View Poll Results: George Orwell's type?

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  • ILE (ENTp)

    1 10.00%
  • SEI (ISFp)

    1 10.00%
  • ESE (ESFj)

    0 0%
  • LII (INTj)

    1 10.00%
  • IEI (INFp)

    0 0%
  • SLE (ESTp)

    0 0%
  • EIE (ENFj)

    1 10.00%
  • LSI (ISTj)

    2 20.00%
  • SEE (ESFp)

    0 0%
  • ILI (INTp)

    1 10.00%
  • LIE (ENTj)

    0 0%
  • ESI (ISFj)

    0 0%
  • IEE (ENFp)

    3 30.00%
  • SLI (ISTp)

    0 0%
  • LSE (ESTj)

    0 0%
  • EII (INFj)

    2 20.00%
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Thread: George Orwell VI and more! (free pr0n)

  1. #41
    LϺαο Not A Communist Shill's Avatar
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    In his early life, amongst his friends he seems to have been quite an energetic leader in a way that does not match my experience with IEIs. He was interested in many fields and seemed inclined to travel to take on new experiences. He does not appear to have been consistent meticulously in appearance...this was especially pronounced during his time as a journalist. He had a particular strong concern for the oppressed and the neglected, and enjoyed making social commentary e.g.making a somewhat tongue-in-cheek essay on the Decline of the English Murder and also wrote an article on how to create the perfect cup of tea, as well as apparently writing a treatise on how the ideal Pub should be.

  2. #42
    Haikus
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    Negativist Ne? ... meh.

  3. #43
    ■■■■■■ Radio's Avatar
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    LSI as fuuuuuuck.

  4. #44
    &papu silke's Avatar
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    LSI and possibly 1w2

  5. #45
    Seed my wickedness The Reality Denialist's Avatar
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    Resurrection!

    Almost final words


    discussion, debate and other ways of communication

    more Orwell


    Sounds like intuitive ethical type. Giving criticism to logical tyranny.
    MOTTO: NEVER TRUST IN REALITY
    Winning is for losers

     

    Sincerely yours,
    idiosyncratic type
    Life is a joke but do you have a life?

    Joinif you dare https://matrix.to/#/#The16Types:matrix.org

  6. #46
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    He is a 6 is all I know. I am not sure about his Socionics type. I love how LSI and IEE are both typings that are given for him.
    “We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand.” Randy Pausch

    Ne-IEE
    6w7 sp/sx
    6w7-9w1-4w5

  7. #47
    Seed my wickedness The Reality Denialist's Avatar
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    The focus is towards external world in way. IE wise I would say extrovert.
    Has some ideological troubles with . Well, in his case it is true. Treatment was awful.
    sounds weak.

    Those videos are enlightening.

    Sounds like critic geared towards .

    LSI typing of him is very peculiar. He is strongly opposed towards that kind of thinking. Ego is something to indulge yourself in it.
    Last edited by The Reality Denialist; 11-09-2017 at 09:45 PM.
    MOTTO: NEVER TRUST IN REALITY
    Winning is for losers

     

    Sincerely yours,
    idiosyncratic type
    Life is a joke but do you have a life?

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  8. #48
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    Excellent example of creative in Orwell. He goes there becomes part of the crowd (). Lives through their experiences. Comes to see how force and order could be detrimental (super-ego ).

    IEE. I rest my case.
    MOTTO: NEVER TRUST IN REALITY
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    Sincerely yours,
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  9. #49
    WE'RE ALL GOING HOME HERO's Avatar
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    EIE-Ni or IEE-Fi

    - From Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell; page 174:

    She thought it over. ‘They can’t do that,’ she said finally. ‘It’s the one thing they can’t do. They can make you say anything—anything—but they can’t make you believe it. They can’t get inside you.’

    ‘No,’ he said a little more hopefully, ‘no; that’s quite true. They can’t get inside you. If you can feel that staying human is worth while, even when it can’t have any result whatever, you’ve beaten them.’

    He thought of the telescreen with its never-sleeping ear. They could spy upon you night and day, but if you kept your head you could still outwit them. With all their cleverness they had never mastered the secret of finding out what another human being was thinking. Perhaps that was less true when you were actually in their hands. One did not know what happened inside the Ministry of Love, but it was possible to guess: tortures, drugs, delicate instruments that registered your nervous reactions, gradual wearing-down by sleeplessness and solitude and persistent questioning. Facts, at any rate, could not be kept hidden. They could be tracked down by enquiry, they could be squeezed out of you by torture. But if the object was not to stay alive but to stay human, what difference did it ultimately make? They could not alter your feelings: for that matter you could not alter them yourself, even if you wanted to. They could lay bare in the utmost detail everything that you had done or said or thought; but the inner heart, whose workings were mysterious even to yourself, remained impregnable.


  10. #50
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    George Orwell: EIE-Ni (Harmonizing subtype) [ENFj-INTp]



    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OW5FHCzsn44


    from Soul Murder: The Effects of Childhood Abuse and Deprivation by Leonard Shengold, M. D.; pages 69-72 [Chapter 5—Soul Murder, Rats, and 1984]:

    I make use of Orwell because whatever the “facts” of his actual experiences, he portrays with such vividness what it felt like and feels like to be an abused child—to feel helpless, inadequate, and guilty in a world one never made.

    I will begin with a sketch of a patient, D., who had been seduced as a child and who feared and was fascinated by rats. I will be using this clinical material to make parallels with George Orwell’s life and especially with the view of the world he presented in 1984, a primer on soul murder.


    Patient D.

    A young man in analysis for several years complained of having difficulty with his memory and of disruptions in his thinking that interfered with his professional achievements. Despite his complaints, his achievements were considerable. D. was very intelligent, but at his work he seemed always to promote dissension, controversy, and ultimately punishment or even dismissal.

    He seemed unaware of his provocation of authority figures. D. lived a life of disconnected and largely unacknowledged sadomasochistic fantasy, which he occasionally expressed in action that he quickly disavowed. So much was disavowed that his functioning sometimes suffered because of a discontinuity in his memory; this affected his sense of identity, and he had little awareness of himself as a child—only dim feelings about a little person with his name who seemed like somebody else. D. insisted on the facade of being regarded as the decent, helpful, kindly, but feckless friend of the family—of so many families. His specialty was compulsively and successfully seducing the wives of his “good friends.” This was part of a secret life that he covered over by competent impersonation. D. had been engaged for many years to a masochistic young woman who worshiped him and whom he treated very badly. He seemed to despise her for loving him, yet felt he needed her dependable affirmation of his “lovability.”

    D.’s painful, although intermittent, awareness of not being able to be responsible for what he was feeling and doing was connected by the analyst with the patient’s deepening memories of having been given as a child repeated, overstimulating enemas by his mother. She appeared to have had very little interest in him, but much fascination with his anus and bowel habits. The enemas always went beyond what he could stand. More pleasurable were the occasions of having his anus wiped by her—a habit that continued even after he started going to school. (The anally fixated D. was a “rat person” . . . who frequently associated to rodents and had a specific fantasy of rats crawling up his anus.) In the early phases of analysis, D. described his childhood with few specific memories but generally thought of it as quite happy. During one session when he seemed to be integrating past and present more than was usual, he commented with poignancy, “It is sad. I am not really a whole person. I live in compartments, in fragments.” The analyst said, stressing the defense, “In disconnected fragments.”

    D., the “son of a bitch” (he would also frequently call himself a “rat”), was struggling with feminine identifications—an identification with the “monster . . . woman,” the bad mother of his childhood, as well as with the seduced child and with his fiancée as victim. But he was not able to be responsibly aware that this was going on. His terror of his suppressed and isolated feelings made much of his life into a dramatic simulation: he lived as if he were involved. After he had gained some insight, D. described himself, echoing T. S. Eliot, as a hollow man, a stuffed man.


    pages 73-78: The headmaster’s wife, who bullied and shamed Orwell and who is portrayed as having made him doubt his own perceptions and feel that he was guilty and bad, may or may not have deserved to be a prototype for Big Brother in the novel, but I have no doubt that Orwell considered her to be so.

    In most families with a soul-murdering parent, the other parent is an unconscious colluder,* a fellow victim, or both. (Where this is not so, the situation is less “totalitarian,” and the trauma tends to be less devastating—the child has someone else to turn to.) When one parent can tyrannize, the need for a loving and rescuing authority is so intense that the child must break with the registration of what he or she has suffered, and establish within the mind (delusionally) the existence of a loving parent who will care and who really must be right. Like the broken Winston Smith at the end of 1984, the child loves Big Brother. (In the adult, there may be a good deal of intellectual awareness of what the parent is like, but the delusion of goodness continues underneath and surfaces when needed.) The child takes on the guilt for the abuse, turning inward the murderous feeling that is evoked by the traumata. The actuality of torment intensifies what is a usual vicissitude of hatred toward a needed parent. The child denies what has happened, sometimes but not always with orders from the tormentor. The parent is right and good; the child must be wrong and bad. I repeat these sequelae of soul murder because they are so movingly presented in Orwell’s essay and in his prophetic novel.

    Shortly after arriving at school, Orwell began to wet his bed. This was felt to be criminal, and even though the child had no control over the symptom, he felt the authorities were right. He was threatened with beating, and when the symptom continued the threat was carried out. The headmaster had “already taken a bone-handled riding crop out of the cupboard, but it was part of the punishment of reporting yourself that you had to proclaim your offense with your own lips. When I had said my say, he read me a short but pompous lecture . . . He had a habit of continuing his lecture while he flogged you, and I remember the words, ‘you dir-ty lit-tle boy’ keeping time with the blows” (1947, pp. 3-4).

    The beating did not hurt much, which made the boy smile. (The boy’s masochistic provocation, similar to my patient’s, can be seen here.) Therefore the beating was repeated:

    This time Sim laid on in real earnest. He continued for a length of time that frightened and astonished me—about five minutes, it seemed—ending up by breaking the riding crop. The bone handle went flying across the room.

    “Look what you’ve made me do!” he said furiously, holding up the broken crop . . . The second beating had not hurt very much either. Fright and shame had anesthetised me. I was crying partly because I felt that this was expected of me, partly from genuine repentance, but partly also because of a deeper grief which is peculiar to childhood . . . a sense of desolate loneliness and helplessness, of being locked up not only in a hostile world but in a world of good and evil where the rules were such that it was actually not possible for me to keep them. . . . I had a conviction of sin and folly and weakness, such as I do not remember to have felt before . . .

