Cryptology ePrint Archive: AES seems weak - comments?
Markus Jansson
coffin (and maybe to few others too).
http://eprint.iacr.org/2007/248
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Ivar Rosquist
> Any comments folks about this one? Seems one more nail to the AES:s
> coffin (and maybe to few others too). http://eprint.iacr.org/2007/248
It's an "if" upon an "if": An algorithm may or may not exist to
break 256-bit AES more efficiently than by brute force, provided that a
certain unknown quantity, conjectured to be less than 10, is actually
smaller than 43.
While it looks like a valuable theoretical contribution, I'd
hardly describe it as a nail on anybody's casket; the author himself
agrees on the lack of practical significance of this result.
Phil Carmody
> Any comments folks about this one? Seems one more nail to the AES:s
> coffin (and maybe to few others too).
> http://eprint.iacr.org/2007/248
To be honest he comes over as a bit of a crank.
e.g.
<<<
3. I do not like Bernstein's decision to employ /salsa20/ as
a pseudorandom number generator i.e. to encrypt data
by XORing it with pseudorandom bits forming an arti-
ficial "one time pad." One time pads are not secure if
they are used twice, and Bernstein's approach makes it
too likely that a naive user might do that.
>>>
Note that (as far as I can see) Dan does not describe salsa20
(or snuffle2005) as, or liken it to, a "one time pad". So those
quotes certainly don't indicate him quoting Dan. Quite why he
didn't refer to the scheme as a stream cypher (either spelling,
I'm not fussy), I don't know. But his avoidance of the correct
term and his deviation to a rant about OTPs seems worrisome.
Phil
--
"Home taping is killing big business profits. We left this side blank
so you can help." -- Dead Kennedys, written upon the B-side of tapes of
/In God We Trust, Inc./.
Phil Carmody
> Markus Jansson <seemyh...@katsokotisivuilta.ni> writes:
> > Any comments folks about this one? Seems one more nail to the AES:s
> > coffin (and maybe to few others too).
> > http://eprint.iacr.org/2007/248
>
> To be honest he comes over as a bit of a crank.
And it gets even better on page 11...
Phil Carmody
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that is passes away, and that the present would therefore also come to
an end, and that which once was, again become reality for him, the heir
of the emperor.
She seated herself at her son's side, on a little sofa that stood on the
balcony, and, opening her book, began to read.
CHAPTER XI.
FRAGMENT FROM THE MEMOIRS OF QUEEN HORTENSE.
"The emperor had returned from Italy. The beautiful ceremony of the
distribution of the crosses of the Legion of Honor had taken place
before his departure, and I had been present on the occasion; the
emperor now repaired to Boulogne, in order to make a second
distribution of the order in the army on his birthday. He had made my
husband general of the army of the reserve, and sent him a courier, with
the request that he should come with me and our son to the camp at
Boulogne. My husband did not wish to interrupt the baths he was taking
at St. Amand, but he requested me to go to Boulogne, to spend a week
with the emperor.
"The emperor resided at Boulogne in a little villa called _Pont de
Brigue_. His sister, Caroline, and Murat, lived in another little villa
near by. I lived with them, and every day we went to dine with the
emperor. During two years, our troops had been concentrating in full
view of England, and every one expected an attack. The camp at Boulogne
was erected on the sea-side, and resembled a long and regularly-built
city. Each hut had a little garden, flowers, and birds. In the middle of
the camp, on an elevation, stood
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with tears for this proof of their regard, which to her seemed but a
natural and appropriate tribute to her Achilles, her lion-hearted hero.
But Bonaparte did not allow himself to be blinded by these
demonstrations; and one day, when popular enthusiasm seemed as though it
would never end, and the crowd were untiring in their cries of "_Vive
Bonaparte!_" while Josephine turned her face toward him, glowing with
delight, and called out, exultingly--"See, how they love you, these good
people of Paris!" he replied, with an almost melancholy expression
"Bah! The crowd would be just as numerous and noisy if they were
conducting me to the scaffold!"
However, these festivals and demonstrations at length subsided, and his
life resumed its more tranquil course.
Bonaparte could now once more spend a few secluded days of rest and calm
enjoyment in his (by this time more richly-decorated) dwelling in the
Rue Chautereine, the name of which the city authorities had changed to
_Rue de la Victoire_, in honor of the conqueror at Arcola and Marengo.
He could, after so many battles and triumphs, afford to repose a while
in the arms of love and happiness.
Nevertheless, this inactivity soon began to press heavily on his
restless spirit. He longed for new exploits, for fresh victories. He
felt that he was only at the commencement, and not at the end of his
conquering career; he constantly heard ringing in his ears the notes of
the battle-clarion, summoning him to renewed triumphs and to other paths
of glory. Love could only delight his heart, but could not completely
satisfy it. Repose he deemed but the beginning of death.
"If I remain here inactive any longer, I am lost," said he. "They retain
the resemblance of nothing whatever in Paris; one celebrity blots out
another in this g
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342, _et seq_.]
Napoleon made no reply. He turned away and wept. But these farewell
tears of his love could not change Josephine's fate; the emperor had
already determined it irrevocably. His demand of the hand of the
Archduchess Marie Louise had already been acceded to in Vienna. Nothing
now remained to be done but to remove Josephine from the throne, and
elevate a new, a legitimate empress, to the vacant place!
The emperor could not and would not retrace his steps. He assembled
about him all his brothers, all the kings, dukes, and princes, created
by his mighty will, and in the state-chambers of the Tuileries, in the
presence of his court and the Senate, the emperor appeared; at his side
the empress, arrayed for the last time in all the insignia of the
dignity she was about to lay aside forever.
In a loud, firm voice the emperor declared to the assembly his
determination to divorce himself from his wife; and Josephine, in a
trembling voice, often interrupted by te
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"It is true," Marie Louise had sadly replied. "I well know that I should
act differently, but it is too late. The state council has decided, and
I can do nothing!"
In sadness and dejection Hortense had then returned to her dwelling,
where Lavalette, Madame Ney, and the ladies of her court, awaited her.
"All is lost," said she, sadly. "Yes, all is lost. The empress has
determined to leave Paris. She lightly abandons France and the emperor.
She is about to depart."
"If she does that," exclaimed General Lavalette, in despair, "then all
is really lost, and yet her firmness and courage might now save the
emperor, who is advancing toward Paris by forced marches. After all this
weighing and deliberating, they have elected to take the worst course
they could choose! But, as this has finally been determined on, what
course will your majesty now pursue?"
"I remain in Paris," said the queen, resolutely; "as I am permitted to
be mistress of my own actions, I am resolved to remain here and share
the fortunes of the Parisians, be they good or evil!
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had but small means, and denied himself many of the enjoyments of life,
in order that he might lend a helping hand to others. He was entreated,
conjured with tears, to remain, but he held firm to his resolution. And
when the horses, that they had at first determined to withhold from him,
were at last, at his earnest and repeated solicitation, provided, the
people unharnessed these horses from his carriage, in order that they
might take their places, and accompany him to the gates of the city with
this demonstration of their love. This departure had the appearance of a
triumphal procession; and this banished king, without a country, was
greeted with as lively plaudits on leaving his place of exile as when he
mounted his throne[20]."
[Footnote 20: Memoires d'une contemporaine, vol. iv., p. 377.]
CHAPTER X.
JUNOT, THE DUKE D'ABRANTES.
While the faithful were rallying around Napoleon to render assistance to
the hero in his hour of peril--while even his brother Louis, forgetting
the mortifications and injuries he had sustained at the emperor's hands,
hastened to his side, there w
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Hortense, for here was situated the great college for the daughters of
high military officers, of which Hortense had been the protectress. She
dared not show herself, for she well knew that she was not forgotten
here; here there were many who still knew and loved her, and she could
only show herself to strangers. But she nevertheless visited the church,
and descended with Louis Napoleon into the vaults. Louis XVIII. alone
reposed in the halls which the empire had restored for the reception of
the new family of rulers, adopted by France. Alas! he who built these
halls, the Emperor Napoleon, now reposed under a weeping-willow on a
desolate island in the midst of the sea, and he who had deposed him now
occupied the place intended for the sarcophagus of the emperor.
While wandering through these silent and gloomy halls, Hortense thought
of the day on which she had come hither with the emperor to inspect the
building of the church. And that time she had been ill and suffering,
and with the fullest conviction she had s
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proper, therefore, that they should receive aristocratic honors.
Gasparin, acting upon this idea, caused all the coaches of the fugitive
and massacred aristocracy to be brought from their stables, and the
carcasses of the dogs were flung into these emblazoned and escutcheoned
vehicles of old France. Six grand coaches that had belonged to the king
opened the procession, and the tails, heads, bodies and legs of the
luckless quadrupeds could be seen behind the glittering glass panels
heaped together in wild disorder[8].
[Footnote 8: Memoires of the Marchioness de Crequi, vol. viii, p. 10.]
After this public canine funeral celebration of the one and indivisible
republic, the gilded state-coaches could not be consistently used for
any human and less mournful occasion, and hence it was that the consular
procession to the Tuileries was so deficient in carriages, and that
public hacks on which the numbers were defaced had to be employed.
With the entry of Bonaparte into the Tuileries the revolution was at an
end
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Alexander, her cousin, called on her immediately. It is supposed that
she will return to her father.
"Your brothers future is not yet determined on, but it will certainly be
a desirable and worthy one. There are many intrigues going on in
connection with it, as Count Nesselrode informs me. As for the kingdom
of Naples, it is no longer spoken of. By the details of the last war
with us, narrated to me by the count, I see that he despises many of our
ministers and marshals, and that these must be very culpable; and yet he
tells me that they considered the result uncertain a week before our
overthrow; as late as the 10th of March they believed that peace had
been made with Prussia at least.
"Do not grieve over the fate of the emperor on the island of Elba. The
emperor selected it himself; the allies would have preferred any
other place.
"All the mails arriving at Paris have been seized by the allies. Among
the letters there was one from the Empress Marie Louise to her husband.
She writes that her son is well, but that on awakening from a good
night's rest he had cried and told her he had dreamed of his father;
notwithstanding all her coaxing and promises of playthings, he had,
however, refused to tell what he had dreamed of his father, and that
this circumstance had made her uneasy in spite of her will.
"Prince Leopold resides in the same house with Countess Tascher; he is
incessantly busied with yours and your mother's
Phil Carmody
CHAPTER III.
CONSUL AND KING.
There was only two days' interval between the betrothal of the young
couple and their wedding; and on the 7th of January, 1802, Hortense was
married to Louis Bonaparte, the youngest brother but one of the first
consul. Bonaparte, who contented himself with the civil ceremony, and
had never given his own union with Josephine the sanction of the Church,
was less careless and unconcerned with regard to this youthful alliance,
which had, indeed, great need of the blessing of Heaven, in order to
prove a source of any good fortune to the young couple. Perhaps he
reasoned that the consciousness of the indissoluble character of their
union would lead them to an honorable and upright effort for a mutual
inclination; perhaps it was because he simply wished to render their
separation impossible. Cardinal Caprara was called into the Tuileries,
after the civil ceremony concluded, and had to bestow the blessing of
God and of the Church upon the bride and bridegroom.
Yet, not one word or one glance had thus far been interchanged by the
young couple. It was in silence that they stepped, after the ceremonies
were over, into the carriage that bore them to their new home, in the
same small residence in the Rue de la Victoire which her mo
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endeavored to connect with the present, without considering the chasm
which lay between.
True, King Louis had agreed, in the treaty of the 11th of April, that
none of his subjects should be deprived of their titles and dignities;
and the new dukes, princes, marshals, counts, and barons, could
therefore appear at court, but they played but a sad and humiliating
_role_, and they were made to feel that they were only tolerated, and
not welcome.
The gentlemen who, before the revolution, had been entitled to seats in
the royal equipages, still retained this privilege, but the doors of
these equipages were never opened to the gentlemen of the new Napoleonic
nobility. "The ladies of the old era still retained their _tabouret,_ as
well as their grand and little _entree_ to the Tuileries and the Louvre,
and it would have been considered very arrogant if the duchesses of the
new era had made claim to similar honors."
It was the Duchess d'Angouleme who took the lead and set the Faubourg
St. Germain an example of intolerance and arrogant pretensions in
ignoring the empire. She was the most unrelenting enemy of the new era,
born of the revolution, and of its representatives; it is true, however,
that she, who was the daughter of the beheaded royal pair, and who had
herself so long languished in the Temple, had been familiar with the
horrors of the revolution in their saddest and most painful features.
She now determined, as she could no longer punish, to at least forget
this era, and to seem to be entirely oblivious of its existence.
At one of the first dinners given by the king to the allies, the Duchess
d'Angouleme, who sat next to the King of Bavaria, pointed to the
Grand-duke of Baden, and asked: "Is not this the prince who married a
princess of Bonaparte's making? What weakness to ally one's self in
such a manner with that general!"
The duchess did not or would not rem
Markus Jansson
boarding-school, to accompany her to the baths of Plombieres. But there
it was that Hortense came near experiencing the greatest sorrow of her
life, in nearly losing her mother.
She was with Josephine and some other ladies in the drawing-room of the
house they occupied at Plombieres. The doors facing the balcony were
open, to let in the warm summer air. Hortense was sitting by the window
painting a nosegay of wild flowers, that she had gathered with her own
hands on the hills of Plombieres. Josephine found the atmosphere of the
room too close, and invited some ladies to step out with her upon the
balcony. A moment afterward there was heard a deafening crash, followed
by piercing shrieks of terror; and when Hortense sprang in desperate
fright to the front entrance, she found that the balcony on which her
mother and the other ladies had stood had disappeared. Its fastenings
had given way, and they had been precipitated with it into the street.
Hortense, in the first impulse of her distress and horror, would have
sprung down after her beloved mother, and could only be held back with
the greatest difficulty. But this time fate had spared the young girl,
and refrained from darkening the pure, unclouded heaven of her youth.
Her mother escaped with no other injury than the fright, and a slight
wound on her arm, while one of the ladies had both legs broken.
Josephine's time to die had not yet come, for the prophecy of the
fortune-teller had no
Markus Jansson
us can regret what we have done for our good friends the allies!"
Nevertheless, that which the ladies "had done for their good friends the
allies" was the occasion of many annoying family scenes, and the
husbands who did not fully participate in the enthusiasm of their wives
were of the opinion that they had good cause to complain of their
inordinate zeal.
Count G----, among others, had married a young and beautiful lady a few
days before the restoration. She, in her youthful innocence, was
entirely indifferent to political matters; but her step-father, her
step-mother, and her husband, Count G----, were royalists of the
first water.
On the day of the entrance of the allies into Paris, step-father,
step-mother, and husband, in common with all good legitimists, hurried
forward to welcome "their good friends," and each of them returned to
their dwelling with a stranger--the husband with an Englishman, the
step-mother with a Prussian, and the step-father with an Austrian. The
three endeavored to outdo each other in the attentions which they
showered upon the guests they had the good fortune to possess. The
little countess alone remained indifferent, in the midst of the joy of
her family. They reproached her with having too little attachment for
the good cause, and exhorted her to do everything in her power to
entertain the gallant men who had restored to France her king.
T
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longer the Duchess of St. Leu, but the queen and the ornament of the
court once more; all heads now bowed before her again, and the high-born
ladies, who had seemed oblivious of her existence during the past year,
now hastened to do homage to the queen.
"Majesty," said one of these ladies to the queen, "unfortunately, you
were always absent in the country when I called to pay my respects
during the past winter."
The queen's only response was a gentle "Indeed madame," which she
accompanied with a smile.
Hortense, as has before been said, was now again the grand point of
attraction at court, and, at Napoleon's command, the public officials
now also hastened to solicit the honor of an audience, in order to pay
their respects to the emperor's step-daughter. Each day beheld new
_fetes_ and ceremonies.
The most sublime and imposing of all these was the ceremony of the
_Champ de Mai_, that took place on the first of June, and at which the
emperor, in the presence of the applauding populace, presented to his
army the new eagles and flags, which they were hencefor
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little boy who stands at the gates of the Tuileries, and from whom we
buy our flowers every day."
The ladies and cavaliers, who had listened to this curious conversation
in silence, now laughed loudly at this naive reply of the little prince.
"Do not laugh, ladies," said the queen, earnestly, as she now arose; "it
was no jest, but a lesson that I gave my children, who were so dazzled
by jewelry. It is the misfortune of princes that they believe that
everything is subject to them, that they are made of another stuff than
other men, and have no duties to perform. They know nothing of human
suffering and want, and do not believe that they can ever be affected by
anything of the kind. And this is why they are so astounded, and remain
so helpless, when the hand of misfortune does strike them. I wish to
preserve my sons from this[22]."
[Footnote 22: The queen's own words.]
She then stooped and kissed her boys, who, while she and her brilliant
suite were driving to the Tuileries, busied their little heads,
considering wh
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was happy when she found him in his prison, where she visited him,
whispering words of consolation and hope in his ear.
But at that time love and fidelity were also capital crimes, and
Josephine's guilt was twofold: first, because she was an aristocrat
herself, and secondly, because she loved and wept for the fate of an
aristocrat, and an alleged traitor to his country. Josephine was
arrested and thrown into the prison of St. Pelagie.
Eugene and Hortense were now little better than orphans, for the
prisoners of the Luxembourg and St. Pelagie, at that time, only left
their prisons to mount the scaffold. Alone, deprived of all help,
avoided by all whom they had once known and loved, the two children were
threatened with misery, want, and even with hunger, for the estate of
their parents had been confiscated, and, in the same hour in which
Josephine was conducted to prison, the entrances and doors of their
dwelling were sealed, and the poor children left to find a sheltering
roof for themselves. But yet they were not entirely helpless, not quite
friendless, for a friend of Josephine, a Madame Ho1stein, had the
courage to come to the rescue, and take the children into her
own family.
But it was necessary to go to work cautiously and wisely, in order to
avoid exciting the hatred and vengeance of those who, coming from the
scum of the people, were now the rulers of France. An imprudent word, a
look, might suffice to cast suspicion upon, and render up to the
guillotine, this good Madame Ho1stein, this courageous friend of the two
children. It was in itself a capital crime that she had taken the
children of the accused into her house, and it was therefore necessary
to adopt every means of conciliating the authorities. It was thought
necessar
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he who asked her to do that very thing.
For this reason Hortense hesitated at first to comply, but Bonaparte
grew only the more pressing and vehement in his request.
"You know how I like to see you dance, Hortense," he said, with his
irresistible smile; "so do this much for me, even if you take the floor
only once, and that for but a single _contredance_."
And Hortense, although most reluctant, although blushing with shame at
the idea of exposing herself in such unseemly shape to the gaze of all,
obeyed and joined the dances.
This took place in the evening--how greatly surprised, then, was
Hortense when next morning she found, in the paper that she usually
read, a poem, extolling her performance in words of ravishing flattery,
and referring to the fact that, notwithstanding her advanced state of
pregnancy, she had consented to tread a measure in the _contredance_, as
a peculiar trait of amiability!
Hortense, however, far from feeling flattered by this very emphatic
piece of verse, took it as an affront, and hastened at once to the
Tuileries, to complain to her mother, and to ask her how it was possible
that, so early as the very next morning, there could be verses published
in the newspapers concerning what had taken place at the ball on the
preceding evening.
Bonaparte, who happened to be with Josephine when Hortense came in, and
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But, in these wanderings through Paris, Hortense also lived in her
memories only. She showed the marquis the dwelling she had once
occupied, and which had for her a single happy association: her sons had
been born there. With a soft smile she looked up at the proud _facade_
of this building, the windows of which were brilliantly illumined, and
in whose parlors some banker or ennobled provision-dealer was now
perhaps giving a ball; pointing to these windows with her slender white
hand, she said: "I wished to see this house, in order to reproach myself
for having been unhappy in it; yes, I then dared to complain even in the
midst of so much splendor; I was so far from dreaming of the weight of
the misfortune that was one day to come upon me[67]."
[Footnote 67: The duchess's own words: see Voyage, etc., p. 225.]
She looked down again and passed on, to seek the houses of several
friends, of whom she knew that they had remained faithful; heavily
veiled and enveloped in her dark cloak she stood in front of these
houses, not daring to acquaint her friends with her presence, contented
with the sweet sense of being near them!
When, after having strengthened her heart with the consciousness of
being near friends, she passed on through the streets, in which she, the
daughter of France, was now unknown, homeless, and forgotten!--no, not
forgotten!--as she chanced to glance in at a store she was just passing,
she saw in the li
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retain possession of her children, and appealed to the law to recognize
and protect them, and not allow her sons to be deprived of their rights
as Frenchmen, by going into a compulsory exile.
While the Duchess of St. Leu was being accused of conspiring in favor of
Napoleon, her whole soul was occupied with the one question, which was
to decide whether one of her sons could be torn from her side or not;
and, if she conspired at all, it was only with her lawyer in order to
frustrate her husband's plans.
But the calumnies and accusations of the press were nevertheless
continued; and at last her friends thought it necessary to lay before
the queen a journal that contained a violent and abusive article against
her, and to request that they might be permitted to reply to it.
"With a sad smile, Hortense read the article and returned the newspaper.
"It is extremely mortifying to be scorned by one's countrymen," said
she, "but it would be useless to make any reply. I can afford to
disregard such attacks--they are powe
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on French soil. For sixteen years she had been living in a foreign land,
in a land whose language was unknown to her, and whose people she could
therefore not understand. Now, on this journey through France, she
rejoiced once more in being able to understand the conversation of the
people in the streets, and of the peasants in the fields. It was a
sensation of mingled bitterness and sweetness to feel that she was not a
stranger among this people, and it therefore now afforded her the
greatest delight to chat with those she met, and to listen to their
_naive_ and artless words.
As soon as she arrived at her hotel in any city or village in which she
purposed enjoying a day's rest, Hortense would walk out into the streets
on her son's arm. On one occasion she stepped into a booth, seated
herself, and conversed with the people who came to the store to purchase
their daily necessaries; on another occasion, she accosted a child on
the street, kissed it, and inquired after its parents; then, again, she
would converse with the peasants in the villages about their farms, and
the prospects of a plentiful harvest. The _naive_, strong, and healthy
disposition of the people delighted her, and, with the smiling pride of
a happy mother, she showed her son this great and beautiful family, this
French people, to which they, though banished and cast off,
still belonged.
In Chantilly, she showed the prince the palace of Prince Conde. The
forests that stood in the neighborhood had once belonged to the queen,
or rather they had been a portion of the appendage w
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were certain accusations against which to even undertake defence is to
admit their possibility, and which, therefore, could only be combated by
silence. The slanders that had been flung at her lay in a plane so far
beneath her, that they could not rise high enough to reach her, but fell
powerless at her feet, whence she did not deem it even worth her while
to thrust them.
But Bonaparte continued to feel outraged and wounded by this vile story,
and it annoyed him deeply to learn that these rumors were still spread
abroad, and that his foes still bestirred themselves to keep him ever on
the alert, and, if possible, to dim the lustre of his gloriously-won
laurels by the shadow of an infamous crime.
"There are still rumors abroad of a _liaison_ between me and Hortense,"
said he one day to Bourrienne. "They have even invented the most
repulsive stories concerning her first infant. At the time, I thought
that these calumnies were circulated among the public because the
latter go earnestly desired that I might have a child to inherit my
name. But it is still spoken of, is it not?"
"Yes, general, it is still spoken of; and I confess that I did not
believe this calumny would be so long continued."
"This is really abominable!" exclaimed Bonaparte, his eyes flashing with
anger. "You, Bourrienne, you best know what truth there is in it. You
have heard and seen all; not the smallest circumstance could escape you.
You were her confidant in her love-affair with Duroc. I expect you to
clear me of this infamous
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remembered only that it was the father of her children whom they had
dared to attack, and that he was not present to defend himself. It
therefore devolved upon her to defend him.
"I am enraged, and I desire that M. Despres shall reply to this article
at once," said Hortense. "Although paternal love on the one side, and
maternal love on the other, has involved us in a painful process, it
nevertheless concerns no one else, and it disgraces neither of us. I
should be in despair, if this sad controversy were made the pretext for
insulting the father of my children and the honored name he bears. For
the very reason that I stand alone, am I called on to defend the absent
to the best of my ability. Therefore let M. Despres come to me; I will
instruct him how to answer this disgraceful article!"
On the following day, an able and eloquent article in defence of Louis
Bonaparte appeared in the journal--an article that shamed and silenced
his accusers--an article which the prince, whose cause it so warmly
espoused, probably never thought of attributing to the wife to whose
maternal heart be had caused such anguish[45].
[Footnote 45: Cochelet, vol. i., p. 303.]
CHAPTER IX.
THE BURIAL OF LOUIS XVI. AND HIS WIFE.
The earnest endeavors of the Bourbon court to find the resting-place of
the remains of the royal couple who had died on the scaffold, and who
had expiated the crimes of their predecessors rather than their own,
were at last successful. The remains of the illustrious martyrs had
been sought for in accordance with the directions of persons who had
witnessed their sorrowful and contemptuous burial, and the body of Louis
XVI. was found in a desolate co
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look, might suffice to cast suspicion upon, and render up to the
guillotine, this good Madame Ho1stein, this courageous friend of the two
children. It was in itself a capital crime that she had taken the
children of the accused into her house, and it was therefore necessary
to adopt every means of conciliating the authorities. It was thought
the festivals and patriotic processions, that were renewed at every
decade in honor of the one and indivisible republic, but she was never
required to take an active part in these celebrations. She was not
considered worthy to figure among the daughters of the people; she had
not yet been forgiven for being the daughter of a viscount, of an
imprisoned _ci-devant._ Eugene had been apprenticed to a carpenter, and
the son of the viscount was now often seen walking through the streets
in a blouse, carrying a board on his shoulder
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possession of Queen Hortense; and Napoleon, who but yesterday had ruled
over a whole empire, and to-day could call nothing, not even the space
of ground on which he stood, his own, Napoleon asked Hortense to receive
him at Malmaison.
Hortense accorded his request joyfully, and, when her friends learned
this, and in their dismay and anxiety conjured her not to identify in
this manner herself and children with the fate of the emperor, but to
consider well the danger that would result from such a course, the queen
replied resolutely: "That is an additional reason for holding firm to my
determination. I consider it my sacred duty to remain true to the
emperor to the last, and the greater the danger that threatens the
emperor, the happier I shall be in having it in my power to show him my
entire devotion and gratitude."
