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Chapter 1 |
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. |
Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the |
vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, |
though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering |
along with him. |
The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. At one end of it a |
coloured poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked to the wall. |
It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a |
man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome |
features. Winston made for the stairs. It was no use trying the lift. Even |
at the best of times it was seldom working, and at present the electric |
current was cut off during daylight hours. It was part of the economy drive |
in preparation for Hate Week. The flat was seven flights up, and Winston, |
who was thirty-nine and had a varicose ulcer above his right ankle, went |
slowly, resting several times on the way. On each landing, opposite the |
lift-shaft, the poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was |
one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about |
when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran. |
Inside the flat a fruity voice was reading out a list of figures which had |
something to do with the production of pig-iron. The voice came from an |
oblong metal plaque like a dulled mirror which formed part of the surface |
of the right-hand wall. Winston turned a switch and the voice sank |
somewhat, though the words were still distinguishable. The instrument |
(the telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of |
shutting it off completely. He moved over to the window: a smallish, frail |
figure, the meagreness of his body merely emphasized by the blue overalls |
which were the uniform of the party. His hair was very fair, his face |
naturally sanguine, his skin roughened by coarse soap and blunt razor |
blades and the cold of the winter that had just ended. |
Outside, even through the shut window-pane, the world looked cold. Down in |
the street little eddies of wind were whirling dust and torn paper into |
spirals, and though the sun was shining and the sky a harsh blue, there |
seemed to be no colour in anything, except the posters that were plastered |
everywhere. The black-moustachio'd face gazed down from every commanding |
corner. There was one on the house-front immediately opposite. BIG BROTHER |
IS WATCHING YOU, the caption said, while the dark eyes looked deep into |
Winston's own. Down at street level another poster, torn at one corner, |
flapped fitfully in the wind, alternately covering and uncovering the |
single word INGSOC. In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down between |
the roofs, hovered for an instant like a bluebottle, and darted away again |
with a curving flight. It was the police patrol, snooping into people's |
windows. The patrols did not matter, however. Only the Thought Police |
mattered. |
Behind Winston's back the voice from the telescreen was still babbling away |
about pig-iron and the overfulfilment of the Ninth Three-Year Plan. The |
telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston |
made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, |
moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal |
plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course |
no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How |
often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual |
wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all |
the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted |
to. You had to live--did live, from habit that became instinct--in the |
assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in |
darkness, every movement scrutinized. |
Winston kept his back turned to the telescreen. It was safer; though, as he |
well knew, even a back can be revealing. A kilometre away the Ministry of |
Truth, his place of work, towered vast and white above the grimy landscape. |
This, he thought with a sort of vague distaste--this was London, chief |
city of Airstrip One, itself the third most populous of the provinces of |
Oceania. He tried to squeeze out some childhood memory that should tell him |
whether London had always been quite like this. Were there always these |
vistas of rotting nineteenth-century houses, their sides shored up with |
baulks of timber, their windows patched with cardboard and their roofs |
with corrugated iron, their crazy garden walls sagging in all directions? |
And the bombed sites where the plaster dust swirled in the air and the |
willow-herb straggled over the heaps of rubble; and the places where the |
bombs had cleared a larger patch and there had sprung up sordid colonies |
of wooden dwellings like chicken-houses? But it was no use, he could not |
remember: nothing remained of his childhood except a series of bright-lit |
tableaux occurring against no background and mostly unintelligible. |
The Ministry of Truth--Minitrue, in Newspeak [Newspeak was the official |
language of Oceania. For an account of its structure and etymology see |
Appendix.]--was startlingly different from any other object in sight. It |
was an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring |
up, terrace after terrace, 300 metres into the air. From where Winston |
stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in |
elegant lettering, the three slogans 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 |
End of preview. Expand in Data Studio
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