    [Another result] is that I accepted the broken riding crop as my own crime. I can still recall my feeling as I saw the handle lying on the carpet—the feeling of having done an ill-bred, clumsy thing, and ruined an expensive object. I had broken it: so Sim told me, and so I believed. This acceptance of guilt lay unnoticed in my memory for twenty or thirty years. (pp. 4-6; Orwell’s italics)



    The abused child takes on the guilt that the self-righteous parent so often lacks. Here is Winston Smith’s response to being tortured beyond his endurance. The tormentor, O’Brien, has been holding up four fingers and insisting that Winston see five. With enough pain, Winston gives in. He loses consciousness and recovers to find O’Brien holding him. “For a moment he clung to O’Brien like a baby, curiously comforted by the heavy arm round his shoulders. He had the feeling that O’Brien was his protector, that the pain was something that came from outside, from some other source, and that it was O’Brien that would save him from it” (p. 254). O’Brien correctly predicts the result of the brainwashing he is administering.

    It is a description chillingly appropriate to my patient D.: “Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow [patient D. called himself a “hollow man”]. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves” (pp. 259-260).

    Orwell shows that Winston Smith has been forced by torture both to identify with the tormentor and to cultivate denial—the erasing of what has happened, the abolition of the past; this has become a principle of government: “All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary” (p. 41). “If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened—that surely was more terrifying than mere torture and death” (p. 35).


    * Here is an instance of “family collusion” from the memoirs of Lucy Boston (1979), an English writer born in 1895. The author describes herself reaching puberty. Her mother, then a widow, never mentioned sex to her but started to treat her with suspicion, “seeing evil where none was”. The mother interfered with an innocent friendship with a very nice boy whom the mother suddenly characterized as “dangerous.” In contrast, the girl was encouraged to stay with her aunt and uncle. Lucy describes her uncle as having an air of “rolling self-confidence and gusto. He had the twinkling little eyes of a porker. They now took notice of me. After a few displeasing signals of his intentions, he one day caught me on the landing and carried me fighting like a bull calf into a bedroom where he flung me onto the bed and his twenty stone on top of me. From this extremity I was rescued by one of his sons calling his father to order. The old man was not put out of countenance. ‘Ah, well. All right, my boy.’ Neither man seemed to think it out of the ordinary. A few days later when Mother wished to send me with a message to her sister, I refused to go, saying Uncle was too dangerous. He wouldn’t let me alone. ‘Nonsense, you silly child,’ she replied. ‘It’s only Uncle’s way.’ This was her side of the family and therefore perfectly conformable. But she was right—it was Uncle’s way, and there was to be no help from her” (p. 81).


    D.’s Denial

    ….In 1984 Orwell describes this power of denial, of being able to split one’s responsible awareness (“It is like trying to write on water,” Freud is alleged to have said of how one patient dealt with his interpretations), as part of the principle of doublethink:

    To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing both . . . to forget, then to draw it back into the memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all to apply the same process to the process itself . . . consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then once again to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word “doublethink” involved the use of doublethink. (p. 36; my italics)


    Orwell mentions hypnosis, and the passage is relevant to the autohypnosis so often used by victims of soul murder to effect nonregistration and denial . . . Therapeutically, the patient needs to become aware of using doublethink and autohypnosis, and, harder still, to become responsible for using them.


    Anal Defense


    It is necessary for the patient to get away from the torment of overstimulation and the rage and murderousness it brings forth by identifying with the tormentor and turning the rage on the self and on others. I conceive of what happens defensively as a regression to the so-called anal-sadistic period of development (between the ages of 18 months and 42 months), during which the child usually evolves defenses against a burgeoning aggressive drive; this regression may also be conceived of as an enhancement of the anal-sadistic period and eventually as a fixation on it. The regression is of course partial and subject to great individual variation . . . .

    . . . becoming able to control the anal sphincter (a momentous developmental achievement) has its psychic counterpart in the control of aggressively charged emotion (that is, murderous emotion). There is a primitive kind of shutting off of feeling as well as a primitive kind of letting go of feeling. We all require some amount of obsessive-compulsive defensive structuring (which implies anal defensive structuring)—the developmental conversion of impulse and action into thought—and the kind of emotional sphincter control that goes along with the possibility of isolating feeling from idea. Optimally, this obsessive-compulsive scaffolding is not so constrictive as to prohibit subsequent emotional development toward the capacity to care about and love others; this is a goal that severe obsessive-compulsive characters with anal fixations (such as D.) do not achieve. We all have to master hate, but those who have been abused as children have more hate to master than most, and they frequently do not have the needed help of a loving parent. What results can be a massive recourse to obsessive-compulsive defenses, to anal mechanisms, symptoms, and erogeneity.* The overuse of the emotional sphincter makes for a kind of anal-sadistic universe with all the contradictions that this entails.

    Repression, isolation, and excessive emotional control (which can result in a kind of zombie existence) can be found alongside outbursts of intense, hate-filled sadism and masochism (sometimes covered over, as in D., by a very different “as if” facade of “normality”). In 1984 the enforced, docile conformity coexists with perpetual war and daily hate sessions.

    In our patients there are myriad combinations of these contradictions, which usually subsist unsynthesized, side by side, in fragments or compartments, and result in the confusing variety of clinical pictures we find.


    *A specific instance for Orwell occurred when he was hospitalized in his early thirties for pneumonia. His sister Avril reported “the nurse telling her that when Eric had been delirious, he had talked incessantly about money: one of the obsessions of his life emerging, as it were, from the unconscious and demanding to be heard . . . ‘We reassured him that everything was all right, and he needn’t worry about money. But it turned out that it wasn’t actually his situation in life as regards money that he was worrying about, it was actual cash—he felt that he wanted cash sort of under his pillow’” (Stansky and Abrahams 1980, 47). Orwell was regressing to anal defensiveness at a time when his life was in danger—holding on with his anal sphincter to try to keep control (see Shengold 1988).

    Before toilet training anal consciousness is cloacal consciousness, and control of the urethral sphincter plays its important but lesser part in asserting a kind of instinctual defensive mastery alongside control of the anal sphincter. Urethral control is usually attained first. Bed-wetting, a frequent response in children subjected to neglect or overstimulation (and a cry for help from them—Orwell illustrates both), means an unconscious relinquishment of urethral control. This probably involves a regression that enhances the anal organization and defensive need for the anal sphincter; here is one explanation for the terror that accompanies loss of the sphincter’s integrity for bed wetters like Orwell. This would underlie Orwell’s fear of rats (and Winston Smith’s): as in the florid fantasies of Freud’s Rat Man, these animals are endowed with the power of penetrating the body by eating through sphincters.


    pages 3-15:

    Victims of attempts at soul murder find it very difficult to be responsible for their mental pictures of themselves, of others, and of the world around them. They often cannot properly register what they want and what they feel, or what they have done and what has been done to them.

    Child abuse is the abuse of power. We do not have a coherent psychology of power; much is unknown. Soul murder is as old as human history, as old as the abuse of the helpless by the powerful in any group—which means as old as the family. But soul murder has a particular resonance with the twentieth century—with the world of Orwell’s—and a particular relevance to it. This is the century of the computer, the concentration camp, and the atomic bomb, of the presence of such destructive potential that all life on earth is threatened, and of a centralized power so monolithic and intrusive that it has been aimed at mastery over the individual’s mind as well as body. This power has been implemented by twentieth-century discoveries in psychology and communications that have made brainwashing and mind control easily attained effects of terror and torture. ****** and Stalin have proven that the strongest adults can be broken and deprived of their individuality and even of their humanity. That is one of the lessons of Orwell’s 1984—one that can also be learned from the lives of those who have grown up in the charge of crazy, cruel, and capricious parents, in the totalitarian family ambience that Randall Jarrell calls “one of God’s concentration camps” (1963, p. 146).

    In relation to both our external and our inner psychic lives, Freud viewed as all-important the influence of those first carriers of the environment and first objects of our instinctual drives, the parents: what they do, what they evoke in the child, how they are registered within the mind of the child and become part of its mental structure, how they are separated out to leave the child with its own individuality. For the developing infant, these gods of the nursery (or their caretaker substitutes) are the environment. They have power over the helpless, and they can easily get away with misrule and tyranny. They are also under a powerful unconscious compulsion to repeat the circumstances of their own childhood. We regularly find that abusers of children have been abused as children by their own parents. This is not heredity (although we cannot completely rule that out) but rather a passing down of a traumatic past from generation to generation. The sins of the father are laid upon the children . . . . we have learned that in the terrible circumstances of parents who do not love, are indifferent, or hate, children will turn to seduction, even to provocation to be beaten, to fulfill the imperative need for some parental attention. Those who have devised procedures for causing mental breakdown in inmates of prisons and concentration camps have resorted to a regimen of emotional deprivation and isolation, alternating with humiliation and torture.

    We find in our patients that they regularly identify with the aggressor. To identify means to be and not to see someone. It follows that when these people find their own victims they do not experience them as separate individuals—they do not empathize with them. The abused child’s siblings, already subject to the primal displacement of murderous impulse from the parent to the intruding infant (this is the theme of the story of Cain and Abel), tend to be the first scapegoats of the abused child. Although individual variations may ensue, usually the hostility is eventually displaced onto people outside the family: underlings, especially those who play vague parental roles and yet are dependent—like servants, porters, waiters. This kind of hostility that denies the other’s humanity is very often shifted onto those who are already the victims of persecution—the racially different, foreigners, “official” enemies, like the ever-changing warring opponents in 1984. (These can all unconsciously stand for the denied and projected bad aspects of one’s parent, self, and family.) Ultimately the compulsion to repeat a traumatic past focuses the rage of the former victims of attempted soul murder on children in general, and on their own children.



    https://bcbooklook.com/2018/01/18/th...eable-truth-2/

    “The Malleable Truth” by Beverly Cramp:

    . . . In Nineteen Eighty-Four, protagonist Winston Smith lives amid omnipresent government propaganda and surveillance in Airstrip One (formerly Great Britain), part of perpetually war-mongering Oceania. Torturers try to make him believe two and two does not equal four.

    “Orwell knew very well where the manipulation of truth and the malignant distortion of language can lead,” writes Stephen Wadhams, gatherer of The Orwell Tapes. “He’d seen it for himself in the Spanish Civil War and even done it himself as a BBC producer in wartime London, matching German propaganda with lies of his own, discovering the seductive power of being freed from normal constraints of truth telling.”

    Joseph Goebbels, ******’s propaganda minister, had said “The secret of propaganda is repetition,” and ******, in his 1925 book, Mein Kampf, had already identified the propaganda technique of the Big Lie—a lie so extreme that no one would believe that someone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.”

    It was George Orwell who revealed to a global audience how easy it is to manipulate people, how fragile our individuality can be, and how complete control of media and other technology can give rise to totalitarianism.