And when, in this decision, when her whole future hung in the balance,
one of her most intimate lady-friends ventured to remind the queen of
the disgraceful and malicious reports that had once been put in
circulation with regard to her relation to Napoleon, and suggested that
she would give new strength to them by now receiving the emperor at
Malmaison, Hortense replied with dignity: "What do I care for these
calumnies? I fulfil the duty imposed on me by feeling and principle. The
emperor has always treated me as his child; I shall therefore ever
remain his devoted and grateful daughter; it is my first and greatest
necessity to be at peace with myself[52]."
[Footnote 52: Cochelet, vol. iii., p. 149.]
Hortense therefore repaired with the emperor to Malmaison, and the
faithful, who were not willing to leave him in his misfortune, gathered
around him, watched over his life, and gave to his residence a fleeting
reflection of th
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near by. I lived with them, and every day we went to dine with the
emperor. During two years, our troops had been concentrating in full
view of England, and every one expected an attack. The camp at Boulogne
was erected on the sea-side, and resembled a long and regularly-built
city. Each hut had a little garden, flowers, and birds. In the middle of
Marshal Berthier. All the men-of-war on the water were drawn up in a
line, only waiting the signal of departure. In the distance we could see
England, and its beautiful ships that were cruising along the coast
seemed to form an impenetrable barrier. This grand spectacle gave us for
the first time an illustration of an unknown, hitherto not-dreamed-of
power that stood opposed to us. Here every thing was calculated to
excite the imagination. This boundless sea might soon transform itself
into a battle-field, and swallow up the _elite_ of the two greatest
nations. Our troops, proud in the feeling that there were no obstacles
for them, made impa
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The unhappy mother was now powerless to resist this hard command; she
was compelled to yield, and send her son from her arms to a father who
was a stranger to the boy, and whom he therefore could not love.
It was a heart-rending scene this parting between the boy, his mother,
and his young brother Louis, from whom he had never before been
separated for a day, and who now threw his arms around his neck,
tearfully entreating him to stay with him.
But the separation was inevitable. Hortense parted the two weeping
children, taking little Louis Napoleon in her arms, while Napoleon Louis
followed his governor to the carriage, sobbing as though his heart would
break. When Hortense heard the carriage driving off, she uttered a cry
of anguish and fell to the ground in a swoon, and a long and painful
attack of illness was the consequence of this sorrowful separation.
CHAPTER II.
LOUIS NAPOLEON AS A CHILD.
The Duchess of St. Leu was, however, not destined to find repose in Aix;
the Bourbons--not yet weary of persecuting her, and still fearing the
name whose first and greatest representative was now languishing on a
solitary, inhospitable rock-island--the Bourbons considered it dangerous
that Hortense, the emperor's step-daughter, and her son, whose name of
Louis Napoleon seemed to them a living monument of the past, should be
permitted to sojourn so near the French boundary. They therefore
instructed their ambassador to the government of Savoy to protest
against the further sojourn of the queen in Aix, and Hortense was
compelled to undertake a new pilgrimage, and to start out into the world
again in search of a home.
She first turned to Baden, whose duchess, Stephanie, was so nearly
related to her, and from whose husband she might therefore well expect a
kindly reception. But the grand-duke did not justify his cousin's h
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battle, his countenance beaming with an assurance of victory, now looked
gloomy and dejected, for he well knew that on the fate of his army now
depended his own, and the fate of France.
This time it was not a question of making conquests, but of saving the
national independence, and it was the mother-earth, red with the blood
of her children, that was now to be defended.
Paris, that for eighty days had been the scene of splendor and
festivity, now put on its mourning attire. All rejoicings were at an
end, and every one listened hopefully to catch the first tones of the
thunder of a victorious battle.
But the days of victory were over; the cannon thundered, the battle was
fought, but instead of a triumph it was an overthrow.
At Waterloo, the eagles that had been consecrated on the first of June,
on the _Champ de Mai_, sank in the dust; the emperor returned to Paris,
a fugitive, and broken down in spirit, while the victorious allies were
approaching the capital.
At the first intelligence of his return, Hortense hastened to the
Elysee, where he had taken up his residence, to greet him. During t
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careful, thoughtful temperaments would be well adapted to each other,
and would know how to manage their hearts as discreetly as they did
their purses.
So she wished to make a step-son of Louis Bonaparte, in order to
strengthen her own position thereby. Josephine already had a premonitory
distrust of the future, and it may sometimes have happened that she took
the mighty eagle that fluttered above her head for a bird of evil omen
whose warning cry she frequently fancied that she heard in the stillness
of the night.
The negress at Martinique had said to her, "You will be more than a
queen." But now, Josephine had visited the new fortune-teller, Madame
Villeneuve, in Paris, and she had said to her, "You will wear a crown,
but only for a short time."
Only for a short time! Josephine was too young, too happy, and too
healthful, to think of her own early death. It must, then, be something
else that threatened her--a separation, perhaps. She had no children,
yet Bonaparte so earnestly desired to have a son, and his brothers
r
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participation in the dance, because, on the preceding day, he had read
in an English journal the calumnious statement that Madame Louis
Bonaparte had safely given birth to a vigorous and healthy child some
weeks previously, and he wished in this manner to refute the malicious
statement.
Hortense received this fresh wound with a cold smile of scorn. She had
not a word of anger or indignation for this unheard-of injury, this
shameless slander; she neither wept nor complained, but, as she rose to
take leave of her mother, she swooned away, and it required hours of
exertion to restore her to consciousness.
A few weeks later, Hortense was delivered of a dead male infant, and so
passed away her last dream of happiness; for thus was destroyed the hope
of a better understanding between her and her husband.
Hortense rose from her sick-bed with a firm, determined heart. In those
long, lonely days that she had passed during her confinement, she had
the time and opportunity to meditate on many things, and keenly to
estimate her whole present position and probable future. She had now
become a mother, without having a child; yet the resolute energy of a
mother remained to her. The youthful, gentle, dreamy, enthusiastic girl
had now become tran
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Middle, and the Low. They have been subdivided in many ways, they have
borne countless different names, and their relative numbers, as well as
their attitude towards one another, have varied from age to age: but the
essential structure of society has never altered. Even after enormous
upheavals and seemingly irrevocable changes, the same pattern has always
reasserted itself, just as a gyroscope will always return to equilibrium,
however far it is pushed one way or the other.
The aims of these groups are entirely irreconcilable...
Winston stopped reading, chiefly in order to appreciate the fact that
he was reading, in comfort and safety. He was alone: no telescreen, no ear
at the keyhole, no nervous impulse to glance over his shoulder or cover the
page with his hand. The sweet summer air played against his cheek. From
somewhere far away there floated the faint shouts of children: in the room
itself there was no sound except the insect voice of the clock. He settled
deeper into the arm-chair and put his feet up on the fender. It was bliss,
it was etemity. Suddenly, as one sometimes does with a book of which one
knows that one will ultimately read and re-read every word, he opened it at
a different place and found himself at Chapter III. He went on reading:
Chapter III.
War is Peace.
The splitting up of the world into three great super-states was an
event which could be and indeed was foreseen before the middle of the
twentieth century. With the absorption of Europe by Russia and of the
British Empire by the United States, two of the three existing powers,
Eurasia and
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They were men far older than himself, relics of the ancient world, almost
the last great figures left over from the heroic days of the Party. The
glamour of the underground struggle and the civil war still faintly clung
to them. He had the feeling, though already at that time facts and dates
were growing blurry, that he had known their names years earlier than he
had known that of Big Brother. But also they were outlaws, enemies,
untouchables, doomed with absolute certainty to extinction within a year or
two. No one who had once fallen into the hands of the Thought Police ever
escaped in the end. They were corpses waiting to be sent back to the grave.
There was no one at any of the tables nearest to them. It was not wise
even to be seen in the neighbourhood of such people. They were sitting in
silence before glasses of the gin flavoured with cloves which was the
speciality of the cafe. Of the three, it was Rutherford whose appearance
had most impressed Winston. Rutherford had once been a famous caricaturist,
whose brutal cartoons had helped to inflame popular opinion before and
during the Revolution. Even now, at long intervals, his cartoons were
appearing in the Times. They were simply an imitation of his earlier
manner, and curiously lifeless and unconvincing. Always they were a
rehashing of the ancient themes -- slum tenements, starving children,
street battles, capitalists in top hats -- even on the barricades the
capitalists still seemed to cling to their top hats an endless, hopeless
effort to get back into the past. He was a monstrous man, with a mane of
greasy grey hair, his face pouched and seamed, with thick negroid lips. At
one time he must have been immensely strong; now his great body was
sagging, sloping, bulging, falling away in every direction. He seemed to be
breaking up before
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Yes, he saw now, he had always known it. But there was no time to
think of that. All he had eyes for was the truncheon in the guard's hand.
It might fall anywhere; on the crown, on the tip of the ear, on the upper
arm, on the elbow--
The elbow! He had slumped to his knees, almost paralysed, clasping the
stricken elbow with his other hand. Everything had exploded into yellow
light. Inconceivable, inconceivable that one blow could cause such pain!
The light cleared and he could see the other two looking down at him. The
guard was laughing at his contortions. One question at any rate was
answered. Never, for any reason on earth, could you wish for an increase of
pain. Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop. Nothing
in the world was so bad as physical pain. In the face of pain there are no
heroes, no heroes, he thought over and over as he writhed on the floor,
clutching uselessly at his disabled left arm.
II
He was lying on something that felt like a camp bed, except that it
was higher off the ground and that he was fixed down in some way so that he
could not move. Light that seemed stronger than usual was falling on his
face. O'Brien was standing at his side, looking down at him intently. At
the other side of him stood a man in a white coat, holding a hypodermic
syringe.
Even afte
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consciousness that one has in sleep, had stopped dead and started again
after a blank interval. But whether the intervals were of days or weeks or
only seconds, there was no way of knowing.
With that first blow on the elbow the nightmare had started. Later he
was to realize that all that then happened was merely a preliminary, a
routine interrogation to which nearly all prisoners were subjected. There
was a long range of crimes -- espionage, sabotage, and the like -- to which
everyone had to confess as a matter of course. The confession was a
formality, though the torture was real. How many times he had been beaten,
how long the beatings had continued, he could not remember. Always there
were five or six men in black uniforms at him simultaneously. Sometimes it
was fists, sometimes it was truncheons, sometimes it was steel rods,
sometimes it was boots. There were times when he rolled about the floor, as
shameless as an animal, writhing his body this way and that in an endless,
hopeless effo
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definitely found out. It was something to do with the question of whether
commas should be placed inside brackets, or outside. There were four others
on the committee, all of them persons similar to himself. There were days
when they assembled and then promptly dispersed again, frankly admitting to
one another that there was not really anything to be done. But there were
other days when they settled down to their work almost eagerly, making a
tremendous show of entering up their minutes and drafting long memoranda
which were never finished -- when the argument as to what they were
supposedly arguing about grew extraordinarily involved and abstruse, with
subtle haggling over definitions, enormous digressions, quarrels --
threats, even, to appeal to higher authority. And then suddenly the life
would go out of them and they would sit round the table looking at one
another with extinct eyes, like ghosts fading at cock-crow.
The telescreen was silent for a moment. Winston raised his head again.
The bulletin! But no, they were merely changing the music. He had the map
of Africa behind his eyelids. The movement of the armies was a diagram: a
black arrow tearing vertically southward, and a white arrow horizontally
eastward, across the tail of the first. As though for reassurance he looked
up at the imperturbable face in the portrait. Was it conceivable that the
second arrow did not even exist?
His interest flagged again. He drank another mouthful of gin, picked
up the white knight and made a tentative move. Check. But it was evidently
not the right move, because--
Uncalled, a memory floated into his mind. He saw a candle-lit room
with a vast white-counterpaned bed, and himself, a boy of nine or ten,
sitting on
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Revolution. I barely knew them by sight.'
'Then what was there to worry about? People are being killed off all
the time, aren't they?'
He tried to make her understand. 'This was an exceptional case. It
wasn't just a question of somebody being killed. Do you realize that the
past, starting from yesterday, has been actually abolished? If it survives
anywhere, it's in a few solid objects with no words attached to them, like
that lump of glass there. Already we know almost literally nothing about
the Revolution and the years before the Revolution. Every record has been
destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has
been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed,
every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and
minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless
present in which the Party is always right. I know, of course, that the
past is falsified, but it would never be possible for me to prove it, even
when I did the falsification myself. After the thing is done, no evidence
ever remains. The only evidence is inside my own mind, and I don't know
with any certainty that any other human being shares my m
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'although a rodent, is carnivorous. You are aware of that. You will have
heard of the things that happen in the poor quarters of this town. In some
streets a woman dare not leave her baby alone in the house, even for five
minutes. The rats are certain to attack it. Within quite a small time they
will strip it to the bones. They also attack sick or dying people. They
show astonishing intelligence in knowing when a human being is helpless.'
There was an outburst of squeals from the cage. It seemed to reach
Winston from far away. The rats were fighting; they were trying to get at
each other through the partition. He heard also a deep groan of despair.
That, too, seemed to come from outside himself.
