George Orwell's 1984 -- Chapter 21
Chapter 21
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment