The alteration of the past is necessary for two reasons,one of which is subsidiary and,so to speak,precautionary.The subsidiary reason is that the Party member,like the proletarian,tolerates pres-ent-day conditions partly because he has no standards of compari-son.He must be cut off from the past,just as he must be cut off from foreign countries,because it is necessary for him to believe that he is better off than his ancestors and that the average level of material comfort is constantly rising.But by far the more important reason for the readjustment of the past is the need to safeguard the infallibility of the Party.It is not merely that speeches,statistics, and records of every kind must be constantly brought up to date in order to show that the predictions of the Party were in all cases right.It is also that no change of doctrine or in political alignment can ever be admitted.For to change one's mind,or even one's poli-cy,is a confession of weakness.If,for example,Eurasia or Eastasia (whichever it may be) is the enemy today,then that country must always have been the enemy.And if the facts say otherwise then the facts must be altered.Thus history is continuously rewritten.This day-to-day falsification of the past,carried out by the Ministry of Truth,is as necessary to the stability of the regime as the work of repression and espionage carried out by the Ministry of Love.
The mutability of the past is the central tenet of Ingsoc.Past e-vents,it is argued,have no obj ective existence,but survive only in written records and in human memories.The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon.And since the Party is in full control of all records and in equally full control of the minds of its members,it follows that the past is whatever the Party chooses to make it.It also follows that though the past is alterable,it never has been altered in any specific instance.For when it has been re-created in whatever shape is needed at the moment,then this new version is the past,and no different past can ever have existed.This holds good even when,as often happens,the same event has to be altered out of recognition several times in the course of a year.At all times the Party is in possession of absolute truth,and clearly the absolute can never have been different from what it is now.It will be seen that the control of the past depends above all on the training of memory.To make sure that all written records agree with the or-thodoxy of the moment is merely a mechanical act.But it is also necessary to remember that events happened in the desired manner. And if it is necessary to rearrange one's memories or to tamper with written records,then it is necessary to forget that one has done so.The trick of doing this can be learned like any other mental technique.It is learned by the majority of Party members,and cer-tainly by all who are intelligent as well as orthodox.In Oldspeak it is called,quite frankly,"reality control".In Newspeak it is called doublethink,though doublethink comprises much else as well.
Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory be-liefs in one's mind simultaneously,and accepting both of them.The Party intellectual knows in which direction his memories must be altered;he therefore knows that he is playing tricks with reality;but by the exercise of doublethink he also satisfies himself that re-ality is not violated.The process has to be conscious,or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision,but it also has to be uncon-scious,or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt.Doublethink lies at the very heart 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 delib-erate lies while genuinely believing in them,to forget any fact that has become inconvenient,and then,when it becomes necessary a-gain,to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed,to deny the existence of obj ective reality and all the while to take ac-count of the reality which one denies—all this is indispensably nec-essary.Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exer-cise doublethink.For by using the word one admits that one is tam-pering with reality;by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge;and so on indefinitely,with the lie always one leap a-head 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 con-cessions when they should have used force,and once again were o-verthrown.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 do-minion of the Party be made permanent.If one is to rule,and to con-tinue ruling,one must be able to dislocate the sense of reality.For the secret of rulership is to combine a belief in one's own infallibili-ty with the Power to learn from past mistakes.