O'Brien picked up the cage, and, as he did so, pressed something in
it. There was a sharp click. Winston made a frantic effort to tear himself
loose from the chair. It was hopeless; every part of him, even his head,
was held immovably. O'Brien moved the cage nearer. It was less than a metre
from Winston's face.
'I have pressed the first lever,' said O'Brien. 'You understand the
construction of this cage. The mask will fit over your head, leaving no
exit. When I press this other lever, the door of the cage will slide up.
These starving brutes will shoot out of it like bullets. Have you ever seen
a rat leap through the air? They will leap on to your face and bore
straight into it. Sometimes they attack the eyes first. Sometimes they
burrow through the cheeks and devour the tongue.'
The cage was nearer; it was closing in. Winston heard a succession of
shrill cries which appeared to be occurring in the air above his head. But
he fought furiously a
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sustained by reasoned argument, because the necessary words were not
available. Ideas inimical to Ingsoc could only be entertained in a vague
wordless form, and could only be named in very broad terms which lumped
together and condemned whole groups of heresies without defining them in
doing so. One could, in fact, only use Newspeak for unorthodox purposes
by illegitimately translating some of the words back into Oldspeak. For
example, All mans are equal was a possible Newspeak sentence, but only
in the same sense in which All men are redhaired is a possible Oldspeak
sentence. It did not contain a grammatical error, but it expressed a
palpable untruth -- i.e. that all men are of equal size, weight, or
strength. The concept of political equality no longer existed, and this
secondary meaning had accordingly been purged out of the word equal. In
1984, when Oldspeak was still the normal means of communication, the
danger theoretically existed that in using Newspeak words one might
remember their original meanings. In practice it was not difficult for
any person well grounded in doublethink to avoid doing this, but within
a couple of generations even the possibility of such a lapse would have
vaished. A person growing up with Newspeak as his sole language would no
more know that equal had once had the secondary meaning of ?politically
equal?, or that free had once meant ?intellectually free?, than for
instance, a person who had never heard of chess would be aware of the
secondary meanings attaching to queen and rook. There would be many
crimes and errors which it would be beyond his power to commit, simply
because they were nameless and therefore unimaginable. And it was to be
foreseen that with the passage of time the distinguishing
characteristics of Newspeak would become more and more pronounced -- its
words growing fewer and fewer, their
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on London were probably fired by the Government of Oceania itself, 'just to
keep people frightened'. This was an idea that had literally never occurred
to him. She also stirred a sort of envy in him by telling him that during
the Two Minutes Hate her great difficulty was to avoid bursting out
laughing. But she only questioned the teachings of the Party when they in
some way touched upon her own life. Often she was ready to accept the
official mythology, simply because the difference between truth and
falsehood did not seem important to her. She believed, for instance, having
learnt it at school, that the Party had invented aeroplanes. (In his own
schooldays, Winston remembered, in the late fifties, it was only the
helicopter that the Party claimed to have invented; a dozen years later,
when Julia was at school, it was already claiming the aeroplane; one
generation more, and it would be claiming the steam engine.) And when he
told her that aeroplanes had been in existence before he was born and long
before the Revolution, the fact struck her as totally uninteresting. After
all, what did it matter who had invented aeroplanes? It was rather more of
a shock to him when he discovered from some chance remark that she did not
remember that Oceania
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a tremendous shout of hundreds of voices women's voices -- had burst from a
side-street a little way ahead. It was a great formidable cry of anger and
despair, a deep, loud 'Oh-o-o-o-oh!' that went humming on like the
reverberation of a bell. His heart had leapt. It's started! he had thought.
A riot! The proles are breaking loose at last! When he had reached the spot
it was to see a mob of two or three hundred women crowding round the stalls
of a street market, with faces as tragic as though they had been the doomed
passengers on a sinking ship. But at this moment the general despair broke
down into a multitude of individual quarrels. It appeared that one of the
stalls had been selling tin saucepans. They were wretched, flimsy things,
but cooking-pots of any kind were always difficult to get. Now the supply
had unexpectedly given out. The successful women, bumped and jostled by the
rest, were trying to make off with their saucepans while dozens of others
clamoured round the stall, accusing the stall-keeper of favouritism and of
having more saucepans somewhere in reserve. There was a fresh outburst of
yells. Two bloated women, one of them with her hair coming down, had got
hold of the same saucepan and were trying to tear it out of one another's
hands. For a moment they were both tugging, and then the handle came off.
Winston watched them disgustedly. And yet, just for a moment, what almost
frightening power had sounded in that cry from only a few hundred throats!
Why was it that they could never shout like that about anything that
mattered?
He wrote:
Until they become conscious
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of the Party:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
The Ministry of Truth contained, it was said, three thousand rooms
above ground level, and corresponding ramifications below. Scattered about
London there were just three other buildings of similar appearance and
size. So completely did they dwarf the surrounding architecture that from
the roof of Victory Mansions you could see all four of them simultaneously.
They were the homes of the four Ministries between which the entire
apparatus of government was divided. The Ministry of Truth, which concerned
itself with news, entertainment, education, and the fine arts. The Ministry
of Peace, which concerned itself with war. The Ministry of Love, which
maintained law and order. And the Ministry of Plenty, which was responsible
for economic affairs. Their names, in Newspeak: Minitrue, Minipax, Miniluv,
and Miniplenty.
The Ministry of Love was the really frightening one. There were no
windows in it at all. Winston had never been inside the Ministry of Love,
nor within half a kilometre of it. It was a place impossible to enter
except on official business, and then only by penetrat
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movement. It was somehow slightly frightening, like the gambolling of tiger
cubs which will soon grow up into man-eaters. There was a sort of
calculating ferocity in the boy's eye, a quite evident desire to hit or
kick Winston and a consciousness of being very nearly big enough to do so.
It was a good job it was not a real pistol he was holding, Winston thought.
Mrs. Parsons" eyes flitted nervously from Winston to the children, and
back again. In the better light of the living-room he noticed with interest
that there actually was dust in the creases of her face.
'They do get so noisy,' she said. 'They're disappointed because they
couldn't go to see the hanging, that's what it is. I'm too busy to take
them. and Tom won't be back from work in time.'
'Why can't we go and see the hanging?' roared the boy in his huge
voice.
'Want to see the hanging! Want to see the hanging!' chanted the little
girl, still capering round.
Some Eurasian prisoners, guilty of war crimes, were to be hanged in
the Park that evening, Winston remembered. This happened about once a
month, and was a popular spectacle. Children always clamoured to be taken
to see it. He took his leave of Mrs. Parsons and made for the door. But he
had not gone six steps down the passage when something hit the back of his
neck an agonizingly painful blow. It was as though a red-hot wire had been
jabbed into him. He spun round just in time to see Mrs. Parsons dragging
her son back into t
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'I was working,' said Winston indifferently. 'I shall see it on the
flicks, I suppose.'
'A very inadequate substitute,' said Syme.
His mocking eyes roved over Winston's face. 'I know you,' the eyes
seemed to say, 'I see through you. I know very well why you didn't go to
see those prisoners hanged.' In an intellectual way, Syme was venomously
orthodox. He would talk with a disagreeable gloating satisfaction of
helicopter raids on enemy villages, and trials and confessions of thought-
criminals, the executions in the cellars of the Ministry of Love. Talking
to him was largely a matter of getting him away from such subjects and
entangling him, if possible, in the technicalities of Newspeak, on which he
was authoritative and interesting. Winston turned his head a little aside
to avoid the scrutiny of the large dark eyes.
'It was a good hanging,' said Syme reminiscently. 'I think it spoils
it when they tie their feet together. I like to see them kicking. And above
all, at the end, the tongue sticking right out, and blue -- a quite bright
blue. That's the detail that appeals to me.'
'Nex', please!' yelled the white-aproned prole with the ladle.
Winston and Syme pushed their trays beneath the grille. On to each was
dumped swiftly the regulation lunch -- a metal pannikin of pinkish-grey
stew, a hunk of bread, a cube of cheese, a mug of milkless Victory Coffee,
and one saccharine tablet.
'There's a table over there, under that telescreen,' said Syme. 'Let's
pick up a gin on the way.'
The gin was served out to them in handleless china mugs. They threaded
their way across the crowded room and unpacked their trays on to the metal-
topped table, on one corner of which someone had left a pool o
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contained a message of only one or two lines, in the abbreviated jargon --
not actually Newspeak, but consisting largely of Newspeak words -- which
was used in the Ministry for internal purposes. They ran:
times 17.3.84 bb speech malreported africa rectify
times 19.12.83 forecasts 3 yp 4th quarter 83 misprints verify
current issue
times 14.2.84 miniplenty malquoted chocolate rectify
times 3.12.83 reporting bb dayorder doubleplusungood refs unpersons
rewrite fullwise upsub antefiling
With a faint feeling of satisfaction Winston laid the fourth message
aside. It was an intricate and responsible job and had better be dealt with
last. The other three were routine matters, though the second one would
probably mean some tedious wading through lists of figures.
Winston dialled 'back numbers' on the telescreen and called for the
appropriate issues of the Times, which slid out of the pneumatic tube after
only a few minutes" delay. The messages he had received referred to
articles or news items which
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the majority of proles.
'I recognized you on the pavement,' he said immediately. 'You're the
gentleman that bought the young lady's keepsake album. That was a beautiful
bit of paper, that was. Cream-laid, it used to be called. There's been no
paper like that made for -- oh, I dare say fifty years.' He peered at
Winston over the top of his spectacles. 'Is there anything special I can do
for you? Or did you just want to look round?'
'I was passing,' said Winston vaguely. 'I just looked in. I don't want
anything in particular.'
'It's just as well,' said the other, 'because I don't suppose I could
have satisfied you.' He made an apologetic gesture with his softpalmed
hand. 'You see how it is; an empty shop, you might say. Between you and me,
the antique trade's just about finished. No demand any longer, and no stock
either. Furniture, china, glass it's all been broken up by degrees. And of
course the metal stuff's mostly been melted down. I haven't seen a brass
candlestick in years.'
The tiny interior of the shop was in fact uncomfortably full, but
there was almost nothing in it of the slightest value. The floorspace was
very restricted, because all round t
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stupid mistake. For what evidence had he in reality that O'Brien was any
kind of political conspirator? Nothing but a flash of the eyes and a single
equivocal remark: beyond that, only his own secret imaginings, founded on a
dream. He could not even fall back on the pretence that he had come to
borrow the dictionary, because in that case Julia's presence was impossible
to explain. As O'Brien passed the telescreen a thought seemed to strike
him. He stopped, turned aside and pressed a switch on the wall. There was a
sharp snap. The voice had stopped.
Julia uttered a tiny sound, a sort of squeak of surprise. Even in the
midst of his panic, Winston was too much taken aback to be able to hold his
tongue.
'You can turn it off!' he said.
'Yes,' said O'Brien, 'we can turn it off. We have that privilege.'
He was opposite them now. His solid form towered over the pair of
them, and the expression on his face was still indecipherable. He was
waiting, somewhat sternly, for Winston to speak, but about what? Even now
it was quite conceivable that he was simply a busy man wondering irritably
why he had been interrupted. Nobody spoke. After the stopping of the
telescreen the room seemed deadly silent. The seconds marched past,
enormous. With difficulty Winston continued to keep his eyes fixed on
O'Brien's. Then suddenly the grim face broke dow
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he checked himself, not feeling fully certain that this remark was not in
some way unorthodox. Syme, however, had divined what he was about to say.
'The proles are not human beings,' he said carelessly. 'By 2050 --
earlier, probably -- all real knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared.
The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. Chaucer,
Shakespeare, Milton, Byron -- they'll exist only in Newspeak versions, not
merely changed into something different, but actually changed into
something contradictory of what they used to be. Even the literature of the
Party will change. Even the slogans will change. How could you have a
slogan like "freedom is slavery" when the concept of freedom has been
abolished? The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there
will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking
-- not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.'
One of these days, thought Winston with sudden deep conviction, Syme
will be vaporized. He is too intelligent. He sees too clearly and speaks
too plainly. The Party does not like such people. One day he will
disappear. It is written in his face.
Winston had fin
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paces away from them when suddenly the group broke up and two of the men
were in violent altercation. For a moment they seemed almost on the point
of blows.
'Can't you bleeding well listen to what I say? I tell you no number
ending in seven ain't won for over fourteen months!'
'Yes, it 'as, then!'
'No, it 'as not! Back 'ome I got the 'ole lot of 'em for over two
years wrote down on a piece of paper. I takes 'em down reg'lar as the
clock. An" I tell you, no number ending in seven--'
'Yes, a seven 'as won! I could pretty near tell you the bleeding
number. Four oh seven, it ended in. It were in February -- second week in
February.'
'February your grandmother! I got it all down in black and white. An"
I tell you, no number--'
'Oh, pack it in!' said the third man.
They were talking about the Lottery. Winston looked back when he had
gone thirty metres. They were still arguing, with vivid, passionate faces.
The Lottery, with its weekly pay-out of enormous prizes, was the one public
event to which the proles paid serious attention. It was probable that
there were some millions of proles for whom the Lottery was the principal
if not the only reason for remaining alive. It was their delight, their
folly, their anodyne, their intellectual sti
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rewritten and rewritten until the original facts and dates no longer had
the smallest significance. The past not only changed, but changed
continuously. What most afflicted him with the sense of nightmare was that
he had never clearly understood why the huge imposture was undertaken. The
immediate advantages of falsifying the past were obvious, but the ultimate
motive was mysterious. He took up his pen again and wrote:
I understand HOW: I do not understand WHY.
