CHAPTER 4

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, but the never-speaking guard who
brought his food would give him a light. The first time he tried to
smoke it made him sick, but he persevered, and spun the packet
out for a long time, smoking half a cigarette after each meal.
They had given him a white slate with a stump of pencil tied to
the corner. At first he made no use of it. Even when he was awake
he was completely torpid. Often he would lie from one meal to the next almost without stirring, sometimes asleep, sometimes waking
into vague reveries in which it was too much trouble to open his
eyes. He had long grown used to sleeping with a strong light on his
face. It seemed to make no difference, except that one’s dreams
were more coherent. He dreamed a great deal all through this time,
and they were always happy dreams. He was in the Golden
Country, or he was sitting among enormous glorious, sunlit ruins,
with his mother, with Julia, with O’Brien — not doing anything,
merely sitting in the sun, talking of peaceful things. Such thoughts
as he had when he was awake were mostly about his dreams. He
seemed to have lost the power of intellectual effort, now that the
stimulus of pain had been removed. He was not bored, he had no
desire for conversation or distraction. Merely to be alone, not to be
beaten or questioned, to have enough to eat, and to be clean all
over, was completely satisfying.
By degrees he came to spend less time in sleep, but he still felt
no impulse to get off the bed. All he cared for was to lie quiet and
feel the strength gathering in his body. He would finger himself
here and there, trying to make sure that it was not an illusion that
his muscles were growing rounder and his skin tauter. Finally it
was established beyond a doubt that he was growing fatter; his
thighs were now definitely thicker than his knees. After that,
reluctantly at first, he began exercising himself regularly. In a little
while he could walk three kilometres, measured by pacing the cell,
and his bowed shoulders were growing straighter. He attempted
more elaborate exercises, and was astonished and humiliated to
find what things he could not do. He could not move out of a walk,
he could not hold his stool out at arm’s length, he could not stand
on one leg without falling over. He squatted down on his heels, and
found that with agonizing pains in thigh and calf he could just lift himself to a standing position. He lay flat on his belly and tried to
lift his weight by his hands. It was hopeless, he could not raise
himself a centimetre. But after a few more days — a few more
mealtimes — even that feat was accomplished. A time came when
he could do it six times running. He began to grow actually proud
of his body, and to cherish an intermittent belief that his face also
was growing back to normal. Only when he chanced to put his hand
on his bald scalp did he remember the seamed, ruined face that had
looked back at him out of the mirror.
His mind grew more active. He sat down on the plank bed, his
back against the wall and the slate on his knees, and set to work
deliberately at the task of re-educating himself.
He had capitulated, that was agreed. In reality, as he saw now,
he had been ready to capitulate long before he had taken the
decision. From the moment when he was inside the Ministry of
Love — and yes, even during those minutes when he and Julia had
stood helpless while the iron voice from the telescreen told them
what to do — he had grasped the frivolity, the shallowness of his
attempt to set himself up against the power of the Party. He knew
now that for seven years the Thought Police had watched him like
a beetle under a magnifying glass. There was no physical act, no
word spoken aloud, that they had not noticed, no train of thought
that they had not been able to infer. Even the speck of whitish dust
on the cover of his diary they had carefully replaced. They had
played sound-tracks to him, shown him photographs. Some of
them were photographs of Julia and himself. Yes, even . . . He
could not fight against the Party any longer. Besides, the Party was
in the right. It must be so; how could the immortal, collective brain
be mistaken? By what external standard could you check its
judgements? Sanity was statistical. It was merely a question of learning to think as they thought. Only ——!
The pencil felt thick and awkward in his fingers. He began to
write down the thoughts that came into his head. He wrote first in
large clumsy capitals:
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
Then almost without a pause he wrote beneath it:
TWO AND TWO MAKE FIVE
But then there came a sort of check. His mind, as though
shying away from something, seemed unable to concentrate. He
knew that he knew what came next, but for the moment he could
not recall it. When he did recall it, it was only by consciously
reasoning out what it must be: it did not come of its own accord.
He wrote:
GOD IS POWER
He accepted everything. The past was alterable. The past never
had been altered. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had
always been at war with Eastasia. Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford
were guilty of the crimes they were charged with. He had never
seen the photograph that disproved their guilt. It had never existed,
he had invented it. He remembered remembering contrary things,
but those were false memories, products of self-deception. How
easy it all was! Only surrender, and everything else followed. It was
like swimming against a current that swept you backwards
however hard you struggled, and then suddenly deciding to turn
round and go with the current instead of opposing it. Nothing had
changed except your own attitude: the predestined thing happened
in any case. He hardly knew why he had ever rebelled. Everything
was easy, except ——!
Anything could be true. The so-called laws of Nature were nonsense. The law of gravity was nonsense. ‘If I wished,’ O’Brien
had said, ‘I could float off this floor like a soap bubble.’ Winston
worked it out. ‘If he THINKS he floats off the floor, and if I
simultaneously THINK I see him do it, then the thing happens.’
Suddenly, like a lump of submerged wreckage breaking the surface
of water, the thought burst into his mind: ‘It doesn’t really happen.
We imagine it. It is hallucination.’ He pushed the thought under
instantly. The fallacy was obvious. It presupposed that somewhere
or other, outside oneself, there was a ‘real’ world where ‘real’
things happened. But how could there be such a world? What
knowledge have we of anything, save through our own minds? All
happenings are in the mind. Whatever happens in all minds, truly
happens.
