"Have you ever seen those bones,Winston? Of course not. Nineteenth-century biologists invented them.Before man there was nothing.After man,if he could come to an end,there would be noth-ing.Outside man there is nothing."
"But the whole universe is outside us.Look at the stars! Some of them are a million light-years away.They are out of our reach forever."
"What are the stars?"said O'Brien indifferently."They are bits of fire a few kilometers away.We could reach them if we wan-ted to.Or we could blot them out.The earth is the center of the uni-verse.The sun and the stars go round it."
Winston made another convulsive movement.This time he did not say anything.O'Brien continued as though answering a spoken obj ection:
"For certain purposes,of course,that is not true.When we nav-igate the ocean,or when we predict an eclipse,we often find it con-venient to assume that the earth goes round the sun and that the stars are millions upon millions of kilometers away.But what of it? Do you suppose it is beyond us to produce a dual system of astrono-my? The stars can be near or distant,according as we need them.Do you suppose our mathematicians are unequal to that? Have you for-gotten doublethink?"
Winston shrank back upon the bed.Whatever he said,the swift answer crushed him like a bludgeon.And yet he knew,he knew,that he was in the right.The belief that nothing exists outside your own mind—surely there must be some way of demonstrating that it was false.Had it not been exposed long ago as a fallacy? There was e-ven a name for it,which he had forgotten.A faint smile twitched the corners of O'Brien's mouth as he looked down at him.
"I told you,Winston,"he said,"that metaphysics is not your strong point.The word you are trying to think of is solipsism.But you are mistaken.This is not solipsism.Collective solipsism,if you like.But that is a different thing;in fact,the opposite thing.All this is a digression,"he added in a different tone."The real power,the power we have to fight for night and day,is not power over things, but over men."He paused,and for a moment assumed again his air of a schoolmaster questioning a promising pupil:"How does one man assert his power over another,Winston?"
Winston thought."By making him suffer,"he said.
"Exactly.By making him suffer.Obedience is not enough.Un-less he is suffering,how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation.Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.Do you begin to see,then,what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined.A world of fear and treachery and torment,a world of trampling and being trampled upon,a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it re-fines itself.Progress in our world will be progress toward more pain.The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love and justice.Ours is founded upon hatred.In our world there will be no emotions except fear,rage,triumph,and self-abasement.Every-thing else we shall destroy—everything.Already we are breaking down the habits of thought which have survived from before the Revolution.We have cut the links between child and parent,and be-tween man and man,and between man and woman.No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer.But in the future there will be no wives and no friends.Children will be taken from their mothers at birth,as one takes eggs from a hen.The sex instinct will be eradicated.Procreation will be an annual formality like the re-newal of a ration card.We shall abolish the orgasm.Our neurologists are at work upon it now.There will be no loyalty,except loyalty to-ward the Party.There will be no love,except the love of Big Broth-er.There will be no laughter,except the laugh of triumph over a de-feated enemy.There will be no art,no literature,no science.When we are omnipotent we shall have no more need of science.There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness.There will be no cu-riosity,no enjoyment of the process of life.All competing pleasures will be destroyed.But always—do not forget this,Winston—always there will be the intoxication of power,constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler.Always,at every moment,there will be the thrill of victory,the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless.If you want a picture of the future,imagine a boot stam-ping on a human face—forever."
He paused as though he expected Winston to speak.Winston had tried to shrink back into the surface of the bed again.He could not say anything.His heart seemed to be frozen.O'Brien went on:
"And remember that it is forever.The face will always be there to be stamped upon.The heretic,the enemy of society,will always be there,so that he can be defeated and humiliated over again.Eve-rything that you have undergone since you have been in our hands—all that will continue,and worse.The espionage,the betray-als,the arrests,the tortures,the executions,the disappearances will never cease.It will be a world of terror as much as a world of tri-umph.The more the Party is powerful,the less it will be tolerant;the weaker the opposition,the tighter the despotism.Goldstein and his heresies will live forever.Every day,at every moment,they will be defeated,discredited,ridiculed,spat upon—and yet they will al-ways survive.This drama that I have played out with you during seven years will be played out over and over again, generation after generation,always in subtler forms.Always we shall have the here-tic here at our mercy,screaming with pain,broken up,contempti-ble—and in the end utterly penitent,saved from himself,crawling to our feet of his own accord.That is the world that we are prepar-ing,Winston.A world of victory after victory,triumph after tri-umph after triumph:an endless pressing,pressing,pressing upon the nerve of power.You are beginning,I can see,to realize what that world will be like.But in the end you will do more than understand it.You will accept it,welcome it,become part of it."