He wondered, as he had many times wondered before, whether he himself
was a lunatic. Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one. At one time
it had been a sign of madness to believe that the earth goes round the sun;
today, to believe that the past is inalterable. He might be alone in
holding that belief, and if alone, then a lunatic. But the thought of being
a lunatic did not greatly trouble him: the horror was that he might also be
wrong.
He picked up the children's history book and looked at the portrait of
Big Brother which formed its frontispiece. The hypnotic eyes gazed into his
own. It was as though some huge force were pressing down upon you --
something that penetrated inside your skull, battering against your brain,
frightening you out of your beliefs, persuading you, almost, to deny the
evidence of your senses. In the end the Party would announce that two and
two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that
they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position
demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence
of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of
heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would
kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they mi
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of Katharine's body as soon as he touched her, the way in which she still
seemed to be pushing him from her with all her strength, even when her arms
were clasped tightly round him. With Julia he felt no difficulty in talking
about such things: Katharine, in any case, had long ceased to be a painful
memory and became merely a distasteful one.
'I could have stood it if it hadn't been for one thing,' he said. He
told her about the frigid little ceremony that Katharine had forced him to
go through on the same night every week. 'She hated it, but nothing would
make her stop doing it. She used to call it -- but you'll never guess.'
'Our duty to the Party,' said Julia promptly.
'How did you know that?'
'I've been at school too, dear. Sex talks once a month for the over-
sixteens. And in the Youth Movement. They rub it into you for years. I dare
say it works in a lot of cases. But of course you can never tell; people
are such hypocrites.'
She began to enlarge upon the subject. With Julia, everything came
back to her own sexuality. As soon as this was touched upon in any way she
was capable of great acuteness. Unlike Winston, she had grasped the inner
meaning of the Party's sexual puritanism. It was not merely tha
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hand and laid it on O'Brien arm. He had never loved him so deeply as at
this moment, and not merely because he had stopped the pain. The old
feeling, that at bottom it did not matter whether O'Brien was a friend or
an enemy, had come back. O'Brien was a person who could be talked to.
Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood. O'Brien
had tortured him to the edge of lunacy, and in a little while, it was
certain, he would send him to his death. It made no difference. In some
sense that went deeper than friendship, they were intimates: somewhere or
other, although the actual words might never be spoken, there was a place
where they could meet and talk. O'Brien was looking down at him with an
expression which suggested that the same thought might be in his own mind.
When he spoke it was in an easy, conversational tone.
'Do you know where you are, Winston?' he said.
'I don't know. I can guess. In the Ministry of Love.'
'Do you know how long you have been here?'
'I don't know. Days, weeks, months -- I think it is months.'
'And why do you imagine that we bring people to this place?'
'To make them confess.'
'No, that is not the reason. Try again.'
'To punish them.'
'No!' exclaimed O'Brien. His voice had changed extraordinarily, and
his face had suddenly become both stern and animated. 'No! Not merely to
extract your confession, not to punish you. Shall I tell you why we have
brought you here? To cure you! To make you sane! Will you understand,
Winston, that no one whom we bring to this place ever leaves our hands
uncured? We are not interested in those stupid crimes that you have
committed. The Party is n
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waiting, somewhat sternly, for Winston to speak, but about what? Even now
it was quite conceivable that he was simply a busy man wondering irritably
why he had been interrupted. Nobody spoke. After the stopping of the
telescreen the room seemed deadly silent. The seconds marched past,
enormous. With difficulty Winston continued to keep his eyes fixed on
the beginnings of a smile. With his characteristic gesture O'Brien
resettled his spectacles on his nose.
'Shall I say it, or will you?' he said.
'I will say it,' said Winston promptly. 'That thing is really turned
off?'
'Yes, everything is turned off. We are alone.'
'We have come here because--'
He paused, realizing for the first time the vagueness of his own
motives. Since he did not in fact know what kind of help he expected from
O'Brien, it was not easy to say why he had come here. He went on, conscious
that what he was saying must sound both feeble and pretentious:
'We believe that there is some kind of conspiracy, some kind of secret
organization working against the Party, and that you are involved in
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Appendix
THE PRINCIPLES OF NEWSPEAK
Newspeak was the official language of Oceania and had been devised to
meet the ideological needs of Ingsoc, or English Socialism. In the year
1984 there was not as yet anyone who used Newspeak as his sole means of
communication, either in speech or writing. The leading articles in the
Times were written in it, but this was a tour de force which could only
be carried out by a specialist. It was expected that Newspeak would have
finally superseded Oldspeak (or Standard English, as we should call it)
by about the year 2050. Meanwhile it gained ground steadily, all Party
members tending to use Newspeak words and grammatical constructions more
and more in their everyday speech. The version in use in 1984, and
embodied in the Ninth and Tenth Editions of the Newspeak Dictionary, was
a provisional one, and contained many superfluous words and archaic
formations which were due to be suppressed later. It is with the final,
perfected version, as embodied in the Eleventh Edition of the
Dictionary, that we are concerned here.
The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression
for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc,
but
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everyone, secretly hated the Party and would break the rules if he thought
it safe to do so. But she refused to believe that widespread, organized
opposition existed or could exist. The tales about Goldstein and his
underground army, she said, were simply a lot of rubbish which the Party
had invented for its own purposes and which you had to pretend to believe
in. Times beyond number, at Party rallies and spontaneous demonstrations,
she had shouted at the top of her voice for the execution of people whose
names she had never heard and in whose supposed crimes she had not the
faintest belief. When public trials were happening she had taken her place
in the detachments from the Youth League who surrounded the courts from
morning to night, chanting at intervals 'Death to the traitors!' During the
Two Minutes Hate she always excelled all others in shouting insults at
Goldstein. Yet she had only the dimmest idea of who Goldstein was and what
doctrines he was supposed to represent. She had grown up since the
Revolution and was too young to remember the ideological battles of the
fifties and sixties. Such a thing as an independent political movement was
outside her imagination: and in any case the Party was invincible. It would
always exist, and it would always be the same. You could only rebel against
it by secret disobedience or, at most, by isolated acts of violence such as
killing somebody or blowing something up.
In some ways she was far more acute than Winston, and far less
susceptible to Party propaganda. Once when he happened in some connexion to
mention the war aga
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couple of faked photographs would soon bring him into existence.
Winston thought for a moment, then pulled the speakwrite towards him
and began dictating in Big Brother's familiar style: a style at once
military and pedantic, and, because of a trick of asking questions and then
promptly answering them ('What lessons do we learn from this fact,
comrades? The lesson -- which is also one of the fundamental principles of
Ingsoc -- that,' etc., etc.), easy to imitate.
At the age of three Comrade Ogilvy had refused all toys except a drum,
a sub-machine gun, and a model helicopter. At six -- a year early, by a
special relaxation of the rules -- he had joined the Spies, at nine he had
been a troop leader. At eleven he had denounced his uncle to the Thought
Police after overhearing a conversation which appeared to him to have
criminal tendencies. At seventeen he had been a district organizer of the
Junior Anti-Sex League. At nine teen he had designed a hand-grenade which
had been adopted by the Ministry of Peace and which, at its first trial,
had killed thirty-one Eurasian prisoners in one burst. At twenty-three he
had perished in action. Pursued by enemy jet planes while flying over the
Indian Ocean with important despatches, he had weighted his body with his
machine gun and leapt out of the helicopter into deep water, despatches and
all -- an end, said Big Brother, which it was impossible to contemplate
without feelings of envy. Big Brother added a few remarks on the purity and
single-mindedness of Comrade Ogilvy's life. He was a total abstainer and a
nonsmoker, had no recreations except a daily hour in the gymnasium, and had
taken a vow of celibacy, believing marriage and the care of a family to be
incompatible with a twenty-four-hour-a-day devotion to duty. He had no
subjects of conversation except the principles of Ingsoc, and no aim in
life except the defeat of t
Markus Jansson
none of the three super-states ever gains a significant lead on the others.
What is more remarkable is that all three powers already possess, in the
atomic bomb, a weapon far more powerful than any that their present
researches are likely to discover. Although the Party, according to its
habit, claims the invention for itself, atomic bombs first appeared as
early as the nineteen-forties, and were first used on a large scale about
ten years later. At that time some hundreds of bombs were dropped on
industrial centres, chiefly in European Russia, Western Europe, and North
America. The effect was to convince the ruling groups of all countries that
a few more atomic bombs would mean the end of organized society, and hence
of their own power. Thereafter, although no formal agreement was ever made
or hinted at, no more bombs were dropped. All three powers merely continue
to produce atomic bombs and store them up against the decisive opportunity
which they all believe will come sooner or later. And meanwhile the art of
war has remained almost stationary for thirty or forty years. Helicopters
are more used than they were formerly, bombing planes have been largely
superseded by self-propelled projectiles, and the fragile movable
battleship has given way to the almost unsinkable Floating Fortress; but
otherwise there has been little development. The tank, the submarine, the
torpedo, the machine gun, even the rifle and the hand grenade are still in
use. And in spite of the endless slaughters reported in the Press and on
the telescreens, the desperate battles of earlier wars, in which hundreds
of thousands or even millions of men were often killed in a few weeks, have
never been repeated.
None of the three super-states ever attemp
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they would suddenly change their tune, call him comrade, appeal to him in
the name of Ingsoc and Big Brother, and ask him sorrowfully whether even
now he had not enough loyalty to the Party left to make him wish to undo
the evil he had done. When his nerves were in rags after hours of
questioning, even this appeal could reduce him to snivelling tears. In the
end the nagging voices broke him down more completely than the boots and
fists of the guards. He became simply a mouth that uttered, a hand that
signed, whatever was demanded of him. His sole concern was to find out what
they wanted him to confess, and then confess it quickly, before the
bullying started anew. He confessed to the assassination of eminent Party
members, the distribution of seditious pamphlets, embezzlement of public
funds, sale of military secrets, sabotage of every kind. He confessed that
he had been a spy in the pay of the Eastasian government as far back as
1968. He confessed that he was a religious believer, an admirer of
capitalism, and a sexual pervert. He confessed that he had murdered his
wife, although he knew, and his questioners must have known, that his wife
was still alive. He confessed that for years he had been in personal touch
with Goldstein and had been a member of an underground organization which
had included almost every human being he had ever known. It was easier to
confess everything and implicate everybody. Besides, in a sense it was all
true. It was true that he had been the enemy of the Party, and in the eyes
of the Party there was no distinction between the thought and the deed.
There were also memories of another kind. They stood out in his mind
disconnectedly, like pi
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Goldstein without a painful mixture of emotions. It was a lean Jewish face,
with a great fuzzy aureole of white hair and a small goatee beard -- a
clever face, and yet somehow inherently despicable, with a kind of senile
silliness in the long thin nose, near the end of which a pair of spectacles
was perched. It resembled the face of a sheep, and the voice, too, had a
sheep-like quality. Goldstein was delivering his usual venomous attack upon
the doctrines of the Party -- an attack so exaggerated and perverse that a
child should have been able to see through it, and yet just plausible
enough to fill one with an alarmed feeling that other people, less level-
headed than oneself, might be taken in by it. He was abusing Big Brother,
he was denouncing the dictatorship of the Party, he was demanding the
immediate conclusion of peace with Eurasia, he was advocating freedom of
speech, freedom of the Press, freedom of assembly, freedom of thought, he
was crying hysterically that the revolution had been betrayed -- and all
this in rapid polysyllabic speech which was a sort of parody of the
habitual style of the orators of the Party, and even contained Newspeak
words: more Newspeak words, indeed, than any Party member would normally
use in real life. And all the while, lest one should be in any doubt as to
the reality which Goldstein's specious claptrap covered, behind his head on
the telescreen there marched the endless columns of the Eurasian army --
row after row of solid-looking men with expressionless Asiatic faces, who
swam up to the surface of the screen and vanished, to be replaced by others
exactly similar. The dull rhythm
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certain charm of manner. He had a trick of resettling his spectacles on his
nose which was curiously disarming -- in some indefinable way, curiously
civilized. It was a gesture which, if anyone had still thought in such
terms, might have recalled an eighteenth-century nobleman offering his
snuffbox. Winston had seen O'Brien perhaps a dozen times in almost as many
years. He felt deeply drawn to him, and not solely because he was intrigued
by the contrast between O'Brien's urbane manner and his prize-fighter's
physique. Much more it was because of a secretly held belief -- or perhaps
not even a belief, merely a hope -- that O'Brien's political orthodoxy was
not perfect. Something in his face suggested it irresistibly. And again,
perhaps it was not even unorthodoxy that was written in his face, but
simply intelligence. But at any rate he had the appearance of being a
person that you could talk to if somehow you could cheat the telescreen and
get him alone. Winston had never made the smallest effort to verify this
guess: indeed, there was no way of doing so. At this moment O'Brien glanced
at his wrist-watch, saw that it was nearly eleven hundred, and evidently
decided to stay in the Records Department until the Two Minutes Hate was
over. He took a chair in the same row as Winston, a couple of places away.
A small, sandy-haired woman who worked
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take the hint. Next day he took care to arrive early. Surely enough, she
was at a table in about the same place, and again alone. The person
immediately ahead of him in the queue was a small, swiftly-moving, beetle-
like man with a flat face and tiny, suspicious eyes. As Winston turned away
from the counter with his tray, he saw that the little man was making
straight for the girl's table. His hopes sank again. There was a vacant
place at a table further away, but something in the little man's appearance
suggested that he would be sufficiently attentive to his own comfort to
choose the emptiest table. With ice at his heart Winston followed. It was
no use unless he could get the girl alone. At this moment there was a
tremendous crash. The little man was sprawling on all fours, his tray had
gone flying, two streams of soup and coffee were flowing across the floor.
He started to his feet with a malignant glance at Winston, whom he
evidently suspected of having tripped him up. But it was all right. Five
seconds later, with a thundering heart, Winston was sitting at the girl's
table.
He did not look at her. He unpacked his tray and promptly began
eating. It was all-important to speak at once, before anyone else came, but
now a terrible fear had taken possession of him. A week had gone by since
she had first approached him. She would have changed her mind, she must
have changed her mind! It was impossible that this affair should end
successfully; such things did not happen in real life. He might have
flinched altogether from speaking if at
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out,' she said, kicking the wainscoting immediately below the picture.
'What is this place? I've seen it before somewhere.'
'It's a church, or at least it used to be. St. Clement's Danes its
name was.' The fragment of rhyme that Mr. Charrington had taught him came
back into his head, and he added half-nostalgically: "Oranges and lemons,"
say the bells of St. Clement's!'
To his astonishment she capped the line:
'You owe me three farthings,' say the bells of St. Martin's,
'When will you pay me?' say the bells of Old Bailey--
'I can't remember how it goes on after that. But anyway I remember it
ends up, "Here comes a candle to light you to bed, here comes a chopper to
chop off your head!"'
It was like the two halves of a countersign. But there must be another
line after 'the bells of Old Bailey'. Perhaps it could be dug out of Mr.
Charrington's memory, if he were suitably prompted.
'Who taught you that?' he said.
'My grandfather. He used to say it to me when I was a little girl. He
was vaporized when I was eight -- at any rate, he disappeared. I wonder
what a lemon was,' she added inconsequently. 'I've seen oranges. They're a
kind of round yellow fruit with a thick skin.'
'I can remember lemons,' said Winston. 'They were quite common in the
fifties. They were so sour that it set your teeth on edge even to smell
them.'
'I bet that picture's got bugs behind it,' said Julia. 'I'll take it
down and give it a good clean some day. I suppose it's almost time we were
leaving. I must start washing this paint off. What a bore! I'll get the
lipstick off your face afterwards.'
Winston did not get up for a few minutes more. The room was darkening.
He turned over towards the light and lay gazing into the glass paperweight.
The inexhaustibly interesting thing was not the fragment of coral but the
interior of the glass itself. There
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revolutionaries. Goldstein had fled and was hiding no one knew where, and
of the others, a few had simply disappeared, while the majority had been
executed after spectacular public trials at which they made confession of
their crimes. Among the last survivors were three men named Jones,
Aaronson, and Rutherford. It must have been in 1965 that these three had
been arrested. As often happened, they had vanished for a year or more, so
that one did not know whether they were alive or dead, and then had
suddenly been brought forth to incriminate themselves in the usual way.
They had confessed to intelligence with the enemy (at that date, too, the
enemy was Eurasia), embezzlement of public funds, the murder of various
trusted Party members, intrigues against the leadership of Big Brother
which had started long before the Revolution happened, and acts of sabotage
causing the death of hundreds of thousands of people. After confessing to
these things they had been pardoned, reinstated in the Party, and given
posts which were in fact sinecures but which sounded important. All three
had written long, abject articles in the Times, analysing the reasons for
their defection and promising to make amends.
Some time after th
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itself involving the destruction of many archaic forms. The word
thought, for example, did not exist in Newspeak. Its place was taken by
think, which did duty for both noun and verb. No etymological principle
was followed here: in some cases it was the original noun that was
chosen for retention, in other cases the verb. Even where a noun and
verb of kindred meaning were not etymologically connected, one or other
of them was frequently suppressed. There was, for example, no such word
as cut, its meaning being sufficiently covered by the noun-verb knife.
Adjectives were formed by adding the suffix -ful to the noun-verb, and
adverbs by adding -wise. Thus for example, speedful meant ?rapid? and
speedwise meant ?quickly?. Certain of our present-day adjectives, such
as good, strong, big, black, soft, were retained, but their total number
was very small. There was little need for them, since almost any
adjectival meaning could be arrived at by adding -ful to a noun-verb.
None of the now-existing adverbs was retained, except for a very few
already ending in -wise: the -wise termination was invariable. The word
well, for example, was replaced by goodwise.
In addition, any word -- this again applied in principle to every word in
the language -- could be negatived by adding the affix un-, or could be
strengthened by the affix plus-, or, for still greater emphasis,
doubleplus-. Thus, for example, uncold meant ?warm?, while pluscold and
doublepluscold meant
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telescreen. It appeared that there had even been demonstrations to thank
Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grammes a week. And
only yesterday, he reflected, it had been announced that the ration was to
be reduced to twenty grammes a week. Was it possible that they could
swallow that, after only twenty-four hours? Yes, they swallowed it. Parsons
swallowed it easily, with the stupidity of an animal. The eyeless creature
at the other table swallowed it fanatically, passionately, with a furious
desire to track down, denounce, and vaporize anyone who should suggest that
last week the ration had been thirty grammes. Syme, too -- in some more
complex way, involving doublethink, Syme swallowed it. Was he, then, alone
in the possession of a memory?
The fabulous statistics continued to pour out of the telescreen. As
compared with last year there was more food, more clothes, more houses,
more furniture, more cooking-pots, more fuel, more ships, more helicopters,
more books, more babies -- more of everything except disease, crime, and
insanity. Year by year and minute by minute, everybody and everything was
whizzing rapidly upwards. As Syme had done earlier Winston had taken up his
spoon and was dabbling in the pale-coloured gravy that dribbled across the
table, drawing a long streak of it out into
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speaking. Winston stopped abruptly and turned. It was O'Brien.
At last they were face to face, and it seemed that his only impulse
was to run away. His heart bounded violently. He would have been incapable
of speaking. O'Brien, however, had continued forward in the same movement,
laying a friendly hand for a moment on Winston's arm, so that the two of
them were walking side by side. He began speaking with the peculiar grave
courtesy that differentiated him from the majority of Inner Party members.
'I had been hoping for an opportunity of talking to you,' he said. 'I
was reading one of your Newspeak articles in the Times the other day. You
take a scholarly interest in Newspeak, I believe?'
Winston had recovered part of his self-possession. 'Hardly scholarly,'
he said. 'I'm only an amateur. It's not my subject. I have never had
anything to do with the actual construction of the language.'
'But you write it very elegantly,' said O'Brien. 'That is not only my
own opinion. I was talking recently to a friend of yours who is certainly
an expert. His name has slipped my memory for the moment.'
Again Winston's heart stirred painfully. It was inconceivable that
this was anything other than a reference to Syme. But Syme was not only
dead, he was abolished, an unperson. Any identifiable reference to him
would have been mortally dangerous. O'Brien's remark must obviously have
been intended as a signal, a codeword. By sharing a small act
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yourself, was always slightly dangerous. There was a word for it in
Newspeak: ownlife, it was called, meaning individualism and eccentricity.
But this evening as he came out of the Ministry the balminess of the April
air had tempted him. The sky was a warmer blue than he had seen it that
year, and suddenly the long, noisy evening at the Centre, the boring,
exhausting games, the lectures, the creaking camaraderie oiled by gin, had
seemed intolerable. On impulse he had turned away from the bus-stop and
wandered off into the labyrinth of London, first south, then east, then
north again, losing himself among unknown streets and hardly bothering in
which direction he was going.
'If there is hope,' he had written in the diary, 'it lies in the
proles.' The words kept coming back to him, statement of a mystical truth
and a palpable absurdity. He was somewhere in the vague, brown-coloured
slums to the north and east of what had once been Saint Pancras Station. He
was walking up a cobbled street of little two-storey houses with battered
doorways which gave straight on the pavement and which were somehow
curiously suggestive of ratholes. There were puddles of filthy water here
and there among the cobbles. In and out of the dark doorways, and down
narrow alley-ways that branched off on either side, people swarmed in
astonishing numbers -- girls in full bloom, with crudely lipsticked mouths,
and youths who chased the girls, and swollen waddling women who showed you
what the girls would be like in ten years" time, and old bent creatures
shuffling along on splayed feet, and ragged barefooted children who played
in the puddles and then scattered at angry yells from their mothers.
Perhaps a quarter of the windows in the street were broken and boarded up.
Most of the people
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ladder had been thrust through the window and had burst in the frame.
Someone was climbing through the window. There was a stampede of boots up
the stairs. The room was full of solid men in black uniforms, with iron-
shod boots on their feet and truncheons in their hands.
Winston was not trembling any longer. Even his eyes he barely moved.
One thing alone mattered; to keep still, to keep still and not give them an
excuse to hit you! A man with a smooth prize-fighter's jowl in which the
mouth was only a slit paused opposite him balancing his truncheon
meditatively between thumb and forefinger. Winston met his eyes. The
feeling of nakedness, with one's hands behind one's head and one's face and
body all exposed, was almost unbearable. The man protruded the tip of a
white tongue, licked the place where his lips should have been, and then
passed on. There was another crash. Someone had picked up the glass
paperweight from the table and smashed it to pieces on the hearth-stone.
The fragment of coral, a tiny crinkle of pink like a sugar rosebud
from a cake, rolled across the mat. How small, thought Winston, how small
it always was! There was a gasp and a thump behind him, and he received a
violent kick on the ankle which nearly flung him off his balance. One of
the men had smashed his fist into Julia's solar plexus, doubling her up
like a pocket ruler. She was thrashing about on the floor, fighting for
breath. Winston dared not turn his head even by a millimetre, but sometimes
her livid, gasping face came within the angle of his vision. Even in his
terror it was as though he could feel the pain i
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unsympathetic men in white coats feeling his pulse, tapping his reflexes,
turning up his eyelids, running harsh fingers over him in search for broken
bones, and shooting needles into his arm to make him sleep.
The beatings grew less frequent, and became mainly a threat, a horror
to which he could be sent back at any moment when his answers were
unsatisfactory. His questioners now were not ruffians in black uniforms but
Party intellectuals, little rotund men with quick movements and flashing
spectacles, who worked on him in relays over periods which lasted -- he
thought, he could not be sure -- ten or twelve hours at a stretch. These
other questioners saw to it that he was in constant slight pain, but it was
not chiefly pain that they relied on. They slapped his face, wrung his
ears. pulled his hair, made him stand on one leg, refused him leave to
urinate, shone glaring lights in his face until his eyes ran with water;
but the aim of this was simply to humiliate him and destroy his power of
arguing and reasoning. Their real weapon was the merciless questioning that
went on and on, hour after hour, tripping him up, laying traps for
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nothing. But of course waiters and servants and people pinch things, and --
look, I got a little packet of tea as well.'
Winston had squatted down beside her. He tore open a corner of the
packet.
'It's real tea. Not blackberry leaves.'
'There's been a lot of tea about lately. They've captured India, or
something,' she said vaguely. 'But listen, dear. I want you to turn your
back on me for three minutes. Go and sit on the other side of the bed.
Don't go too near the window. And don't turn round till I tell you.'
Winston gazed abstractedly through the muslin curtain. Down in the
yard the red-armed woman was still marching to and fro between the washtub
and the line. She took two more pegs out of her mouth and sang with deep
feeling:
They sye that time 'eals all things,
They sye you can always forget;
But the smiles an' the tears acrorss the years
They twist my 'eart-strings yet!
She knew the whole drivelling song by heart, it seemed. Her voice
floated upward with the sweet summer air, very tuneful, charged with a sort
of happy melancholy. One had the feeling that she would have been perfectly
content, if the June evening had been endless and the supply of clothes
inexhaustible, to remain there for a thousand years, pegging out diapers
and singing rubbish. It struck him as a curious fact that he had never
heard a member of the Party singing alone an
Ivar Rosquist
very restricted, because all round the walls were stacked innumerable dusty
picture-frames. In the window there were trays of nuts and bolts, worn-out
chisels, penknives with broken blades, tarnished watches that did not even
pretend to be in going order, and other miscellaneous rubbish. Only on a
small table in the corner was there a litter of odds and ends -- lacquered
snuffboxes, agate brooches, and the like -- which looked as though they
might include something interesting. As Winston wandered towards the table
his eye was caught by a round, smooth thing that gleamed softly in the
lamplight, and he picked it up.
It was a heavy lump of glass, curved on one side, flat on the other,
making almost a hemisphere. There was a peculiar softness, as of rainwater,
in both the colour and the texture of the glass. At the heart of it,
magnified by the curved surface, there was a strange, pink, convoluted
object that recalled a rose or a sea anemone.
'What is it?' said Winston, fascinated.
'That's coral, that is,' said the old man. 'It must
Markus Jansson
forward there was a significant change. In the past the need for a
hierarchical form of society had been the doctrine specifically of the
High. It had been preached by kings and aristocrats and by the priests,
lawyers, and the like who were parasitical upon them, and it had generally
been softened by promises of compensation in an imaginary world beyond the
grave. The Middle, so long as it was struggling for power, had always made
use of such terms as freedom, justice, and fraternity. Now, however, the
concept of human brotherhood began to be assailed by people who were not
yet in positions of command, but merely hoped to be so before long. In the
past the Middle had made revolutions under the banner of equality, and then
had established a fresh tyranny as soon as the old one was overthrown. The
new Middle groups in effect proclaimed their tyranny beforehand. Socialism,
a theory which appeared in the early nineteenth century and was the last
link in a chain of thought stretching back to the slave rebellions of
antiquity, was still deeply infected by the Utopianism of past ages. But in
each variant of Socialism that appeared from about 1900 onwards the aim of
establishing liberty and equality was more and more openly abandoned. The
new movements which appeared in the middle years of the century, Ingsoc in
Oceania, Neo-Bolshevism in Eurasia, Death-Worship, as it is commonly
called, in Eastasia, had the conscious aim of perpetuating UNfreedom and
INequality. These new movements, of course, grew out of the old ones and
tended to keep their names and pay
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'What is it, do you think?' said Julia.
'I don't think it's anything -- I mean, I don't think it was ever put
to any use. That's what I like about it. It's a little chunk of history
that they've forgotten to alter. It's a message from a hundred years ago,
if one knew how to read it.'
'And that picture over there' -- she nodded at the engraving on the
opposite wall -- 'would that be a hundred years old?'
'More. Two hundred, I dare say. One can't tell. It's impossible to
discover the age of anything nowadays.'
She went over to look at it. 'Here's where that brute stuck his nose
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superfluous motion, like an artist's lay-figure moving of its own accord.
Her large shapely body seemed to relapse naturally into stillness. For
hours at a time she would sit almost immobile on the bed, nursing his young
sister, a tiny, ailing, very silent child of two or three, with a face made
simian by thinness. Very occasionally she would take Winston in her arms
and press him against her for a long time without saying anything. He was
aware, in spite of his youthfulness and selfishness, that this was somehow
connected with the never-mentioned thing that was about to happen.
He remembered the room where they lived, a dark, close-smelling room
that seemed half filled by a bed with a white counterpane. There was a gas
ring in the fender, and a shelf where food was kept, and on the landing
outside there was a brown earthenware sink, common to several rooms. He
remembered his mother's statuesque body bending over the gas ring to stir
at something in a saucepan. Above all he remembered his continuous hunger,
and the fierce sordid battles at mealtimes. He would ask his mother
naggingly, over and over again, why there was not more food, he would shout
and storm at her (he even remembered the tones of his voice, which was
beginning to break prematurely and sometimes boomed in a peculiar way), or
he would attempt a snivelling note of pathos in his efforts to get more
than
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of them. So far as it could be achieved, a Newspeak word of this class was
simply a staccato sound expressing one clearly understood concept. It would
have been quite impossible to use the A vocabulary for literary purposes or
for political or philosophical discussion. It was intended only to express
simple, purposive thoughts, usually involving concrete objects or physical
actions.
The grammar of Newspeak had two outstanding peculiarities. The first
of these was an almost complete interchangeability between different parts
of speech. Any word in the language (in principle this applied even to very
abstract words such as if or when) could be used either as verb, noun,
adjective, or adverb. Between the verb and the noun form, when they were of
the same root, there was never any variation, this rule of itself involving
the destruction of many archaic forms. The word thought, for example, did
not exist in Newspeak. Its place was taken by think, which did duty for
both noun and verb. No etymological principle was followed here: in some
cases it was the original noun that was chosen for retention, in other
cases the verb. Even where a noun and verb of kindred meaning were not
etymologically connected, one or other of them was frequently suppressed.
There was, for example, no such word as cut, its meaning being sufficiently
covered by the noun-verb knife. Adjectives were formed by adding the suffix
-ful to the noun-verb, and adverbs by adding -wise. Thus for example,
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sliding up and down, the white-jacketed servants hurrying to and fro --
everything was intimidating. Although he had a good pretext for coming
here, he was haunted at every step by the fear that a black-uniformed guard
would suddenly appear from round the corner, demand his papers, and order
him to get out. O'Brien's servant, however, had admitted the two of them
without demur. He was a small, dark-haired man in a white jacket, with a
diamond-shaped, completely expressionless face which might have been that
of a Chinese. The passage down which he led them was softly carpeted, with
cream-papered walls and white wainscoting, all exquisitely clean. That too
was intimidating. Winston could not remember ever to have seen a passageway
whose walls were not grimy from the contact of human bodies.
O'Brien had a slip of paper between his fingers and seemed to be
studying it intently. His heavy face, bent down so that one could see the
line
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But don't give up hope. Everyone is cured sooner or later. In the end we
shall shoot you.'
IV
He was much better. He was growing fatter and stronger every day, if
it was proper to speak of days.
The white light and the humming sound were the same as ever, but the
cell was a little more comfortable than the others he had been in. There
was a pillow and a mattress on the plank bed, and a stool to sit on. They
had given him a bath, and they allowed him to wash himself fairly
frequently in a tin basin. They even gave him warm water to wash with. They
had given him new underclothes and a clean suit of overalls. They had
dressed his varicose ulcer with soothing ointment. They had pulled out the
remnants of his teeth and given him a new set of dentures.
Weeks or months must have passed. It would have been possible now to
keep count of the passage of time, if he had felt any interest in doing so,
since he was being fed at what appeared to be regular intervals. He was
getting, he judged, three meals in the twenty-four hours; sometimes he
wondered dimly whether he was getting them by night or by day. The food was
surprisingly good, with meat at every third meal. Once there was even a
packet of cigarettes. He had no matches, bu
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followed him here, because it was not credible that by pure chance she
should have happened to be walking on the same evening up the same obscure
backstreet, kilometres distant from any quarter where Party members lived.
It was too great a coincidence. Whether she was really an agent of the
Thought Police, or simply an amateur spy actuated by officiousness, hardly
mattered. It was enough that she was watching him. Probably she had seen
him go into the pub as well.
It was an effort to walk. The lump of glass in his pocket banged
against his thigh at each step, and he was half minded to take it out and
throw it away. The worst thing was the pain in his belly. For a couple of
minutes he had the feeling that he would die if he did not reach a lavatory
soon. But there would be no public lavatories in a quarter like this. Then
the spasm passed, leaving a dull ache behind.
The street was a blind alley. Winston halted, stood for several
seconds wondering vaguely what to do, then turned round and began to
retrace his steps. As he turned it occur
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and seemed to be already on the point of falling asleep. He reached out for
the book, which was lying on the floor, and sat up against the bedhead.
'We must read it,' he said. 'You too. All members of the Brotherhood
have to read it.'
'You read it,' she said with her eyes shut. 'Read it aloud. That's the
best way. Then you can explain it to me as you go.'
The clock's hands said six, meaning eighteen. They had three or four
hours ahead of them. He propped the book against his knees and began
reading:
Chapter I.
Ignorance is Strength.
Throughout recorded time, and probably since the end of the Neolithic
Age, there have been three kinds of people in the world, the High, the
Middle, and the Low. They have been subdivided in many ways, they have
borne countless different names, and their relative numbers, as well as
their attitude towards one another, have varied from age to age: but the
essential structure of society has
Markus Jansson
always the danger of concealed microphones by which your voice might be
picked up and recognized; besides, it was not easy to make a journey by
yourself without attracting attention. For distances of less than 100
kilometres it was not necessary to get your passport endorsed, but
sometimes there were patrols hanging about the railway stations, who
examined the papers of any Party member they found there and asked awkward
questions. However, no patrols had appeared, and on the walk from the
station he had made sure by cautious backward glances that he was not being
followed. The train was full of proles, in holiday mood because of the
summery weather. The wooden-seated carriage in which he travelled was
filled to overflowing by a single enormous family, ranging from a toothless
great-grandmother to a month-old baby, going out to spend an afternoon with
'in-laws' in the country, and, as they freely explained to Winston, to get
hold of a little blackmarket butter.
The lane widened, and in a minute he came to t
Markus Jansson
suicide.'
'Nonsense. You are under the impression that hatred is more exhausting
than love. Why should it be? And if it were, what difference would that
make? Suppose that we choose to wear ourselves out faster. Suppose that we
quicken the tempo of human life till men are senile at thirty. Still what
difference would it make? Can you not understand that the death of the
individual is not death? The party is immortal.'
As usual, the voice had battered Winston into helplessness. Moreover
he was in dread that if he persisted in his disagreement O'Brien would
twist the dial again. And yet he could not keep silent. Feebly, without
arguments, with nothing to support him except his inarticulate horror of
what O'Brien had said, he returned to the attack.
'I don't know -- I don't care. Somehow you will fail. Something will
defeat you. Life will defeat you.'
'We control life, Winston, at all its levels. You are imagining that
there is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do
and will turn against us. But we create human nature. Men are infinitely
malleable. Or perhaps you have returned to your old idea that the
proletarians or the slaves will arise and overthrow us. Put it out of your
mind. They are helpless, like the animals. Humanity is the Party. The
others are outside -- irrelevant.'
'I don't care. In the end they will beat you. Sooner or later they
will see you for what you are, and then they will tear you to pieces.'
'Do you see any evidence that that is happening? Or any reason why it
should?'
'No. I believe it. I know that you will fail. There is something in
the universe -- I don't know, some spirit, some principle -- that you will
never overcome.'
'Do you believe in God, Winston?'
'No.'
'Then what is
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strengthened by the affix plus-, or, for still greater emphasis,
doublepluscold meant, respectively, 'very cold' and 'superlatively cold'.
It was also possible, as in present-day English, to modify the meaning of
almost any word by prepositional affixes such as ante-, post-, up-, down-,
etc. By such methods it was found possible to bring about an enormous
diminution of vocabulary. Given, for instance, the word good, there was no
need for such a word as bad, since the required meaning was equally well --
indeed, better -- expressed by ungood. All that was necessary, in any case
where two words formed a natural pair of opposites, was to decide which of
them to suppress. Dark, for example, could be replaced by unlight, or light
by undark, according to preference.
The second distinguishing mark of Newspeak grammar was its regularity.
Subject to a few exceptions which are mentioned below all inflexions
followed the same rules. Thus, in all verbs the preterite and the past
participle were the same and ended in -ed. The preterite of steal was
stealed, the preterite of think was thinked, and so on throughout the
language, all such forms as swam, gave, brought, spoke, taken, etc., being
abolished. All plurals were made by adding -s or -es as the case might be.
The plurals of man, ox, life, were mans, oxes, lifes. Comparison of
adjectives was invariably made by adding -er, -est (good, gooder, goodest),
irregular forms and the more, most formation being suppressed.
The only classes of words that were still allowed to inflect
irregularly were the pronouns, the relatives, the demonstrative adjectives,
and the auxiliary verbs. All of these followed their ancient usage, except
that whom had been scrapped as unnecessary,
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regard it as a verb, ?to think in an orthodox manner?. This inflected as
follows: noun-verb, goodthink; past tense and past participle,
goodthinked; present participle, goodthinking; adjective, goodthinkful;
adverb, goodthinkwise; verbal noun, goodthinker.
The B words were not constructed on any etymological plan. The words of
which they were made up could be any parts of speech, and could be
placed in any order and mutilated in any way which made them easy to
pronounce while indicating their derivation. In the word crimethink
(thoughtcrime), for instance, the think came second, whereas in thinkpol
(Thought Police) it came first, and in the latter word police had lost
its second syllable. Because of the great difficulty in securing
euphony, irregular formations were commoner in the B vocabulary than in
the A vocabulary. For example, the adjective forms of Minitrue, Minipax,
and Miniluv were, respectively, Minitruthful, Minipeaceful, and
Minilovely, simply because -trueful, -paxful, and -loveful were
sliightly awkward to pronounce. In principle, however, all B words could
inflect, and all inflected in exactly the same way.
Some of the B words had highly subtilized meanings, barely intelligible
to anyone who had not mastered the language as a whole. Consider, for
example, such a typical sentence from a Times leading article as
Oldthinkers unbellyfeel Ingsoc. The shortest rendering that one could
make of this in Oldspeak would be: ?Those whose ideas were formed before
the Revolution cannot have a full emotional understanding of the
principles of English Socialism.? But this is not an adequate
translation. To begin with, in order to grasp the full meaning of the
Newspeak sentence quoted above, one would have to have a clear idea of
what is meant
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one was at my sister-in-law's funeral. And that was -- well, I couldn't
give you the date, but it must'a been fifty years ago. Of course it was
only 'ired for the occasion, you understand.'
'It isn't very important about the top hats,' said Winston patiently.
'The point is, these capitalists -- they and a few lawyers and priests and
so forth who lived on them -- were the lords of the earth. Everything
existed for their benefit. You -- the ordinary people, the workers -- were
their slaves. They could do what they liked with you. They could ship you
off to Canada like cattle. They could sleep with your daughters if they
chose. They could order you to be flogged with something called a cat-o'-
nine tails. You had to take your cap off when you passed them. Every
capitalist went about with a gang of lackeys who--'
The old man brightened again.