He had no difficulty in disposing of the fallacy, and he was in
no danger of succumbing to it. He realized, nevertheless, that it
ought never to have occurred to him. The mind should develop a
blind spot whenever a dangerous thought presented itself. The
process should be automatic, instinctive. CRIMESTOP, they called
it in Newspeak.
He set to work to exercise himself in crimestop. He presented
himself with propositions —‘the Party says the earth is flat’, ‘the
party says that ice is heavier than water’— and trained himself in
not seeing or not understanding the arguments that contradicted
them. It was not easy. It needed great powers of reasoning and
improvisation. The arithmetical problems raised, for instance, by
such a statement as ‘two and two make five’ were beyond his
intellectual grasp. It needed also a sort of athleticism of mind, an
ability at one moment to make the most delicate use of logic and at
the next to be unconscious of the crudest logical errors. Stupidity
was as necessary as intelligence, and as difficult to attain. All the while, with one part of his mind, he wondered how
soon they would shoot him. ‘Everything depends on yourself,’
O’Brien had said; but he knew that there was no conscious act by
which he could bring it nearer. It might be ten minutes hence, or
ten years. They might keep him for years in solitary confinement,
they might send him to a labour-camp, they might release him for
a while, as they sometimes did. It was perfectly possible that before
he was shot the whole drama of his arrest and interrogation would
be enacted all over again. The one certain thing was that death
never came at an expected moment. The tradition — the unspoken
tradition: somehow you knew it, though you never heard it said —
was that they shot you from behind; always in the back of the head,
without warning, as you walked down a corridor from cell to cell.
One day — but ‘one day’ was not the right expression; just as
probably it was in the middle of the night: once — he fell into a
strange, blissful reverie. He was walking down the corridor, waiting
for the bullet. He knew that it was coming in another moment.
Everything was settled, smoothed out, reconciled. There were no
more doubts, no more arguments, no more pain, no more fear. His
body was healthy and strong. He walked easily, with a joy of
movement and with a feeling of walking in sunlight. He was not
any longer in the narrow white corridors in the Ministry of Love,
he was in the enormous sunlit passage, a kilometre wide, down
which he had seemed to walk in the delirium induced by drugs. He
was in the Golden Country, following the foot-track across the old
rabbit-cropped pasture. He could feel the short springy turf under
his feet and the gentle sunshine on his face. At the edge of the field
were the elm trees, faintly stirring, and somewhere beyond that
was the stream where the dace lay in the green pools under the willows. Suddenly he started up with a shock of horror. The sweat
broke out on his backbone. He had heard himself cry aloud:
‘Julia! Julia! Julia, my love! Julia!’
For a moment he had had an overwhelming hallucination of
her presence. She had seemed to be not merely with him, but
inside him. It was as though she had got into the texture of his
skin. In that moment he had loved her far more than he had ever
done when they were together and free. Also he knew that
somewhere or other she was still alive and needed his help.
He lay back on the bed and tried to compose himself. What
had he done? How many years had he added to his servitude by
that moment of weakness?
In another moment he would hear the tramp of boots outside.
They could not let such an outburst go unpunished. They would
know now, if they had not known before, that he was breaking the
agreement he had made with them. He obeyed the Party, but he
still hated the Party. In the old days he had hidden a heretical mind
beneath an appearance of conformity. Now he had retreated a step
further: in the mind he had surrendered, but he had hoped to keep
the inner heart inviolate. He knew that he was in the wrong, but he
preferred to be in the wrong. They would understand that —
O’Brien would understand it. It was all confessed in that single
foolish cry.
He would have to start all over again. It might take years. He
ran a hand over his face, trying to familiarize himself with the new
shape. There were deep furrows in the cheeks, the cheekbones felt
sharp, the nose flattened. Besides, since last seeing himself in the
glass he had been given a complete new set of teeth. It was not easy
to preserve inscrutability when you did not know what your face
looked like. In any case, mere control of the features was not enough. For the first time he perceived that if you want to keep a
secret you must also hide it from yourself. You must know all the
while that it is there, but until it is needed you must never let it
emerge into your consciousness in any shape that could be given a
name. From now onwards he must not only think right; he must
feel right, dream right. And all the while he must keep his hatred
locked up inside him like a ball of matter which was part of himself
and yet unconnected with the rest of him, a kind of cyst.
One day they would decide to shoot him. You could not tell
when it would happen, but a few seconds beforehand it should be
possible to guess. It was always from behind, walking down a
corridor. Ten seconds would be enough. In that time the world
inside him could turn over. And then suddenly, without a word
uttered, without a check in his step, without the changing of a line
in his face — suddenly the camouflage would be down and bang!
would go the batteries of his hatred. Hatred would fill him like an
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.’
He paused, and went on in a gentler tone:
‘You are improving. Intellectually there is very little wrong
with you. It is only emotionally that you have failed to make
progress. Tell me, Winston — and remember, no lies: you know
that I am always able to detect a lie — tell me, what are your true
feelings towards Big Brother?’
‘I hate him.’
‘You hate him. Good. Then the time has come for you to take
the last step. You must love Big Brother. It is not enough to obey
him: you must love him.’
He released Winston with a little push towards the guards.
‘Room 101,’ he said.