    Now Stephen Wadhams’ interviews for The Orwell Tapes provide a unique prism for understanding the 20th century’s most prophetic voice of caution.

    Eric Arthur Blair (pen name George Orwell) was born in 1903 in Motihari, then part of Bengal, but now called Bihar, which is in India. At the time, opium was legal and a big money-producer for the British Empire. Orwell’s father, Richard Blair, was an opium agent in the Indian Civil Service. Orwell’s mother was the much-younger Ida Blair, the half-French daughter of a tea merchant from Burma.

    With parents from the lower rungs of the British Raj elite, Orwell joked he was, “born into what you might describe as the lower-upper-middle class.”

    Eric Blair’s family and a rigidly conformist society conspired to shape him in a particular way.

    “His parents certainly wanted him to conform,” writes Wadhams. “They made considerable financial sacrifices to send him to ‘good’ schools where he would meet the right people. But from the beginning he appears to have tried to break out of the mould. The consensus among his childhood friends and schoolmates is that the young Eric Blair was always strangely on the outside, observing but rarely joining in – and then usually to challenge and find fault. The picture given is that of an abrasive, free-thinking individual, but intelligent fault-finding is a far cry from open revolt; the young Blair was not a radical.”

    That may explain why Orwell would study hard to eventually finish his education at Eton, one of the top boarding schools in Britain, and upon graduation spent five years in the colonial police force in Burma. It was expected of him. But the five years he spent in Burma deeply changed the young man.

    “The inequities and oppression he saw there had a lasting effect on him,” says Wadhams. “In his writing he describes these years as traumatic. The ‘dirty end of Empire’ left him with an ‘enormous weight of guilt,’ which he felt he could expunge only by understanding and identifying with the oppressed classes of his own country.”

    Thereafter, the young Eric Blair shifted his social climbing from up to down the ladder. But even though Orwell took up the underclasses as his adult cause, he retained many of the very English ways that he learned at British boarding schools.

    At St. Cyprian’s, Orwell’s first boarding school, he became known for bookish ways. A fellow student there remembers, “He was round-faced, with straight hair, not in the least the bearded, long-faced number he turned out to be. I don’t think he was any good at sports. Blair and my brother both got bullied. I can remember very well the whole school booing and chasing them and getting them up against the wall of the gymnasium, with a view to bashing at them. I can’t think what anyone would have had against Blair. He was quite harmless. I think he was a born bookworm and would have liked to have been left in peace to pursue his own line of studies.”

    Wadhams editorializes that Orwell probably didn’t suffer more than any other English boy, “uprooted from hearth and home and planted in the tough, regimented society of an English prep school. His early letters home offer glimpses of a boy coming to terms fairly cheerfully with his new environment.”

    Orwell’s scholastic ability was noticed and he became one of the few “scholarship boys” that won free entry to the more reputable Wellington and later Eton School.

    On holidays back at home, Orwell developed a lifelong love of the English countryside and fishing, rather conservative passions one doesn’t associate with a radical thinker. He also became attracted to Jacintha Buddicom, a girl two years’ older than him. Buddicom revealed that books were a common denominator between the two and that Blair dreamed of being a famous writer.

    “I was never without a book in my hand and nor was he,” she said. “He was always going to write, and he was always going to be a Famous Writer. He used to say, ‘When I’m a famous…’ and I used to say, ‘When you’re a famous writer…’ That was his trademark, Eric the Famous Writer.”

    Buddicom inspired the young Orwell to write a poem about her independent spirit. By then, he had already published a poem in a local newspaper at the age of 11, a patriotic ditty called “Awake! Young Men of England.”

    From 1917 – 1922, Orwell was a King’s Scholar at Eton. A fellow Etonion recalls that Eric Blair loved arguing: “Endless arguments about all sorts of things, in which he was one of the great leaders. He was one of those boys who thought for himself, and at an age when a good many schoolboys haven’t graduated out of thinking the way they’d been taught to think.”

    Upon graduation from Eton, Blair chose not to continue onto Oxford or Cambridge. He hadn’t studied hard enough to win a scholarship and his parents couldn’t afford to send him. In those days, the usual career path was chosen based on who your father knew. In Blair’s case, it was the Indian Civil Service in Burma. And that was how Blair came to leave England for a job with the Burmese Police on October 27, 1922.

    We see what Orwell discovered in the five following years in one of his early novels, Burmese Days. The fictional character, John Flory is angered by the sham of Imperial Britain and how it has made him, “a creature of the despotism, tied tighter than a monk or a savage by an unbreakable system of taboos.”

    After Orwell’s first trip back home to England in 1927, he chose not to return to Burma, telling his family that he wanted to be a writer instead. It caused a small scandal according to longtime residents of the seaside town of Southwold where Orwell’s parents eventually retired.

    “…he had socialist ideas I suppose, hadn’t he? And Mr. Blair Senior wouldn’t really agree with that. Also, I think there was a bit of a row when he gave up his job. I mean, young men didn’t give up jobs in those days. They did what their fathers wanted them to, more or less.”

    Another resident remembered, “…Eric used to go on long walks across the marshes, looking for birds and flowers. He was very keen on that. And he was always talking to whoever he was with; it was usually only one person. He had his opinions which nobody really took any notice of till just before he died. Sad, wasn’t it? His first books were no use. When Down and Out was published as George Orwell, everybody here knew it was Eric. We were all rather horrified at it – his being a tramp, you know. We thought it was rather a funny thing to do. I think his parents thought so too.”

    Even the local tailor agreed that Orwell was unusual, saying “He was looked upon here as a little bit eccentric,” later adding that Orwell’s father was a snob and that if the tailor, who was not considered ‘society’, encountered the elder Blair on a Sunday, the old autocrat would walk straight past him with no gesture of recognition. “Avril [Orwell’s younger sister] was a bit the same. It was a bit of an honour to be served cakes by her! They’d all got a bit of that. I didn’t notice it with Eric so much, though.”

    Shortly after Orwell returned from Burma, he was asked to define his own politics. He replied, “Tory anarchist.” Wadhams notes here that although Orwell later embraced socialism in the 1930s, “he never lost his suspicion of organizations and institutions.”

    Wadhams describes Orwell’s socialism as not being so much about changing human society based on some doctrine. “Orwell’s socialism sprang from a simple, passionate desire to support the underdog, to right obvious wrongs. If the role of the underdog shifted from the worker to the boss, Orwell was more than likely to switch sides. This made him a contradictory character without the apparent consistency of orthodox reformers who were more willing to adhere to theories long after the supporting facts had changed.”

    Wadhams contends it was Orwell’s hatred of injustice that led him to write about poverty. “And with a straightforward and powerful subject came his equally straightforward and powerful writing style,” writes Wadhams.

    Orwell started “tramping” in East London in the autumn, 1927 followed by a stint in Paris the following spring. That may account for his first professional article being published in Le Monde in 1928.

    Although slumming it provided the material for another early book, Down and Out in London and Paris [1933], it likely strained his health says Wadhams. “Orwell always felt that he had to write from experience…and was constantly stimulating his imagination by going out into the world to find ‘experiences.’ And in doing so – as investigator, journalist, and novelist – Orwell always got his hands dirty. If he was going to write about tramps, he would live with tramps. If he was to document the poverty of the depressed mining communities of the north of England, he would live among the unemployed and go down into the mines himself. There is no doubt that Orwell damaged his health by ‘slumming it’ in London and Paris and trudging around Wigan, Barnsley and Liverpool in February and March 1936.”

    In February 1929, Orwell spent several weeks in Paris’s Hôpital Cochin with pneumonia. Then, before Christmas in 1933, he came down with pneumonia again. Clearly, he had weak lungs. In 1938, Orwell suffered a tubercular lesion in one lung and entered a sanitorium in Kent – a harbinger of what his last years would be like.

    Before Orwell’s father died, he saw his son’s first published book. A friend, Mabel Fierz helped Orwell find the publisher Victor Gollancz.

    Orwell bared his heart to Fierz. “That was a great sorrow to him, that he never came up to his father’s expectations. His father didn’t think he’d ever make money as a writer, and when his father was dying [1939] they were able to show him Orwell’s latest book, and that was a great comfort to Eric. So, his father and he parted friends when his father died. That was the reason he changed his name – that if his book was an absolute failure, he didn’t want the name Blair, his father’s name, to be thought badly of.”

    Fierz also sheds light on Orwell’s early romantic life. “He used to say the one thing he wished in this world was that he’d been attractive to women. He liked women and had many girlfriends, I think, in Burma. He had a girl in Southwold and another girl in London. He was rather a womanizer, yet he was afraid he wasn’t attractive.”

    It was through Fierz that Orwell met his first wife Eileen O’Shaughnessy in 1935. She had graduated in English from Oxford University. Her friend Lydia Jackson recalled the meeting.

    “A fellow student of ours gave a party. George and Richard Rees were there, and I remember looking at the two of them. They were both standing by the fireplace, leaning on it, and I thought what unattractive men they were. Rather faded and worn. That was my impression. Anyway, after that party in London she told me that Eric Blair ‘sort of’ proposed to her, saying that he wasn’t much good, but even so perhaps she would consider him. And I said, ‘And did you?’ and she said yes. I was rather appalled…But Eileen had said before, that when she reached thirty she would get married. George talked in a way that intrigued her, interested her, because he was an unusual person. I’m very doubtful if she was in love with him. I think it must have been his outspokenness that attracted her.

    The next year Orwell moved to a small cottage in Wallington, Hertfordshire where he married Eileen. In the rented cottage, Orwell divided his time between writing The Road to Wigan Pier and acting as the village shopkeeper. He hoped to earn a small income and “some independence from the ups and downs of life as a moderately successful author,” writes Wadhams.

    In any event, less than a year later, in January 1937, Orwell went to Spain to fight for the Spanish Republican Government as it was under attack by General Franco. Eileen followed, arriving in Barcelona in February, visiting Orwell at the front for two days in the middle of March.

    “Fighting with a group of mainly British volunteers who, like him, had gone to Spain to combat fascism and prevent the wider war many believed was otherwise inevitable, Orwell felt at one with the working class,” says Wadhams. “He was noting what he saw, and his observations would no doubt end up in print, but he was also fighting shoulder to shoulder with British working men, and for a working-class cause: an elected government that sought to challenge the traditional Spanish elite.”

    Two events from this time period might catch the casual Orwell reader by surprise. The first, and one that is well-known to Orwell scholars and historians is that although Orwell was initially inspired by the revolutionary atmosphere in Barcelona, by the time he left six months later with a throat wound (he had been shot through the throat while fighting), the atmosphere had turned poisonous. Turns out that among the socialist militias who came to the Republican Government’s aid, there were Trotskyists. As a result, the communists who controlled the Spanish Republicans began persecuting Orwell’s militia.