'Lackeys!' he said. 'Now there's a word I ain't 'eard since ever so
long. Lackeys! That reg'lar takes me back, that does. I recollect oh,
donkey's years ago -- I used to sometimes go to 'Yde Park of a Sunday
afternoon to 'ear the blokes making speeches. Salvation Army, Roman
Catholics, Jews, Indians -- all sorts there was. And there was one bloke --
well, I couldn't give you 'is name, but a real powerful speaker 'e was. 'E
didn't 'alf give it 'em! "Lackeys!" 'e says, "lackeys of the bourgeoisi
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accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully
grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not
sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By
lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything,
and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue
behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a
bird.
VI
It had happened at last. The expected message had come. All his life,
it seemed to him, he had been waiting for this to happen.
He was walking down the long corridor at the Ministry and he was
almost at the spot where Julia had slipped the note into his hand when he
became aware that someone larger than himself was walking just behind him.
The person, whoever it was, gave a small cough, evidently as a prelude to
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something illegal.
'What are these books like?' said Winston curiously.
'Oh, ghastly rubbish. They're boring, really. They only have six
plots, but they swap them round a bit. Of course I was only on the
kaleidoscopes. I was never in the Rewrite Squad. I'm not literary, dear --
not even enough for that.'
He learned with astonishment that all the workers in Pornosec, except
the heads of the departments, were girls. The theory was that men, whose
sex instincts were less controllable than those of women, were in greater
danger of being corrupted by the filth they handled.
'They don't even like having married women there,' she added. Girls
are always supposed to be so pure. Here's one who isn't, anyway.
She had had her first love-affair when she was sixteen, with a Party
member of sixty who later committed suicide to avoid arrest. 'And a good
job too,' said Julia, 'otherwise they'd have had my name out of him when he
confessed.' Since then there had been various others. Life as she saw it
was quite simple. You wanted a good time; 'they', meaning the Party, wanted
to stop you having it; you broke the rules as best you could. She seemed to
think it just as natural tha
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impression of being physically attracted to one another. The only
recognized purpose of marriage was to beget children for the service of the
Party. Sexual intercourse was to be looked on as a slightly disgusting
minor operation, like having an enema. This again was never put into plain
words, but in an indirect way it was rubbed into every Party member from
childhood onwards. There were even organizations such as the Junior Anti-
Sex League, which advocated complete celibacy for both sexes. All children
were to be begotten by artificial insemination (artsem, it was called in
Newspeak) and brought up in public institutions. This, Winston was aware,
was not meant altogether seriously, but somehow it fitted in with the
general ideology of the Party. The Party was trying to kill the sex
instinct, or, if it could not be killed, then to distort it and dirty it.
He did not know why this was so, but it seemed natural that it should be
so. And as far as the women were concerned, the Party's efforts were
largely succe
Markus Jansson
to look at the map to see what it meant. It was not merely a question of
losing Central Africa: for the first time in the whole war, the territory
of Oceania itself was menaced.
A violent emotion, not fear exactly but a sort of undifferentiated
excitement, flared up in him, then faded again. He stopped thinking about
the war. In these days he could never fix his mind on any one subject for
more than a few moments at a time. He picked up his glass and drained it at
a gulp. As always, the gin made him shudder and even retch slightly. The
stuff was horrible. The cloves and saccharine, themselves disgusting enough
in their sickly way, could not disguise the flat oily smell; and what was
worst of all was that the smell of gin, which dwelt with him night and day,
was inextricably mixed up in his mind with the smell of those--
He never named them, even in his thoughts, and so far as it was
possible he never visualized them. They were something that he was half-
aware of, hovering close to his face, a smell that clung to his nostrils.
As the gin rose in him he belched through purple lips. He had grown fatter
since they released him, and had regained his old colour -- indeed, more
than regained it. His features had thickened, the skin on nose and
cheekbones was coarsely red, even the bald scalp was too deep a pink. A
waiter, again unbidden, brought the chessboard and the current issue of the
Times, with the page turned down at the chess problem. Then, seeing that
Winston's glass was empty, he brought the gin bottle and filled it. There
was no need to give orders. They knew his habits. The chessboard was always
waiting for him, his corner table was always reserved;
Markus Jansson
could only be named in very broad terms which lumped together and condemned
whole groups of heresies without defining them in doing so. One could, in
fact, only use Newspeak for unorthodox purposes by illegitimately
translating some of the words back into Oldspeak. For example, All mans are
equal was a possible Newspeak sentence, but only in the same sense in which
All men are redhaired is a possible Oldspeak sentence. It did not contain a
grammatical error, but it expressed a palpable untruth -- i.e. that all men
are of equal size, weight, or strength. The concept of political equality
no longer existed, and this secondary meaning had accordingly been purged
out of the word equal. In 1984, when Oldspeak was still the normal means of
communication, the danger theoretically existed that in using Newspeak
words one might remember their original meanings. In practice it was not
difficult for any person well grounded in doublethink to avoid doing this,
but within a couple of generations even the possibility of such a lapse
would have vaished. A person growing up with Newspeak as his sole language
would no more know that equal had once had the secondary meaning of
'politically equal', or that free had once meant 'intellectually free',
than for instance, a person who had never heard of chess would be aware of
the secondary meanings attaching to queen and rook. There would be many
crimes and errors which it would be beyond his power to commit, simply
because they were nameless and therefore unimaginable. And it was to be
foreseen that with the passage of time the distinguishing characteristics
of Newspeak would become more and more pronounced -- its words growing
fewer and fewer, their meanings more and more rigid, and
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of Ingsoc, since the essential act of the Party is to use conscious
deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete
honesty. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to
forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes
necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is
needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to
take account of the reality which one denies -- all this is indispensably
necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise
doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with
reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on
indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth. Ultimately
it is by means of doublethink that the Party has been able -- and may, for
all we know, continue to be able for thousands of years -- to arrest the
course of history.
All past oligarchies have fallen from power either because they
ossified or because they grew soft. Either they became stupid and arrogant,
failed to adjust themselves to changing circumstances, and were overthrown;
or they became liberal and cowardly, made concessions when they should have
used force, and once again were overthrown. They fell, that is to say,
either through consciousness or through unconsciousness. It is the
achievement of the Party to have produced a system of thought in which both
conditions can exist simultaneously. And upon no other intellectual basis
could the dominion of the Party be made permanent. If one is to
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guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then
to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and
then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process
to the process itself. That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to
induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the
act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word
'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink.
The instructress had called them to attention again. 'And now let's
see which of us can touch our toes!' she said enthusiastically. 'Right over
from the hips, please, comrades. One-two! One-two!...'
Winston loathed this exercise, which sent shooting pains all the way
from his heels to his buttocks and often ended by bringing on another
coughing fit. The half-pleasant quality went out of his meditations. The
past, he reflected, had not merely been altered, it had been actually
destroyed.
Phil Carmody
Such incidents never had any sequel. All that they did was to keep alive in
him the belief, or hope, that others besides himself were the enemies of
the Party. Perhaps the rumours of vast underground conspiracies were true
after all -- perhaps the Brotherhood really existed! It was impossible, in
spite of the endless arrests and confessions and executions, to be sure
that the Brotherhood was not simply a myth. Some days he believed in it,
some days not. There was no evidence, only fleeting glimpses that might
mean anything or nothing: snatches of overheard conversation, faint
scribbles on lavatory walls -- once, even, when two strangers met, a small
movement of the hand which had looked as though it might be a signal of
recognition. It was all guesswork: very likely he had imagined everything.
He had gone back to his cubicle without looking at O'Brien again. The idea
of following up their momentary contact hardly crossed his mind. It would
have been inconceivably dangerous even if he had known how to set about
doing it. For a second, two seconds, they had exchanged an equivocal
glance, and that was the end of the story. But even that was a memorable
event, in the locked loneliness in which one had to live.
Winston roused himself and sat up straighter. He let out a belch. The
gin was rising from his stomach.
His eyes re-focused on the page. He discovered that while he sat
helplessly musing he had also been writing, as though by automatic action.
And it was no longer the same cramped, awkward handwriting as before. His
pen had slid voluptuously over the smo
Phil Carmody
that seemed to make the pavement heave; a shower of light objects pattered
on to his back. When he stood up he found that he was covered with
fragments of glass from the nearest window.
He walked on. The bomb had demolished a group of houses 200 metres up
the street. A black plume of smoke hung in the sky, and below it a cloud of
plaster dust in which a crowd was already forming around the ruins. There
was a little pile of plaster lying on the pavement ahead of him, and in the
middle of it he could see a bright red streak. When he got up to it he saw
that it was a human hand severed at the wrist. Apart from the bloody stump,
the hand was so completely whitened as to resemble a plaster cast.
He kicked the thing into the gutter, and then, to avoid the crowd,
turned down a side-street to the right. Within three or four minutes he was
out of the area which the bomb had affected, and the sordid swarming life
of the streets was going on as though nothing had happened. It was nearly
twenty hours, and the drinking-shops which the proles frequented ('pubs',
they called them) were choked with customers. From their grimy swing doors,
endlessly opening and shutting, there came forth a smell of urine, sawdust,
and sour beer. In an angle formed by a projecting house-front three men
were standing very close together, the middle one of them holding a folded-
up newspaper which the other two were studying over his shoulder. Even
before he was near enough to make out the expression on their faces,
Winston could see absorption in every line of their bodies. It was
obviously some serious piece of news that they were reading. He was a few
paces away from th
Phil Carmody
deliberately constructed for political purposes: words, that is to say,
which not only had in every case a political implication, but were
intended to impose a desirable mental attitude upon the person using
them. Without a full understanding of the principles of Ingsoc it was
difficult to use these words correctly. In some cases they could be
translated into Oldspeak, or even into words taken from the A
vocabulary, but this usually demanded a long paraphrase and always
involved the loss of certain overtones. The B words were a sort of
verbal shorthand, often packing whole ranges of ideas into a few
syllables, and at the same time more accurate and forcible than ordinary
language.
The B words were in all cases compound words[2]. They consisted of two
or more words, or portions of words, welded together in an easily
pronounceable form. The resulting amalgam was always a noun-verb, and
inflected according to the ordinary rules. To take a single example: the
word goodthink, meaning, very roughly, ?orthodoxy?, or, if one chose to
Ivar Rosquist
enormous roaring flame. And almost in the same instant bang! would go the
bullet, too late, or too early. They would have blown his brain to pieces
before they could reclaim it. The heretical thought would be unpunished,
unrepented, out of their reach for ever. They would have blown a hole in
their own perfection. To die hating them, that was freedom.
He shut his eyes. It was more difficult than accepting an intellectual
discipline. It was a question of degrading himself, mutilating himself. He
had got to plunge into the filthiest of filth. What was the most horrible,
sickening thing of all? He thought of Big Brother. The enormous face
(because of constantly seeing it on posters he always thought of it as
being a metre wide), with its heavy black moustache and the eyes that
followed you to and fro, seemed to float into his mind of its own accord.
What were his true feelings towards Big Brother?
There was a heavy tramp of boots in the passage. The steel door swung
open with a clang. O'Brien walked into the cell. Behind him were the waxen-
faced officer and the black-uniformed guards.
'Get up,' said O'Brien. 'Come here.'
Winston stood opposite him. O'Brien took Winston's shoulders between
his strong hands and looked at him closely.
'You have had thoughts of deceiving me,' he said. 'That was stupid.
Stand up straighter. Look me in the face.
Markus Jansson
and leapt back again, all in one movement. At the same instant a man in a
concertina-like black suit, who had emerged from a side alley, ran towards
Winston, pointing excitedly to the sky.
'Steamer!' he yelled. 'Look out, guv'nor! Bang over'ead! Lay down
quick!'
'Steamer' was a nickname which, for some reason, the proles applied to
rocket bombs. Winston promptly flung himself on his face. The proles were
nearly always right when they gave you a warning of this kind. They seemed
to possess some kind of instinct which told them several seconds in advance
when a rocket was coming, although the rockets supposedly travelled faster
than sound. Winston clasped his forearms above his head. There was a roar
Markus Jansson
incongruous possession than the glass paperweight, and impossible to carry
home, unless it were taken out of its frame. But he lingered for some
minutes more, talking to the old man, whose name, he discovered, was not
Weeks -- as one might have gathered from the inscription over the shop-
front -- but Charrington. Mr. Charrington, it seemed, was a widower aged
sixty-three and had inhabited this shop for thirty years. Throughout that
time he had been intending to alter the name over the window, but had never
quite got to the point of doing it. All the while that they were talking
the half-remembered rhyme kept running through Winston's head. Oranges and
lemons say the bells of St. Clement's, You owe me three farthings, say the
bells of St. Martin's! It was curious, but when you said it to yourself you
had the illusion of actually hearing bells, the bells of a lost London that
still existed somewhere or other, disguised and forgotten. From one ghostly
steeple after another he seemed to hear them pealing forth. Yet so far as
he could remember he had never in real life heard church bells ringing.
He got away from Mr. Charrington and went down the stairs alone, so as
not to let the old man see him reconnoitring the street before stepping out
of the door. He had already made up his mind that after a suitable interval
-- a month, say -- he would take the risk of visiting the shop again. It
was perhaps not more dangerous than shirking an evening at the Centre. The
serious piece of folly had been to come back here in the first place, af