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 it, this principle that will defeat us?'
'I don't know. The spirit of Man.'
'And do you consider yourself a man?.' ...

second. A tremor had gone through his bowels. To mark the paper was the
decisive act. In small clumsy letters he wrote:

April 4th, 1984.

He sat back. A sense of complete helplessness had descended upon him.
To begin with, he did not know with any certainty that this was 1984. It
must be round about that date, since he was fairly...

every act are included in the
act itself. He wrote:

Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime IS death.

Now he had recognized himself as a dead man it became important to
stay alive as long as possible. Two fingers of his right hand were
inkstained. It was exactly the kind of detail that...

him.
The person, whoever it was, gave a small cough, evidently as a prelude to
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 ...

in the principles of Ingsoc, he venerated Big
Brother, he rejoiced over victories, he hated heretics, not merely with
sincerity but with a sort of restless zeal, an up-to-dateness of
information, which the ordinary Party member did not approach. Yet a faint
air of disreputability always clung to him. He said things that would have
been better unsaid, he had read too many books, he frequented the Chestnut
Tree Cafe, haunt of painters and musicians. There was no law, not even an
unwritten law, against frequenting the Chestnut Tree Cafe, yet the place
was somehow ill-omened. The old, discredited leaders of the Party had been
used to gather there before they were finally purged. Goldstein himself, it
was said, had sometimes been seen there, years and decades ago. Syme's fate
was not difficult to foresee. And yet it was a fact that if Syme grasped,
even for three seconds, the nature of his, Winston's, secret opinions, he
would betray him instantly to the Thought police. So would anybody else,
for that matter: but Syme more than most. Zeal was not enough. Orthodoxy
was unconsciousness.
Syme looked up. 'Here comes Parsons,' he said.
Something in the tone of his voice seemed to add, 'that bloody fool'.
Parsons, Winston's fellow-tenant at Victory Mansions, was in fact threading
his way across the room -- a tubby, middle-sized man with fair hair and a ...

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 of
thoughtcrime he had turned the two of them into accomplices. They had
continued to stroll slowly down the corridor, but now O'Brien halted. With
the curious, disarming friendliness that he always managed to put in to the
gesture he resettled his spectacles on his nose. Then he went on:
'What I had really intended to say was that in your article I noticed
you had used two words which have become obsolete. But they have only
become so very recently. Have you seen the tenth edition of the Newspeak
Dictionary?'
'No,' said Winston. 'I didn't think it had been issued yet. We are
still using the ninth in the Records Department.'
'The tenth edition is not due to appear for some months, I believe.
But a few advance copies have been circulated. I have one myself. It might
interest you to look at it, perhaps?'
'Very much so,' said Winston, immediately seeing where this tended.
'Some of the new developments are most ingenious. The reduction in the
number of verbs -- that is the point that will appeal to you, I think. Let
me see, shall I send a messenger to you with the dictionary? But I am ...

as long
as thirty seconds. In 1973, it must have been -- at any rate, it was at
about the time when he and Katharine had parted. But the really relevant
date was seven or eight years earlier.
The story really began in the middle sixties, the period of the great
purges in which the original leaders of the Revolution were wiped out once
and for all. By 1970 none of them was left, except Big Brother himself. All
the rest had by that time been exposed as traitors and counter-
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 ...

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 ...

curious that he seemed not
merely to have lost the power of expressing himself, but even to have
forgotten what it was that he had originally intended to say. For weeks
past he had been making ready for this moment, and it had never crossed his
mind that anything would be needed except courage. The actual writing would
be easy. All he had to do was to transfer to paper the interminable
restless monologue that had been running inside his head, literally for
years. At this moment, however, even the monologue had dried up. Moreover
his varicose ulcer had begun itching unbearably. He dared not scratch it,
because if he did so it always became inflamed. The seconds were ticking
by. He was conscious of nothing except the blankness of the page in front
of him, the itching...

and would learn to think for
themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later
realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep
it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a
basis of poverty and ignorance. To return to the agricultural past, as some
thinkers about the beginning of the twentieth century dreamed of doing, was
not a practicable solution. It conflicted with the tendency towards
mechanization which had become quasi-instinctive throughout almost the
whole world, and moreover, any country which remained industrially backward
was helpless in a military sense and was bound to be dominated, directly or
indirectly, by its more advanced rivals.
Nor was it a satisfactory solution to...