    “Orwell claimed he was in danger of being arrested, imprisoned or even shot by the communists, working men who had earlier been his comrades,” says Wadhams. Orwell himself wrote, “It was a queer business. We started off by being heroic defenders of democracy, and ended up by slipping over the border with the police at our heels.”

    Orwell was shocked to see his fellow workers spending more time and energy fighting each other than their common enemy. He also believed that the Soviet Union had become an anti-revolutionary force, helping to suppress many of the socialists fighting in Spain. For these reasons, Orwell no longer supported the Soviet Union. He wrote this into his account of the Spanish experience in Homage to Catalonia. The book thereafter put Orwell at odds with many other communists and socialists in England.

    The second happening recalled by one of Orwell’s fellow fighters, was that Orwell diligently fought when he had to and likely killed people on the Fascist side. “We were attacking a troublesome salient, and Orwell wanted a hand grenade and I gave him one,” says Douglas Moyle who was in Orwell’s contingent. “He threw it, and there was a scream from a person being wounded, or perhaps even being killed by it.”

    But as Moyle adds, the military action was rare and he often found Orwell reading to pass time in the trenches. “I was surprised to find him sitting quietly by himself, sheltering from the cold wind, reading a little volume of Shakespeare’s plays. He didn’t speak, and I realized he would rather be left alone. We thought he was rather ‘putting it on,’ but as a literary man he was doing no more than taking some exercise in the sort of thing he liked doing.”


    The youngest soldier in Orwell’s group, 18-year-old Stafford Cottman says Orwell was a natural leader. “He had the common touch. He could talk to anyone,” recalls Cottman. “You had respect for him. He knew what he was talking about, you felt he did. There are people who one is more inclined to listen to than others, and George Orwell was such a man.”

    Orwell returned to his Wallington cottage in England with Eileen where he wrote Homage. His fellow Spanish fighters often visited him, including Moyle who notes that Eileen cooked a lovely dinner with all the trimmings. Afterwards Moyle and Orwell went on long walks in the countryside, taking Orwell’s dog along. “He was a lovely French poodle, and he was called Marx.”

    After spending time in a Kent sanatorium for a tubercular lesion, Orwell and Eileen travelled to Morocco in the winter of 1938 for Orwell’s health. Here, Orwell wrote the novel Coming Up for Air that warned of war and included themes he would fully explore in his tour de force, Nineteen Eight Four.

    When the second world war started, Eileen moved to London to work in the Censorship Department. Orwell was to follow in August 1941, taking a job at BBC Radio as a producer in the Indian Service. They kept the Wallington cottage for weekends.

    Just prior to the BBC job, Orwell wrote and published a short book, that called for an English revolution. While at the home of this book’s future publisher, Frederic Warburg, Orwell met Tosco Fyvel. “He was tall, gaunt, with deep grooves in his face. Poor hair, poor skin, and a poor little mustache. He looked like a sort of seedy sahib, one of the many British Imperial administrators I’d met in the Middle East,” says Fyvel of his first impression of Orwell. “At the time we all believed you could have both patriotism and socialism. Orwell was trying to identify himself with England in its finest hour. Out of this meeting came the project for Searchlight Books. I insisted Orwell should write the first one. It was called The Lion and the Unicorn. In it Orwell wrote as a patriotic socialist. He hoped for a British revolution, but it had to be a patriotic revolution. So my credit was, I managed to extract from Orwell, with this book, the only really positive, optimistic book he ever wrote.”

    Whether or not Fyvel can take all the credit for what he described as Orwell’s “moment of hope” is up for conjecture. But he quotes Orwell as supporting the upper-class Etonians who could be counted on to fight for their country. “He always said that the British ruling classes might be politically and financially corrupt, but they were not morally corrupt…I mean when the hour came, they were all ready to fight and give their lives for the country.”

    Orwell was refused war service due to his bad health. To contribute, he became a sergeant for the Home Guard. His publisher Warburg was in the same St. John’s Wood company. He recalled, that, “there was practically nothing about the Home Guard that didn’t suit Orwell’s temperament, until it began to be efficient.”

    Henry Swanzy joined the BBC at the same time as Orwell. The two became friends and Orwell invited Swanzy to his and Eileen’s London flat for tea. “I always remember the extraordinary remark he made about her before I met her. He said, ‘Well, come along to tea on Sunday, my wife isn’t a bad old stick.’ Don’t you think that was a very odd expression? Of course that is a phrase that was used very much in middle-class circles, really, and I did notice in Orwell a kind of arrogance, or superiority towards materialism and the whole money society, the sort of attitude where it wasn’t altogether done to make a lot of money, where to be Left was an anti-materialistic thing.”

    In addition to his radio work, Orwell freelanced articles for Horizon, Partisan Review, Tribune, The Observer and other publications. He resigned from the BBC in 1943 to work on a new book. He met a young translator of Ibsen and Strindberg named Michael Meyer who thought it would be a good idea to arrange a meeting between Orwell and the novelist Graham Greene. The three met in a Soho restaurant on a hot June day. Meyer worried that it might not go well because Greene thought George was a good writer, but not a good novelist. And Orwell thought any religion, which was so important to Greene, was more or less humbug.

    “I felt very small, because I’m only five foot eight, and Graham Greene is six foot two and Orwell was six foot four. But they liked each other at once and got on very well. They were both very straight, unaffected men. They hated any kind of affectation, they were both very independent thinkers, and so appealed to each other.”

    Meyer found that Orwell wasn’t good at describing the plots of his books although he floated his story ideas and theories to his many friends and fellow writers. “I once asked George what he was doing, and he said, ‘I’m writing a kind of parable, about people who are blind to the dangers of totalitarianism.’ He described the new book as being about a farm run by people, where the animals take over and make just as bad a job of it so they call in the humans again. And that was Animal Farm…It’s so marvelously simple, one of the wisest and deepest books ever written. When I read it, I was staggered and delighted because it bore no relation to his awful summary.”

    Orwell and his wife adopted a baby boy, Richard, before Animal Farm was published. Tragically, Eileen died shortly afterwards while under anesthetic for an operation. Orwell hired a housekeeper to look after himself and Richard. It could have been a difficult time because many publishers had shied away from Animal Farm. The problem being, writes Wadhams the book’s “clear anti-Soviet theme made publishers nervous; Stalin was still a vital ally of the British Government.”


    When the Book-of-the-Month Club in the United States chose Animal Farm in 1946 and gave it an initial printing of half a million copies, Orwell finally had financial security for the first time in his life.

    Fellow writer and friend Malcom Muggeridge saw Animal Farm as a masterpiece satire although he understood the reluctance of publishers at the time. “It’s a beautiful piece of work, and it was refused by fourteen publishers (twelve in the USA), so that’s a good sign! I asked Gollancz [Victor] once how he felt about turning down Animal Farm, and he said, ‘Well, I regret it as a publisher, but I don’t regret it as a citizen, because at that time it was right not to have something which was an obvious attack on the USSR.’ Even that wasn’t quite true, you know, because although it was the USSR that people had in mind, at the same time I think that George was really making a case against every form of authoritarian government, and it just happened that the model available at that time was the USSR. What obsessed George in writing Animal Farm was that human beings were going to lose their taste for freedom. And I think that was a just fear. This is what he dreaded.”

    If Orwell was now financially free to devote his time to writing, he was also a very sick man writes Wadhams. “From the moment Orwell began writing Nineteen Eighty-Four in the summer of 1946, he knew there was a danger that the ill health that had shadowed him all his life might prevent him from committing to paper the ideas he had been formulating for several years.”

    Orwell spent time living in a stone farmhouse that summer in the northern part of Jura, an underpopulated island in the Inner Hebrides on the Scottish west coast. “There in his stuffy upstairs bedroom, with his hand-rolled cigarette dangling from his lips, he worked on the manuscript of Nineteen Eighty-Four, looking up occasionally to watch the ocean waves crashing on the shore a few yards away,” writes Wadhams.

    Orwell was driven to warn the English and the wider Western world of what he claimed in a letter as, “perversions to which a centralized economy is liable and which have already been partly realized in Communism and Fascism.” Orwell added that he believed, “totalitarian ideas have taken root in the minds of intellectuals everywhere and I have tried to draw these ideas out to their logical consequences.”

    Orwell’s working title for the book was “The Last Man in Europe,” because that was how he saw himself says Wadhams, “a solitary man fighting against the powerful forces of an advancing machine society, a mass society that would drain from the individual the taste for freedom.”



    from Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell; pages v-vi (“A Note on the Text” by Peter Davison):

    As a child Orwell was fascinated by H. G. Wells’s Modern Utopia. He told Jacintha Buddicom that he might one day write a similar type of book. He was introduced to Yevgeny Zamyatine's We by Gleb Struve, and he told him on 17 February 1944, ‘I am interested in that kind of book, and even keep making notes for one myself that may get written sooner or later.’ Orwell began writing his last novel in earnest at Barnhill, Jura, in the summer of 1946 and by the autumn had typed some fifty pages of which pages 25-38 (Goldstein’s Testament) survive. These form part of the draft of the novel, about 40 per cent of which still exists and has been reproduced in facsimle (ed. P. Davison, 1984). From this it can be established that Orwell completed his first draft in the early autumn of 1947 (of which ten pages survive) and revised the whole novel in the summer and autumn of 1948. He was by now very sick and in pain, but he struggled through November to retype the whole book, revising it as he did so, and he posted copies to Fredric Warburg and his agent, Leonard Moore, on 3 December 1948; a third copy was sent to New York. The draft has many points of interest, but two are particularly worth recording here.

    As a result of Orwell’s novel, the year 1984 became a legend before it arrived. However, that was not the year Orwell initially intended. He first set his story in 1980, but, as the time taken to write the book dragged on (partly because of his illness), that was changed to 1982 and, later, to 1984. The second interesting feature is a passage Orwell cut out from the final version. After their meeting with O’Brien, Julia and Winston depart separately. In the draft, Julia waits for Winston. This is part of the passage cut out from the conclusion to Part II, section viii (page 186):


    He had gone perhaps two hundred metres, and was in the dark patch midway between two street lamps, when he was startled by something soft bumping against him. The next moment Julia’s arms were clinging tightly round him.

    ‘You see I’ve broken my first order,’ she whispered with her lips close against his ear. ‘But I couldn’t help it. We hadn’t fixed up about tomorrow. Listen.’ In the usual manner, she gave him instructions about their next meeting. ‘And now, good-night, my love, good-night!’