Winston had recovered himself sufficiently to speak."You can't!"he said weakly.
"What do you mean by that remark,Winston?"
"You could not create such a world as you have just described.It is a dream.It is impossible."
"Why?"
"It is impossible to found a civilization on fear and hatred and cruelty.It would never endure."
"Why not?"
"It would have no vitality.It would disintegrate.It would com-mit suicide."
"Nonsense.You are under the impression that hatred is more exhausting than love.Why should it be? And if it were,what differ-ence 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.Mo-reover he was in dread that if he persisted in his disagreement O'Brien would twist the dial again.And yet he could not keep si-lent.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 na-ture.Men are infinitely malleable.Or perhaps you have returned to your old idea that the proletarians or the slaves will arise and over-throw us.Put it out of your mind.They are helpless,like the ani mals.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 rea-son 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 it,this principle that will defeat us?"
"I don't know.The spirit of Man."
"And do you consider yourself a man?"
"Yes."
"If you are a man,Winston,you are the last man.Your kind is extinct;we are the inheritors.Do you understand that you are a-lone? You are outside history,you are nonexistent."His manner changed and he said more harshly:"And you consider yourself mor-ally superior to us,with our lies and our cruelty?"
"Yes,I consider myself superior."
O'Brien did not speak.Two other voices were speaking.After a moment Winston recognized one of them as his own.It was a sound-track of the conversation he had had with O'Brien,on the night when he had enrolled himself in the Brotherhood.He heard himself promising to lie,to steal,to forge,to murder,to encourage drug taking and prostitution,to disseminate venereal diseases,to throw vitriol in a child's face.O'Brien made a small impatient gesture,as though to say that the demonstration was hardly worth making. Then he turned a switch and the voices stopped.
"Get up from that bed,"he said.
The bonds had loosened themselves.Winston lowered himself to the floor and stood up unsteadily.
"You are the last man,"said O'Brien."You are the guardian of the human spirit.You shall see yourself as you are.Take off your clothes."
Winston undid the bit of string that held his overalls together. The zip fastener had long since been wrenched out of them.He could not remember whether at any time since his arrest he had taken off all his clothes at one time.Beneath the overalls his body was looped with filthy yellowish rags,just recognizable as the rem-nants of underclothes.As he slid them to the ground he saw that there was a three-sided mirror at the far end of the room.He ap-proached it,then stopped short.An involuntary cry had broken out of him.
"Go on,"said O'Brien."Stand between the wings of the mir-ror.You shall see the side view as well."
He had stopped because he was frightened.A bowed,grey-col-ored,skeletonlike thing was coming toward him.Its actual appear-ance was frightening,and not merely the fact that he knew it to be himself.He moved closer to the glass.The creature's face seemed to be protruded,because of its bent carriage.A forlorn,jailbird's face with a nobby forehead running back into a bald scalp,a crooked nose and battered-looking cheekbones above which his eyes were fierce and watchful.The cheeks were seamed,the mouth had a drawn-in look.Certainly it was his own face,but it seemed to him that it had changed more than he had changed inside.The emotions it registered would be different from the ones he felt.He had gone partially bald.For the first moment he had thought that he had gone grey as well,but it was only the scalp that was grey.Except for his hands and a circle of his face,his body was grey all over with ancient,ingrained dirt.Here and there under the dirt there were the red scars of wounds,and near the ankle the varicose ulcer was an inflamed mass with flakes of skin peeling off it.But the truly fright-ening thing was the emaciation of his body.The barrel of the ribs was as narrow as that of a skeleton;the legs had shrunk so that the knees were thicker than the thighs.He saw now what O'Brien had meant about seeing the side view.The curvature of the spine was as-tonishing.The thin shoulders were hunched forward so as to make a cavity of the chest,the scraggy neck seemed to be bending double under the weight of the skull.At a guess he would have said that it was the body of a man of sixty,suffering from some malignant dis-ease.
"You have thought sometimes,"said O'Brien,"that my face—the face of a member of the Inner Party—looks old and worn.What do you think of your own face?"
He seized Winston's shoulder and spun him round so that he was facing him.