It need hardly be said that the subtlest practitioners of double-think are those who invented doublethink and know that it is a vast system of mental cheating.In our society,those who have the best knowledge of what is happening are also those who are furthest from seeing the world as it is.In general,the greater the under-standing,the greater the delusion:the more intelligent,the less sane.One clear illustration of this is the fact that war hysteria in-creases in intensity as one rises in the social scale.Those whose atti-tude toward the war is most nearly rational are the subj ect peoples of the disputed territories.To these people the war is simply a con-tinuous calamity which sweeps to and fro over their bodies like a tidal wave.Which side is winning is a matter of complete indiffer-ence to them.They are aware that a change of overlordship means simply that they will be doing the same work as before for new masters who treat them in the same manner as the old ones.The slightly more favoured workers whom we call"the proles"are only intermittently conscious of the war.When it is necessary they can be prodded into frenzies of fear and hatred,but when left to them-selves they are capable of forgetting for long periods that the war is happening.It is in the ranks of the Party,and above all of the Inner Party,that the true war enthusiasm is found.World-conquest is be-lieved in most firmly by those who know it to be impossible.This peculiar linking-together of opposites—knowledge with ignorance, cynicism with fanaticism—is one of the chief distinguishing marks of Oceanic society.The official ideology abounds with contradictions even were there is no practical reason for them.Thus,the Party re-j ects and vilifies every principle for which the Socialist movement o-riginally stood,and it chooses to do this in the name of Socialism.It preaches a contempt for the working class unexampled for centuries past,and it dresses its members in a uniform which was at one time peculiar to manual workers and was adopted for that reason.It sys-tematically undermines the solidarity of the family,and it calls its leader by a name which is a direct appeal to the sentiment of family loyalty.Even the names of the four Ministries by which we are gov-erned exhibit a sort of impudence in their deliberate reversal of the facts.The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war,the Ministry of Truth with lies,the Ministry of Love with torture and the Minis-try of Plenty with starvation.These contradictions are not acciden-tal,nor do they result from ordinary hypocrisy:they are deliberate exercises in doublethink.For it is only by reconciling contradictions that power can be retained indefinitely.In no other way could the ancient cycle be broken.If human equality is to be forever averted—if the High,as we have called them,are to keep their places perma-nently—then the prevailing mental condition must be controlled in-sanity.
But there is one question which until this moment we have al-most ignored.It is:why should human equality be averted? Suppo-sing that the mechanics of the process have been rightly described, what is the motive for this huge,accurately planned effort to freeze history at a particular moment of time?
Here we reach the central secret.As we have seen.the mystique of the Party,and above all of the Inner Party,depends upon double-think But deeper than this lies the original motive,the never-ques-tioned instinct that first led to the seizure of power and brought doublethink,the Thought Police,continuous warfare,and all the other necessary paraphernalia into existence afterwards.This motive really consists...
Winston became aware of silence,as one becomes aware of a new sound.It seemed to him that Julia had been very still for some time past.She was lying on her side,naked from the waist upwards, with her cheek pillowed on her hand and one dark lock tumbling across her eyes.Her breast rose and fell slowly and regularly.
"Julia."
No answer.
"Julia,are you awake?"
No answer.She was asleep.He shut the book,put it carefully on the floor,lay down,and pulled the coverlet over both of them.
He had still,he reflected,not learned the ultimate secret.He understood how;he did not understand why.Chapter I,like Chapter III,had not actually told him anything that he did not know,it had merely systematized the knowledge that he possessed already.But after reading it he knew better than before that he was not mad.Be-ing in a minority,even a minority of one,did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth,and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world,you were not mad.A yellow beam from the sinking sun slanted in through the window and fell across the pillow.He shut his eyes.The sun on his face and the girl's smooth body touching his own gave him a strong,sleepy, confident feeling.He was safe,everything was all right.He fell a-sleep murmuring"Sanity is not statistical,"with the feeling that this remark contained in it a profound wisdom.
X
When he woke it was with the sensation of having slept for a long time,but a glance at the old-fashioned clock told him that it was only twenty-thirty.He lay dozing for a while;then the usual deep-lunged singing struck up from the yard below:
"It was only an 'opeless fancy,
It passed like anIpril dye,
But a look an'a word an'the dreams they stirred
They 'ave stolen my 'eart awye!"
The drivelling song seemed to have kept its popularity.You still heard it all over the place.It had outlived the Hate Song.Julia woke at the sound,stretched herself luxuriously,and got out of bed.
"I'm hungry,"she said."Let's make some more coffee.Damn! The stove's gone out and the water's cold."She picked the stove up and shook it."There's no oil in it."
"We can get some from old Charrington,I expect."
"The funny thing is I made sure it was full.I'm going to put my clothes on,"she added."It seems to have got colder."
Winston also got up and dressed himself.The indefatigable voice sang on:
"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 'eartstrings yet!"
As he fastened the belt of his overalls he strolled across to the window.The sun must have gone down behind the houses;it was not shining into the yard any longer.The flagstones were wet as though they had just been washed,and he had the feeling that the sky had been washed too,so fresh and pale was the blue between the chimney-pots.Tirelessly the woman marched to and fro,corking and uncorking herself,singing and falling silent,and pegging out more diapers,and more and yet more.He wondered whether she took in washing for a living or was merely the slave of twenty or thirty grandchildren.Julia had come across to his side;together they gazed down with a sort of fascination at the sturdy figure below.As he looked at the woman in her characteristic attitude,her thick arms reaching up for the line,her powerful marelike buttocks pro-truded,it struck him for the first time that she was beautiful.It had never before occurred to him that the body of a woman of fifty, blown up to monstrous dimensions by childbearing,then hardened, roughened by work till it was coarse in the grain like an overripe turnip,could be beautiful.But it was so,and after all,he thought, why not? The solid,contourless body,like a block of granite,and the rasping red skin,bore the same relation to the body of a girl as the rose-hip to the rose.Why should the fruit be held inferior to the flower?
"She's beautiful,"he murmured.
"She's a meter across the hips,easily,"said Julia.
"That is her style of beauty,"said Winston.
He held Julia's supple waist easily encircled by his arm.From the hip to the knee her flank was against his.Out of their bodies no child would ever come.That was the one thing they could never do. Only by word of mouth,from mind to mind,could they pass on the secret.The woman down there had no mind,she had only strong arms,a warm heart,and a fertile belly.He wondered how many children she had given birth to.It might easily be fifteen.She had had her momentary flowering,a year,perhaps,of wildrose beauty and then she had suddenly swollen like a fertilized fruit and grown hard and red and coarse,and then her life had been laundering, scrubbing,darning,cooking,sweeping,polishing,mending,scrub-bing,laundering,first for children,then for grandchildren,over thir-ty unbroken years.At the end of it she was still singing.The mysti-cal reverence that he felt for her was somehow mixed up with the aspect of the pale,cloudless sky,stretching away behind the chim-ney pots into interminable distance.It was curious to think that the sky was the same for everybody,in Eurasia or Eastasia as well as here.And the people under the sky were also very much the same—everywhere,all over the world,hundreds of thousands of millions of people just like this,people ignorant of one another's existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies,and yet almost exactly the same—people who had never learned to think but who were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world.If there was hope,it lay in the proles!With-out having read to the end of the book,he knew that that must be Goldstein's final message.The future belonged to the proles.And could he be sure that when their time came the world they con-structed would not be just as alien to him,Winston Smith,as the world of the Party? Yes,because at the least it would be a world of sanity.Where there is equality there can be sanity.Sooner or later it would happen:strength would change into consciousness.The pro-les were immortal;you could not doubt it when you looked at that valiant figure in the yard.In the end their awakening would come. And until that happened,though it might be a thousand years,they would stay alive against all the odds,like birds,passing on from body to body the vitality which the Party did not share and could not kill.
"Do you remember,"he said,"the thrush that sang to us,that first day,at the edge of the wood?"
"He wasn't singing to us,"said Julia."He was singing to please himself.Not even that.He was just singing."
The birds sang,the proles sang.the Party did not sing.All round the world,in London and New York,in Africa and Brazil and in the mysterious,forbidden lands beyond the frontiers,in the streets of Paris and Berlin,in the villages of the endless Russian plain,in the bazaars of China and Japan—everywhere stood the same solid unconquerable figure,made monstrous by work and childbearing,toiling from birth to death and still singing.Out of those mighty loins a race of conscious beings must one day come. You were the dead; theirs was the future.But you could share in that future if you kept alive the mind as they kept alive the body, and passed on the secret doctrine that two plus two make four.
"We are the dead,"he said.
"We are the dead,"echoed Julia dutifully.
"You are the dead,"said an iron voice behind them.
They sprang apart.Winston's entrails seemed to have turned into ice.He could see the white all round the irises of Julia's eyes. Her face had turned a milky yellow.The smear of rouge that was still on each cheekbone stood out sharply,almost as though uncon-nected with the skin beneath.
"You are the dead,"repeated the iron voice.
"It was behind the picture,"breathed Julia.
"It was behind the picture,"said the voice."Remain exactly where you are.Make no movement until you are ordered."
It was starting,it was starting at last! They could do nothing except stand gazing into one another's eyes.To run for life,to get out of the house before it was too late—no such thought occurred to them.Unthinkable to disobey the iron voice from the wall.There was a snap as though a catch had been turned back,and a crash of breaking glass.The picture had fallen to the floor uncovering the telescreen behind it.
"Now they can see us,"said Julia.
"Now we can see you,"said the voice."Stand out in the middle of the room.Stand back to back.Clasp your hands behind your heads.Do not touch one another."
They were not touching,but it seemed to him that he could feel Julia's body shaking.Or perhaps it was merely the shaking of his own.He could just stop his teeth from chattering,but his knees were beyond his control.There was a sound of trampling boots be-low,inside the house and outside.The yard seemed to be full of men.Something was being dragged across the stones.The woman's singing had stopped abruptly.There was a long,rolling clang,as though the washtub had been flung across the yard,and then a con-fusion of angry shouts which ended in a yell of pain.
"The house is surrounded,"said Winston.
"The house is surrounded,"said the voice.
He heard Julia snap her teeth together."I suppose we may as well say good-by,"she said.
"You may as well say good-by,"said the voice.And then an-other quite different voice,a thin,cultivated voice which Winston had the impression of having heard before,struck in;"And by the way,while we are on the subj ect,Here comes a candle to light you to bed,here comes a chopper to chop off your head!"
Something crashed on to the bed behind Winston's back.The head of a 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 fore-finger.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 pa-perweight from the table and smashed it to pieces on the hearth stone.
The fragment of coral,a tiny crinkle of pink like a sugar rose-bud from a cake,rolled across the mat.How small,thought Win-ston,how small it always was! There was a gasp and a thump be-hind 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 millimeter,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 in his own body,the deadly pain which nevertheless was less urgent than the struggle to get back her breath.He knew what it was like;the terrible,agonizing pain which was there all the while but could not be suffered yet,because before all else it was necessary to be able to breathe.Then two of the men hoisted her up by knees and shoulders,and carried her out of the room like a sack.Winston had a glimpse of her face,upside down,yellow and contorted,with the eyes shut,and still with a smear of rouge on either cheek;and that was the last he saw of her.
He stood dead still.No one had hit him yet.Thoughts which came of their own accord but seemed totally uninteresting began to flit through his mind.He wondered whether they had got Mr.Charrington.He wondered what they had done to the woman in the yard.He noticed that he badly wanted to urinate,and felt a faint surprise,because he had done so only two or three hours ago.He noticed that the clock on the mantelpiece said nine,meaning twen-ty-one.But the light seemed too strong.Would not the light be fa-ding at twenty-one hours on an August evening? He wondered whether after all he and Julia had mistaken the time—had slept the clock round and thought it was twenty-thirty when really it was nought eight-thirty on the following morning.But he did not pursue the thought further.It was not interesting.
There was another,lighter step in the passage.Mr.Charrington came into the room.The demeanor of the black-uniformed men sud-denly became more subdued.Something had also changed in Mr.Charrington's appearance.His eye fell on the fragments of the glass paperweight.
"Pick up those pieces,"he said sharply.
A man stooped to obey.The cockney accent had disappeared;Winston suddenly realized whose voice it was that he had heard a few moments ago on the telescreen.Mr.Charrington was still wear-ing his old velvet jacket,but his hair,which had been almost white, had turned black.Also he was not wearing his spectacles.He gave Winston a single sharp glance,as though verifying his identity,and then paid no more attention to him.He was still recognizable,but he was not the same person any longer.His body had straightened,and seemed to have grown bigger.His face had undergone only tiny changes that had nevertheless worked a complete transformation. The black eyebrows were less bushy,the wrinkles were gone,the whole lines of the face seemed to have altered;even the nose seemed shorter.It was the alert,cold face of a man of about five-and-thirty. It occurred to Winston that for the first time in his life he was looking,with knowledge,at a member of the Thought Police.