    She kissed his cheek almost violently a number of times, then slipped away into the shadow of the wall and promptly disappeared. Her lips had been cold, and in the darkness it had seemed to him that her face was pale. He had a curious feeling that although the purpose for which she had waited was to arrange another meeting, the embrace she had given him was intended as some kind of good-bye.


    - page viii:

    Orwell’s first book, Down and Out in Paris and London, and several thereafter suffered from ‘in-house censorship’. His last underwent the same fate in at least one of its many editions and translations. A Spanish version for publication in Argentina was the subject of the very last surviving letter to Orwell from his agent, Leonard Moore, dated 22 November 1949, two months before his death. Moore told Orwell that the Argentine publishers wanted cuts made of some 140 lines because ‘the Spanish language is cruder than the English’ and the authorities might be induced to ban Nineteen Eighty-Four ‘on some quite irrelevant point of morality’. That would mean the loss of a book the basic philosophy of which was ‘aimed directly against some of the most powerful movements of our time’. Among passages causing particular concern in Argentina were page 70, lines 3-23 and much of pages 131-3.



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    - Pages 130-33:

    ‘Look!’ whispered Julia.

    A thrush had alighted on a bough not five metres away, almost at the level of their faces. Perhaps it had not seen them. It was in the sun, they in the shade. It spread out its wings, fitted them carefully into place again, ducked its head for a moment, as though making a sort of obeisance to the sun, and then began to pour forth a torrent of song. In the afternoon hush the volume of sound was startling. Winston and Julia clung together, fascinated. The music went on and on, minute after minute, with astonishing variations, never once repeating itself, almost as though the bird were deliberately showing off its virtuosity. Sometimes it stopped for a few seconds, spread out and resettled its wings, then swelled its speckled breast and again burst into song. Winston watched it with a sort of vague reverence. For whom, for what, was that bird singing? No mate, no rival was watching it. What made it sit at the edge of the lonely wood and pour its music into nothingness? He wondered whether after all there was a microphone hidden somewhere near. He and Julia had spoken only in low whispers, and it would not pick up what they had said, but it would pick up the thrush. Perhaps at the other end of the instrument some small, beetle-like man was listening intently — listening to that. But by degrees the flood of music drove all speculations out of his mind. It was as though it were a kind of liquid stuff that poured all over him and got mixed up with the sunlight that filtered through the leaves. He stopped thinking and merely felt. The girl’s waist in the bend of his arm was soft and warm. He pulled her round so that they were breast to breast; her body seemed to melt into his. Wherever his hands moved it was all as yielding as water. Their mouths clung together; it was quite different from the hard kisses they had exchanged earlier. When they moved their faces apart again both of them sighed deeply. The bird took fright and fled with a clatter of wings.

    Winston put his lips against her ear. ‘Now,’ he whispered.

    ‘Not here,’ she whispered back. ‘Come back to the hide- out. It’s safer.’

    Quickly, with an occasional crackle of twigs, they threaded their way back to the clearing. When they were once inside the ring of saplings she turned and faced him. They were both breathing fast. but the smile had reappeared round the corners of her mouth. She stood looking at him for an instant, then felt at the zipper of her overalls. And, yes! it was almost as in his dream. Almost as swiftly as he had imagined it, she had torn her clothes off, and when she flung them aside it was with that same magnificent gesture by which a whole civilization seemed to be annihilated. Her body gleamed white in the sun. But for a moment he did not look at her body; his eyes were anchored by the freckled face with its faint, bold smile. He knelt down before her and took her hands in his.

    ‘Have you done this before?’

    ‘Of course. Hundreds of times—well scores of times anyway.’

    ‘With Party members.’

    ‘Yes, always with Party members.’

    ‘With members of the Inner Party?’

    ‘Not with those swine, no. But there’s plenty that would if they got half a chance. They’re not so holy as they make out.’

    His heart leapt. Scores of times she had done it: he wished it had been hundreds—thousands. Anything that hinted at corruption always filled him with a wild hope. Who knew, perhaps the Party was rotten under the surface, its cult of strenuousness and self-denial simply a sham concealing iniquity. If he could have infected the whole lot of them with leprosy or syphilis, how gladly he would have done so! Anything to rot, to weaken, to undermine! He pulled her down so that they were kneeling face to face.

    ‘Listen. The more men you’ve had, the more I love you. Do you understand that?’

    ‘Yes, perfectly.’

    ‘I hate purity, I hate goodness! I don’t want any virtue to exist anywhere. I want everyone to be corrupt to the bones.

    ‘Well then, I ought to suit you, dear. I’m corrupt to the bones.’

    ‘You like doing this? I don’t mean simply me: I mean the thing in itself?’

    ‘I adore it.’

    That was above all what he wanted to hear. Not merely the love of one person but the animal instinct, the simple undifferentiated desire: that was the force that would tear the Party to pieces. He pressed her down upon the grass, among the fallen bluebells. This time there was no difficulty. Presently the rising and falling of their breasts slowed to normal speed, and in a sort of pleasant helplessness they fell apart. The sun seemed to have grown hotter. They were both sleepy. He reached out for the discarded overalls and pulled them partly over her. Almost immediately they fell asleep and slept for about half an hour.

    Winston woke first. He sat up and watched the freckled face, still peacefully asleep, pillowed on the palm of her hand. Except for her mouth, you could not call her beautiful. There was a line or two round the eyes, if you looked closely. The short dark hair was extraordinarily thick and soft. It occurred to him that he still did not know her surname or where she lived.

    The young, strong body, now helpless in sleep, awoke in him a pitying, protecting feeling. But the mindless tenderness that he had felt under the hazel tree, while the thrush was singing, had not quite come back. He pulled the overalls aside and studied her smooth white flank. In the old days, he thought, a man looked at a girl’s body and saw that it was desirable, and that was the end of the story. But you could not have pure love or pure lust nowadays. No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred. Their embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory. It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act.

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    - Pages 9-22:

    For whom, it suddenly occurred to him to wonder, was he writing this diary? For the future, for the unborn. His mind hovered for a moment round the doubtful date on the page, and then fetched up with a bump against the Newspeak word doublethink. For the first time the magnitude of what he had undertaken came home to him. How could you communicate with the future? It was of its nature impossible. Either the future would resemble the present, in which case it would not listen to him: or it would be different from it, and his predicament would be meaningless.

    For some time he sat gazing stupidly at the paper. The telescreen had changed over to strident military music. It was 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 of the skin above his ankle, the blaring of the music, and a slight booziness caused by the gin.

    Suddenly he began writing in sheer panic, only imperfectly aware of what he was setting down. His small but childish handwriting straggled up and down the page, shedding first its capital letters and finally even its full stops:

    April 4th, 1984. Last night to the flicks. All war films. One very good one of a ship full of refugees being bombed somewhere in the Mediterranean. Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away with a helicopter after him, first you saw him wallowing along in the water like a porpoise, then you saw him through the helicopters gunsights, then he was full of holes and the sea round him turned pink and he sank as suddenly as though the holes had let in the water, audience shouting with laughter when he sank. then you saw a lifeboat full of children with a helicopter hovering over it. there was a middle-aged woman might have been a jewess sitting up in the bow with a little boy about three years old in her arms. little boy screaming with fright and hiding his head between her breasts as if he was trying to burrow right into her and the woman putting her arms round him and comforting him although she was blue with fright herself, all the time covering him up as much as possible as if she thought her arms could keep the bullets off him. then the helicopter planted a 20 kilo bomb in among them terrific flash and the boat went all to matchwood. then there was a wonderful shot of a child’s arm going up up up right up into the air a helicopter with a camera in its nose must have followed it up and there was a lot of applause from the party seats but a woman down in the prole part of the house suddenly started kicking up a fuss and shouting they didnt oughter of showed it not in front of kids they didnt it aint right not in front of kids it aint until the police turned her turned her out i dont suppose anything happened to her nobody cares what the proles say typical prole reaction they never

    Winston stopped writing, partly because he was suffering from cramp. He did not know what had made him pour out this stream of rubbish. But the curious thing was that while he was doing so a totally different memory had clarified itself in his mind, to the point where he almost felt equal to writing it down. It was, he now realized, because of this other incident that he had suddenly decided to come home and begin the diary today.

    It had happened that morning at the Ministry, if anything so nebulous could be said to happen.

    It was nearly eleven hundred, and in the Records Department, where Winston worked, they were dragging the chairs out of the cubicles and grouping them in the centre of the hall opposite the big telescreen, in preparation for the Two Minutes Hate. Winston was just taking his place in one of the middle rows when two people whom he knew by sight, but had never spoken to, came unexpectedly into the room. One of them was a girl whom he often passed in the corridors. He did not know her name, but he knew that she worked in the Fiction Department. Presumably—since he had sometimes seen her with oily hands and carrying a spanner she had some mechanical job on one of the novel-writing machines. She was a bold-looking girl, of about twenty- seven, with thick hair, a freckled face, and swift, athletic movements. A narrow scarlet sash, emblem of the Junior Anti-Sex League, was wound several times round the waist of her overalls, just tightly enough to bring out the shapeliness of her hips. Winston had disliked her from the very first moment of seeing her. He knew the reason. It was because of the atmosphere of hockey-fields and cold baths and community hikes and general clean- mindedness which she managed to carry about with her. He disliked nearly all women, and especially the young and pretty ones. It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy. But this particular girl gave him the impression of being more dangerous than most. Once when they passed in the corridor she gave him a quick sidelong glance which seemed to pierce right into him and for a moment had filled him with black terror. The idea had even crossed his mind that she might be an agent of the Thought Police. That, it was true, was very unlikely. Still, he continued to feel a peculiar uneasiness, which had fear mixed up in it as well as hostility, whenever she was anywhere near him.

    The other person was a man named O’Brien, a member of the Inner Party and holder of some post so important and remote that Winston had only a dim idea of its nature. A momentary hush passed over the group of people round the chairs as they saw the black overalls of an Inner Party member approaching. O’Brien was a large, burly man with a thick neck and a coarse, humorous, brutal face. In spite of his formidable appearance he had a certain charm of manner. He had a trick of resettling his spectacles on his nose which was curiously disarming—in some indefinable way, curiously civilized. It was a gesture which, if anyone had still thought in such terms, might have recalled an eighteenth-century nobleman offering his snuffbox. Winston had seen O’Brien perhaps a dozen times in almost as many years. He felt deeply drawn to him, and not solely because he was intrigued by the contrast between O’Brien’s urbane manner and his prize-fighter’s physique. Much more it was because of a secretly held belief—or perhaps not even a belief, merely a hope—that O’Brien’s political orthodoxy was not perfect. Something in his face suggested it irresistibly. And again, perhaps it was not even unorthodoxy that was written in his face, but simply intelligence. But at any rate he had the appearance of being a person that you could talk to if somehow you could cheat the telescreen and get him alone. Winston had never made the smallest effort to verify this guess: indeed, there was no way of doing so. At this moment O’Brien glanced at his wrist-watch, saw that it was nearly eleven hundred, and evidently decided to stay in the Records Department until the Two Minutes Hate was over. He took a chair in the same row as Winston, a couple of places away. A small, sandy-haired woman who worked in the next cubicle to Winston was between them. The girl with dark hair was sitting immediately behind.