"Look at the condition you are in!"he said."Look at this filthy grime all over your body.Look at the dirt between your toes.Look at that disgusting running sore on your leg.Do you know that you stink like a goat? Probably you have ceased to notice it.Look at your emaciation.Do you see? I can make my thumb and forefinger meet a round your biceps.I could snap your neck like a carrot.Do you know that you have lost twenty-five kilograms since you have been in our hands? Even your hair is coming out in handfuls.Look!"He plucked at Winston's head and brought away a tuft of hair."Open your mouth.Nine,ten,eleven teeth left.How many had you when you came to us? And the few you have left are dropping out of your head.Look here!"
He seized one of Winston's remaining front teeth between his powerful thumb and forefinger.A twinge of pain shot through Win-ston's jaw.O'Brien had wrenched the loose tooth out by the roots. He tossed it across the cell.
"You are rotting away,"he said;"you are falling to pieces. What are you? A bag of filth.Now turn around and look into that mirror again.Do you see that thing facing you?That is the last man. If you are human,that is humanity.Now put your clothes on again."
Winston began to dress himself with slow stiff movements. Until now he had not seemed to notice how thin and weak he was. Only one thought stirred in his mind:that he must have been in this place longer than he had imagined.Then suddenly as he fixed the miserable rags round himself a feeling of pity for his ruined body o-vercame him.Before he knew what he was doing he had collapsed onto a small stool that stood beside the bed and burst into tears.He was aware of his ugliness,his gracelessness,a bundle of bones in filthy underclothes sitting weeping in the harsh white light;but he could not stop himself.O'Brien laid a hand on his shoulder,almost kindly.
"It will not last forever,"he said,"You can escape from it whenever you choose.Everything depends on yourself."
"You did it!"sobbed Winston."You reduced me to this state."
"No,Winston,you reduced yourself to it.This is what you ac-cepted when you set yourself up against the Party.It was all con-tained in that first act.Nothing has happened that you did not foresee."
He paused,and then went on:
"We have beaten you,Winston.We have broken you up.You have seen what your body is like.Your mind is in the same state.I do not think there can be much pride left in you.You have been kicked and flogged and insulted,you have screamed with pain,you have rolled on the floor in your own blood and vomit.You have whimpered for mercy,you have betrayed everybody and everything. Can you think of a single degradation that has not happened to you?"
Winston had stopped weeping,though the tears were still oo-zing out of his eyes.He looked up at O'Brien.
"I have not betrayed Julia,"he said.
O'Brien looked down at him thoughtfully."No,"he said;"no;that is perfectly true.You have not betrayed Julia."
The peculiar reverence for O'Brien,which nothing seemed able to destroy,flooded Winston' s heart again.How intelligent,he thought,how intelligent! Never did O'Brien fail to understand what was said to him.Anyone else on earth would have answered promptly that he had betrayed Julia.For what was there that they had not screwed out of him under the torture? He had told them everything he knew about her,her habits,her character,her past life;he had confessed in the most trivial detail everything that had happened at their meetings,all that he had said to her and she to him,their black-market meals,their adulteries,their vague plottings against the Party—everything.And yet,in the sense in which he in-tended the word,he had not betrayed her.He had not stopped loving her;his feelings toward her had remained the same.O'Brien had seen what he meant without the need for explanation.
"Tell me,"he said,"how soon will they shoot me?"
"It might be a long time,"said O'Brien."You are a difficult case.But don't give up hope.Everyone is cured sooner or later.In the end we shall shoot you."
Chapter 4
H e 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 possi-ble now to keep count of the passage of time,if he had felt any in-terest 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 ciga-rettes.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 moth-er,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 satisfy-ing.
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,reluc-tantly at first,he began exercising himself regularly.In a little while he could walk three kilometers,measured by pacing the cell,and his bowed shoulders were growing straighter.He attempted more elab-orate 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 centime-tre.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 cher-ish 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 de-liberately 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 deci-sion.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 j udgements? 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 a-way 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 al-ways 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 ex-cept your own attitude;the predestined thing happened in any case. He hardly knew why he had ever rebelled.Everything was easy,ex-cept—!
Anything could be true.The so-called laws of Nature were non-sense.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 think s he floats off the floor,and if I simulta-neously 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 i-magine it.It is hallucination."He pushed the thought under instant-ly.The fallacy was obvious.It presupposed that somewhere or oth-er,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 incrimestop.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 im-provisation.The arithmetical problems raised,for instance,by such a statement as"two and two make five"were beyond his intellectu-al 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 nec-essary as intelligence,and as difficult to attain.