    The next moment a hideous, grinding speech, as of some monstrous machine running without oil, burst from the big telescreen at the end of the room. It was a noise that set one’s teeth on edge and bristled the hair at the back of one’s neck. The Hate had started.

    As usual, the face of Emmanuel Goldstein, the Enemy of the People, had flashed on to the screen. There were hisses here and there among the audience. The little sandy-haired woman gave a squeak of mingled fear and disgust. Goldstein was the renegade and backslider who once, long ago (how long ago, nobody quite remembered), had been one of the leading figures of the Party, almost on a level with Big Brother himself, and then had engaged in counter-revolutionary activities, had been condemned to death, and had mysteriously escaped and disappeared. The programmes of the Two Minutes Hate varied from day to day, but there was none in which Goldstein was not the principal figure. He was the primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the Party’s purity. All subsequent crimes against the Party, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations, sprang directly out of his teaching. Somewhere or other he was still alive and hatching his conspiracies: perhaps somewhere beyond the sea, under the protection of his foreign paymasters, perhaps even—so it was occasionally rumoured—in some hiding-place in Oceania itself.

    Winston’s diaphragm was constricted. He could never see the face of Goldstein without a painful mixture of emotions. It was a lean Jewish face, with a great fuzzy aureole of white hair and a small goatee beard—a clever face, and yet somehow inherently despicable, with a kind of senile silliness in the long thin nose, near the end of which a pair of spectacles was perched. It resembled the face of a sheep, and the voice, too, had a sheep-like quality. Goldstein was delivering his usual venomous attack upon the doctrines of the Party—an attack so exaggerated and perverse that a child should have been able to see through it, and yet just plausible enough to fill one with an alarmed feeling that other people, less level-headed than oneself, might be taken in by it. He was abusing Big Brother, he was denouncing the dictatorship of the Party, he was demanding the immediate conclusion of peace with Eurasia, he was advocating freedom of speech, freedom of the Press, freedom of assembly, freedom of thought, he was crying hysterically that the revolution had been betrayed—and all this in rapid polysyllabic speech which was a sort of parody of the habitual style of the orators of the Party, and even contained Newspeak words: more Newspeak words, indeed, than any Party member would normally use in real life. And all the while, lest one should be in any doubt as to the reality which Goldstein’s specious claptrap covered, behind his head on the telescreen there marched the endless columns of the Eurasian army—row after row of solid-looking men with expressionless Asiatic faces, who swam up to the surface of the screen and vanished, to be replaced by others exactly similar. The dull rhythmic tramp of the soldiers’ boots formed the background to Goldstein’s bleating voice.

    Before the Hate had proceeded for thirty seconds, uncontrollable exclamations of rage were breaking out from half the people in the room. The self-satisfied sheep-like face on the screen, and the terrifying power of the Eurasian army behind it, were too much to be borne: besides, the sight or even the thought of Goldstein produced fear and anger automatically. He was an object of hatred more constant than either Eurasia or Eastasia, since when Oceania was at war with one of these Powers it was generally at peace with the other. But what was strange was that although Goldstein was hated and despised by everybody, although every day and a thousand times a day, on platforms, on the telescreen, in newspapers, in books, his theories were refuted, smashed, ridiculed, held up to the general gaze for the pitiful rubbish that they were in spite of all this, his influence never seemed to grow less. Always there were fresh dupes waiting to be seduced by him. A day never passed when spies and saboteurs acting under his directions were not unmasked by the Thought Police. He was the commander of a vast shadowy army, an underground network of conspirators dedicated to the overthrow of the State. The Brotherhood, its name was supposed to be. There were also whispered stories of a terrible book, a compendium of all the heresies, of which Goldstein was the author and which circulated clandestinely here and there. It was a book without a title. People referred to it, if at all, simply as the book. But one knew of such things only through vague rumours. Neither the Brotherhood nor the book was a subject that any ordinary Party member would mention if there was a way of avoiding it.

    In its second minute the Hate rose to a frenzy. People were leaping up and down in their places and shouting at the tops of their voices in an effort to drown the maddening bleating voice that came from the screen. The little sandy- haired woman had turned bright pink, and her mouth was opening and shutting like that of a landed fish. Even O’Brien’s heavy face was flushed. He was sitting very straight in his chair, his powerful chest swelling and quivering as though he were standing up to the assault of a wave. The dark-haired girl behind Winston had begun crying out ‘Swine! Swine! Swine!’ and suddenly she picked up a heavy Newspeak dictionary and flung it at the screen. It struck Goldstein’s nose and bounced off; the voice continued inexorably. In a lucid moment Winston found that he was shouting with the others and kicking his heel violently against the rung of his chair. The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge-hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp. Thus, at one moment Winston’s hatred was not turned against Goldstein at all, but, on the contrary, against Big Brother, the Party, and the Thought Police; and at such moments his heart went out to the lonely, derided heretic on the screen, sole guardian of truth and sanity in a world of lies. And yet the very next instant he was at one with the people about him, and all that was said of Goldstein seemed to him to be true. At those moments his secret loathing of Big Brother changed into adoration, and Big Brother seemed to tower up, an invincible, fearless protector, standing like a rock against the hordes of Asia, and Goldstein, in spite of his isolation, his helplessness, and the doubt that hung about his very existence, seemed like some sinister enchanter, capable by the mere power of his voice of wrecking the structure of civilization.

    It was even possible, at moments, to switch one’s hatred this way or that by a voluntary act. Suddenly, by the sort of violent effort with which one wrenches one’s head away from the pillow in a nightmare, Winston succeeded in transferring his hatred from the face on the screen to the dark-haired girl behind him. Vivid, beautiful hallucinations flashed through his mind. He would flog her to death with a rubber truncheon. He would tie her naked to a stake and shoot her full of arrows like Saint Sebastian. He would ravish her and cut her throat at the moment of climax. Better than before, moreover, he realized why it was that he hated her. He hated her because she was young and pretty and sexless, because he wanted to go to bed with her and would never do so, because round her sweet supple waist, which seemed to ask you to encircle it with your arm, there was only the odious scarlet sash, aggressive symbol of chastity.

    The Hate rose to its climax. The voice of Goldstein had become an actual sheep’s bleat, and for an instant the face changed into that of a sheep. Then the sheep-face melted into the figure of a Eurasian soldier who seemed to be advancing, huge and terrible, his sub-machine gun roaring, and seeming to spring out of the surface of the screen, so that some of the people in the front row actually flinched backwards in their seats. But in the same moment, drawing a deep sigh of relief from everybody, the hostile figure melted into the face of Big Brother, black-haired, blackmoustachio’d, full of power and mysterious calm, and so vast that it almost filled up the screen. Nobody heard what Big Brother was saying. It was merely a few words of encouragement, the sort of words that are uttered in the din of battle, not distinguishable individually but restoring confidence by the fact of being spoken. Then the face of Big Brother faded away again, and instead the three slogans of the Party stood out in bold capitals:

    WAR IS PEACE
    FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
    IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH


    But the face of Big Brother seemed to persist for several seconds on the screen, as though the impact that it had made on everyone’s eyeballs was too vivid to wear off immediately. The little sandyhaired woman had flung herself forward over the back of the chair in front of her. With a tremulous murmur that sounded like ‘My Saviour!’ she extended her arms towards the screen. Then she buried her face in her hands. It was apparent that she was uttering a prayer.

    At this moment the entire group of people broke into a deep, slow, rhythmical chant of ‘B-B! . . . B-B!’—over and over again, very slowly, with a long pause between the first ‘B’ and the second-a heavy, murmurous sound, somehow curiously savage, in the background of which one seemed to hear the stamp of naked feet and the throbbing of tom-toms. For perhaps as much as thirty seconds they kept it up. It was a refrain that was often heard in moments of overwhelming emotion. Partly it was a sort of hymn to the wisdom and majesty of Big Brother, but still more it was an act of self-hypnosis, a deliberate drowning of consciousness by means of rhythmic noise. Winston’s entrails seemed to grow cold. In the Two Minutes Hate he could not help sharing in the general delirium, but this sub-human chanting of ‘B- B! . . . B-B !’ always filled him with horror. Of course he chanted with the rest: it was impossible to do otherwise. To dissemble your feelings, to control your face, to do what everyone else was doing, was an instinctive reaction. But there was a space of a couple of seconds during which the expression of his eyes might conceivably have betrayed him. And it was exactly at this moment that the significant thing happened—if, indeed, it did happen.

    Momentarily he caught O’Brien’s eye. O’Brien had stood up. He had taken off his spectacles and was in the act of resettling them on his nose with his characteristic gesture. But there was a fraction of a second when their eyes met, and for as long as it took to happen Winston knew—yes, he knew!—that O’Brien was thinking the same thing as himself. An unmistakable message had passed. It was as though their two minds had opened and the thoughts were flowing from one into the other through their eyes. ‘I am with you,’ O’Brien seemed to be saying to him. ‘I know precisely what you are feeling. I know all about your contempt, your hatred, your disgust. But don’t worry, I am on your side!’ And then the flash of intelligence was gone, and O’Brien’s face was as inscrutable as everybody else’s.

    That was all, and he was already uncertain whether it had happened. Such incidents never had any sequel. All that they did was to keep alive in him the belief, or hope, that others besides himself were the enemies of the Party. Perhaps the rumours of vast underground conspiracies were true after all—perhaps the Brotherhood really existed ! It was impossible, in spite of the endless arrests and confessions and executions, to be sure that the Brotherhood was not simply a myth. Some days he believed in it, some days not. There was no evidence, only fleeting glimpses that might mean anything or nothing: snatches of overheard conversation, faint scribbles on lavatory walls—once, even, when two strangers met, a small movement of the hand which had looked as though it might be a signal of recognition. It was all guesswork: very likely he had imagined everything. He had gone back to his cubicle without looking at O’Brien again. The idea of following up their momentary contact hardly crossed his mind. It would have been inconceivably dangerous even if he had known how to set about doing it. For a second, two seconds, they had exchanged an equivocal glance, and that was the end of the story. But even that was a memorable event, in the locked loneliness in which one had to live.

    Winston roused himself and sat up straighter. He let out a belch. The gin was rising from his stomach.

    His eyes re-focused on the page. He discovered that while he sat helplessly musing he had also been writing, as though by automatic action. And it was no longer the same cramped, awkward handwriting as before. His pen had slid voluptuously over the smooth paper, printing in large neat capitals

    DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
    DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
    DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
    DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
    DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER

    over and over again, filling half a page.

    He could not help feeling a twinge of panic. It was absurd, since the writing of those particular words was not more dangerous than the initial act of opening the diary, but for a moment he was tempted to tear out the spoiled pages and abandon the enterprise altogether.

    He did not do so, however, because he knew that it was useless. Whether he wrote DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER, or whether he refrained from writing it, made no difference. Whether he went on with the diary, or whether he did not go on with it, made no difference. The Thought Police would get him just the same. He had committed—would still have committed, even if he had never set pen to paper—the essential crime that contained all others in itself. Thoughtcrime, they called it. Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed for ever. You might dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you.

    It was always at night—the arrests invariably happened at night. The sudden jerk out of sleep, the rough hand shaking your shoulder, the lights glaring in your eyes, the ring of hard faces round the bed. In the vast majority of cases there was no trial, no report of the arrest. People simply disappeared, always during the night. Your name was removed from the registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated: vaporized was the usual word.

    For a moment he was seized by a kind of hysteria. He began writing in a hurried untidy scrawl:

    theyll shoot me i don’t care theyll shoot me in the back of the neck i dont care down with big brother they always shoot you in the back of the neck i dont care down with big brother—

    He sat back in his chair, slightly ashamed of himself, and laid down the pen. The next moment he started violently. There was a knocking at the door.

    Already! He sat as still as a mouse, in the futile hope that whoever it was might go away after a single attempt. But no, the knocking was repeated. The worst thing of all would be to delay. His heart was thumping like a drum, but his face, from long habit, was probably expressionless. He got up and moved heavily towards the door.


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    - Pages 28-33:

    Down in the street the wind flapped the torn poster to and fro, and the word INGSOC fitfully appeared and vanished. INGSOC. The sacred principles of INGSOC. Newspeak, doublethink, the mutability of the past. He felt as though he were wandering in the forests of the sea bottom, lost in a monstrous world where he himself was the monster. He was alone. The past was dead, the future was unimaginable. What certainty had he that a single human creature now living was on his side? And what way of knowing that the dominion of the Party would not endure for ever? Like an answer, the three slogans on the white face of the Ministry of Truth came back to him:

    WAR IS PEACE
    FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
    IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH


    He took a twenty-five cent piece out of his pocket. There, too, in tiny clear lettering, the same slogans were inscribed, and on the other face of the coin the head of Big Brother. Even from the coin the eyes pursued you. On coins, on stamps, on the covers of books, on banners, on posters, and on the wrappings of a cigarette Packet—everywhere. Always the eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, working or eating, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or in bed—no escape. Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.

    The sun had shifted round, and the myriad windows of the Ministry of Truth, with the light no longer shining on them, looked grim as the loopholes of a fortress. His heart quailed before the enormous pyramidal shape. It was too strong, it could not be stormed. A thousand rocket bombs would not batter it down. He wondered again for whom he was writing the diary. For the future, for the past—for an age that might be imaginary. And in front of him there lay not death but annihilation. The diary would be reduced to ashes and himself to vapour. Only the Thought Police would read what he had written, before they wiped it out of existence and out of memory. How could you make appeal to the future when not a trace of you, not even an anonymous word scribbled on a piece of paper, could physically survive?

    The telescreen struck fourteen. He must leave in ten minutes. He had to be back at work by fourteen-thirty.

    Curiously, the chiming of the hour seemed to have put new heart into him. He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear. But so long as he uttered it, in some obscure way the continuity was not broken. It was not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you carried on the human heritage. He went back to the table, dipped his pen, and wrote:

    To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone—to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone:

    From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink—greetings!


    He was already dead, he reflected. It seemed to him that it was only now, when he had begun to be able to formulate his thoughts, that he had taken the decisive step. The consequences of 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 might betray you. Some nosing zealot in the Ministry (a woman, probably: someone like the little sandy- haired woman or the dark-haired girl from the Fiction Department) might start wondering why he had been writing during the lunch interval, why he had used an oldfashioned pen, what he had been writing—and then drop a hint in the appropriate quarter. He went to the bathroom and carefully scrubbed the ink away with the gritty dark-brown soap which rasped your skin like sandpaper and was therefore well adapted for this purpose.

    He put the diary away in the drawer. It was quite useless to think of hiding it, but he could at least make sure whether or not its existence had been discovered. A hair laid across the page-ends was too obvious. With the tip of his finger he picked up an identifiable grain of whitish dust and deposited it on the corner of the cover, where it was bound to be shaken off if the book was moved.


    III

    WINSTON was dreaming of his mother.

    He must, he thought, have been ten or eleven years old when his mother had disappeared. She was a tall, statuesque, rather silent woman with slow movements and magnificent fair hair. His father he remembered more vaguely as dark and thin, dressed always in neat dark clothes (Winston remembered especially the very thin soles of his father’s shoes) and wearing spectacles. The two of them must evidently have been swallowed up in one of the first great purges of the fifties.

    At this moment his mother was sitting in some place deep down beneath him, with his young sister in her arms. He did not remember his sister at all, except as a tiny, feeble baby, always silent, with large, watchful eyes. Both of them were looking up at him. They were down in some subterranean place—the bottom of a well, for instance, or a very deep grave—but it was a place which, already far below him, was itself moving downwards. They were in the saloon of a sinking ship, looking up at him through the darkening water. There was still air in the saloon, they could still see him and he them, but all the while they were sinking down, down into the green waters which in another moment must hide them from sight for ever. He was out in the light and air while they were being sucked down to death, and they were down there because he was up here. He knew it and they knew it, and he could see the knowledge in their faces. There was no reproach either in their faces or in their hearts, only the knowledge that they must die in order that he might remain alive, and that this was part of the unavoidable order of things.

    He could not remember what had happened, but he knew in his dream that in some way the lives of his mother and his sister had been sacrificed to his own. It was one of those dreams which, while retaining the characteristic dream scenery, are a continuation of one’s intellectual life, and in which one becomes aware of facts and ideas which still seem new and valuable after one is awake. The thing that now suddenly struck Winston was that his mother’s death, nearly thirty years ago, had been tragic and sorrowful in a way that was no longer possible. Tragedy, he perceived, belonged to the ancient time, to a time when there was still privacy, love, and friendship, and when the members of a family stood by one another without needing to know the reason. His mother’s memory tore at his heart because she had died loving him, when he was too young and selfish to love her in return, and because somehow, he did not remember how, she had sacrificed herself to a conception of loyalty that was private and unalterable. Such things, he saw, could not happen today. Today there were fear, hatred, and pain, but no dignity of emotion, no deep or complex sorrows. All this he seemed to see in the large eyes of his mother and his sister, looking up at him through the green water, hundreds of fathoms down and still sinking.

    Suddenly he was standing on short springy turf, on a summer evening when the slanting rays of the sun gilded the ground. The landscape that he was looking at recurred so often in his dreams that he was never fully certain whether or not he had seen it in the real world. In his waking thoughts he called it the Golden Country. It was an old, rabbit-bitten pasture, with a foot-track wandering across it and a molehill here and there. In the ragged hedge on the opposite side of the field the boughs of the elm trees were swaying very faintly in the breeze, their leaves just stirring in dense masses like women’s hair. Somewhere near at hand, though out of sight, there was a clear, slow-moving stream where dace were swimming in the pools under the willow trees.

    The girl with dark hair was coming towards them across the field. With what seemed a single movement she tore off her clothes and flung them disdainfully aside. Her body was white and smooth, but it aroused no desire in him, indeed he barely looked at it. What overwhelmed him in that instant was admiration for the gesture with which she had thrown her clothes aside. With its grace and carelessness it seemed to annihilate a whole culture, a whole system of thought, as though Big Brother and the Party and the Thought Police could all be swept into nothingness by a single splendid movement of the arm. That too was a gesture belonging to the ancient time. Winston woke up with the word ‘Shakespeare’ on his lips.


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    - Pages 35-8:

    Winston could not definitely remember a time when his country had not been at war, but it was evident that there had been a fairly long interval of peace during his childhood, because one of his early memories was of an air raid which appeared to take everyone by surprise. Perhaps it was the time when the atomic bomb had fallen on Colchester. He did not remember the raid itself, but he did remember his father’s hand clutching his own as they hurried down, down, down into some place deep in the earth, round and round a spiral staircase which rang under his feet and which finally so wearied his legs that he began whimpering and they had to stop and rest. His mother, in her slow, dreamy way, was following a long way behind them. She was carrying his baby sister—or perhaps it was only a bundle of blankets that she was carrying: he was not certain whether his sister had been born then. Finally they had emerged into a noisy, crowded place which he had realized to be a Tube station.

    There were people sitting all over the stone-flagged floor, and other people, packed tightly together, were sitting on metal bunks, one above the other. Winston and his mother and father found themselves a place on the floor, and near them an old man and an old woman were sitting side by side on a bunk. The old man had on a decent dark suit and a black cloth cap pushed back from very white hair: his face was scarlet and his eyes were blue and full of tears. He reeked of gin. It seemed to breathe out of his skin in place of sweat, and one could have fancied that the tears welling from his eyes were pure gin. But though slightly drunk he was also suffering under some grief that was genuine and unbearable. In his childish way Winston grasped that some terrible thing, something that was beyond forgiveness and could never be remedied, had just happened. It also seemed to him that he knew what it was. Someone whom the old man loved—a little granddaughter, perhaps had been killed. Every few minutes the old man kept repeating:

    ‘We didn’t ought to ’ave trusted ’em. I said so, Ma, didn’t I? That’s what comes of trusting ’em. I said so all along. We didn’t ought to ’ave trusted the buggers.’

    But which buggers they didn’t ought to have trusted Winston could not now remember.

    Since about that time, war had been literally continuous, though strictly speaking it had not always been the same war. For several months during his childhood there had been confused street fighting in London itself, some of which he remembered vividly. But to trace out the history of the whole period, to say who was fighting whom at any given moment, would have been utterly impossible, since no written record, and no spoken word, ever made mention of any other alignment than the existing one. At this moment, for example, in 1984 (if it was 1984), Oceania was at war with Eurasia and in alliance with Eastasia. In no public or private utterance was it ever admitted that the three powers had at any time been grouped along different lines. Actually, as Winston well knew, it was only four years since Oceania had been at war with Eastasia and in alliance with Eurasia. But that was merely a piece of furtive knowledge which he happened to possess because his memory was not satisfactorily under control. Officially the change of partners had never happened. Oceania was at war with Eurasia: therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia. The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible.

    The frightening thing, he reflected for the ten thousandth time as he forced his shoulders painfully backward (with hands on hips, they were gyrating their bodies from the waist, an exercise that was supposed to be good for the back muscles)—the frightening thing was that it might all be true. If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened—that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death?

    The Party said that Oceania had never been in alliance with Eurasia. He, Winston Smith, knew that Oceania had been in alliance with Eurasia as short a time as four years ago. But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his own consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated. And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’ And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. ‘Reality control’, they called it: in Newspeak, ‘doublethink’.

    ‘Stand easy!’ barked the instructress, a little more genially.

    Winston sank his arms to his sides and slowly refilled his lungs with air. His mind slid away into the labyrinthine world of doublethink. To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself. That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word ‘doublethink’ involved the use of doublethink.

    The instructress had called them to attention again. ‘And now let’s see which of us can touch our toes!’ she said enthusiastically. ‘Right over from the hips, please, comrades. One-two! One-two! . . .’

    Winston loathed this exercise, which sent shooting pains all the way from his heels to his buttocks and often ended by bringing on another coughing fit. The half-pleasant quality went out of his meditations. The past, he reflected, had not merely been altered, it had been actually destroyed. For how could you establish even the most obvious fact when there existed no record outside your own memory? He tried to remember in what year he had first heard mention of Big Brother. He thought it must have been at some time in the sixties, but it was impossible to be certain. In the Party histories, of course, Big Brother figured as the leader and guardian of the Revolution since its very earliest days. His exploits had been gradually pushed backwards in time until already they extended into the fabulous world of the forties and the thirties, when the capitalists in their strange cylindrical hats still rode through the streets of London in great gleaming motor-cars or horse carriages with glass sides. There was no knowing how much of this legend was true and how much invented. Winston could not even remember at what date the Party itself had come into existence. He did not believe he had ever heard the word INGSOC before 1960, but it was possible that in its Oldspeak form—’English Socialism’, that is to say—it had been current earlier. Everything melted into mist. Sometimes, indeed, you could put your finger on a definite lie. It was not true, for example, as was claimed in the Party history books, that the Party had invented aeroplanes. He remembered aeroplanes since his earliest childhood. But you could prove nothing. There was never any evidence. Just once in his whole life he had held in his hands unmistakable documentary proof of the falsification of an historical fact. And on that occasion—

    ‘Smith!’ screamed the shrewish voice from the telescreen. ‘6079 Smith W.! Yes, you! Bend lower, please! You can do better than that. You’re not trying. Lower, please! That’s better, comrade. Now stand at ease, the whole squad, and watch me.’

    A sudden hot sweat had broken out all over Winston’s body. His face remained completely inscrutable. Never show dismay! Never show resentment! A single flicker of the eyes could give you away. He stood watching while the instructress raised her arms above her head and—one could not say gracefully, but with remarkable neatness and efficiency—bent over and tucked the first joint of her fingers under her toes.

    ‘There, comrades! That’s how I want to see you doing it. Watch me again. I’m thirty-nine and I’ve had four children. Now look.’ She bent over again. ‘You see my knees aren’t bent. You can all do it if you want to,’ she added as she straightened herself up. ‘Anyone under forty-five is perfectly capable of touching his toes. We don’t all have the privilege of fighting in the front line, but at least we can all keep fit. Remember our boys on the Malabar front! And the sailors in the Floating Fortresses! Just think what they have to put up with. Now try again. That’s better, comrade, that’s much better,’ she added encouragingly as Winston, with a violent lunge, succeeded in touching his toes with knees unbent, for the first time in several years.







    Last edited by HERO; 06-26-2018 at 08:46 AM.

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    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OW5FHCzsn44

    from Soul Murder: The Effects of Childhood Abuse and Deprivation by Leonard Shengold, M. D.; pages 69-72 [Chapter 5—Soul Murder, Rats, and 1984]:

    I make use of Orwell because whatever the “facts” of his actual experiences, he portrays with such vividness what it felt like and feels like to be an abused child—to feel helpless, inadequate, and guilty in a world one never made.

    I will begin with a sketch of a patient, D., who had been seduced as a child and who feared and was fascinated by rats. I will be using this clinical material to make parallels with George Orwell’s life and especially with the view of the world he presented in 1984, a primer on soul murder.


    Patient D.

    A young man in analysis for several years complained of having difficulty with his memory and of disruptions in his thinking that interfered with his professional achievements. Despite his complaints, his achievements were considerable. D. was very intelligent, but at his work he seemed always to promote dissension, controversy, and ultimately punishment or even dismissal.

    He seemed unaware of his provocation of authority figures. D. lived a life of disconnected and largely unacknowledged sadomasochistic fantasy, which he occasionally expressed in action that he quickly disavowed. So much was disavowed that his functioning sometimes suffered because of a discontinuity in his memory; this affected his sense of identity, and he had little awareness of himself as a child—only dim feelings about a little person with his name who seemed like somebody else. D. insisted on the facade of being regarded as the decent, helpful, kindly, but feckless friend of the family—of so many families. His specialty was compulsively and successfully seducing the wives of his “good friends.” This was part of a secret life that he covered over by competent impersonation. D. had been engaged for many years to a masochistic young woman who worshiped him and whom he treated very badly. He seemed to despise her for loving him, yet felt he needed her dependable affirmation of his “lovability.”

    D.’s painful, although intermittent, awareness of not being able to be responsible for what he was feeling and doing was connected by the analyst with the patient’s deepening memories of having been given as a child repeated, overstimulating enemas by his mother. She appeared to have had very little interest in him, but much fascination with his anus and bowel habits. The enemas always went beyond what he could stand. More pleasurable were the occasions of having his anus wiped by her—a habit that continued even after he started going to school. (The anally fixated D. was a “rat person” . . . who frequently associated to rodents and had a specific fantasy of rats crawling up his anus.) In the early phases of analysis, D. described his childhood with few specific memories but generally thought of it as quite happy. During one session when he seemed to be integrating past and present more than was usual, he commented with poignancy, “It is sad. I am not really a whole person. I live in compartments, in fragments.” The analyst said, stressing the defense, “In disconnected fragments.”

    D., the “son of a bitch” (he would also frequently call himself a “rat”), was struggling with feminine identifications—an identification with the “monster . . . woman,” the bad mother of his childhood, as well as with the seduced child and with his fiancée as victim. But he was not able to be responsibly aware that this was going on. His terror of his suppressed and isolated feelings made much of his life into a dramatic simulation: he lived as if he were involved. After he had gained some insight, D. described himself, echoing T. S. Eliot, as a hollow man, a stuffed man.


    pages 73-78: The headmaster’s wife, who bullied and shamed Orwell and who is portrayed as having made him doubt his own perceptions and feel that he was guilty and bad, may or may not have deserved to be a prototype for Big Brother in the novel, but I have no doubt that Orwell considered her to be so.

    In most families with a soul-murdering parent, the other parent is an unconscious colluder,* a fellow victim, or both. (Where this is not so, the situation is less “totalitarian,” and the trauma tends to be less devastating—the child has someone else to turn to.) When one parent can tyrannize, the need for a loving and rescuing authority is so intense that the child must break with the registration of what he or she has suffered, and establish within the mind (delusionally) the existence of a loving parent who will care and who really must be right. Like the broken Winston Smith at the end of 1984, the child loves Big Brother. (In the adult, there may be a good deal of intellectual awareness of what the parent is like, but the delusion of goodness continues underneath and surfaces when needed.) The child takes on the guilt for the abuse, turning inward the murderous feeling that is evoked by the traumata. The actuality of torment intensifies what is a usual vicissitude of hatred toward a needed parent. The child denies what has happened, sometimes but not always with orders from the tormentor. The parent is right and good; the child must be wrong and bad. I repeat these sequelae of soul murder because they are so movingly presented in Orwell’s essay and in his prophetic novel.

    Shortly after arriving at school, Orwell began to wet his bed. This was felt to be criminal, and even though the child had no control over the symptom, he felt the authorities were right. He was threatened with beating, and when the symptom continued the threat was carried out. The headmaster had “already taken a bone-handled riding crop out of the cupboard, but it was part of the punishment of reporting yourself that you had to proclaim your offense with your own lips. When I had said my say, he read me a short but pompous lecture . . . He had a habit of continuing his lecture while he flogged you, and I remember the words, ‘you dir-ty lit-tle boy’ keeping time with the blows” (1947, pp. 3-4).

    The beating did not hurt much, which made the boy smile. (The boy’s masochistic provocation, similar to my patient’s, can be seen here.) Therefore the beating was repeated:

    This time Sim laid on in real earnest. He continued for a length of time that frightened and astonished me—about five minutes, it seemed—ending up by breaking the riding crop. The bone handle went flying across the room.

    “Look what you’ve made me do!” he said furiously, holding up the broken crop . . . The second beating had not hurt very much either. Fright and shame had anesthetised me. I was crying partly because I felt that this was expected of me, partly from genuine repentance, but partly also because of a deeper grief which is peculiar to childhood . . . a sense of desolate loneliness and helplessness, of being locked up not only in a hostile world but in a world of good and evil where the rules were such that it was actually not possible for me to keep them. . . . I had a conviction of sin and folly and weakness, such as I do not remember to have felt before . . .

    [Another result] is that I accepted the broken riding crop as my own crime. I can still recall my feeling as I saw the handle lying on the carpet—the feeling of having done an ill-bred, clumsy thing, and ruined an expensive object. I had broken it: so Sim told me, and so I believed. This acceptance of guilt lay unnoticed in my memory for twenty or thirty years. (pp. 4-6; Orwell’s italics)



    The abused child takes on the guilt that the self-righteous parent so often lacks. Here is Winston Smith’s response to being tortured beyond his endurance. The tormentor, O’Brien, has been holding up four fingers and insisting that Winston see five. With enough pain, Winston gives in. He loses consciousness and recovers to find O’Brien holding him. “For a moment he clung to O’Brien like a baby, curiously comforted by the heavy arm round his shoulders. He had the feeling that O’Brien was his protector, that the pain was something that came from outside, from some other source, and that it was O’Brien that would save him from it” (p. 254). O’Brien correctly predicts the result of the brainwashing he is administering.

    It is a description chillingly appropriate to my patient D.: “Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow [patient D. called himself a “hollow man”]. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves” (pp. 259-260).

    Orwell shows that Winston Smith has been forced by torture both to identify with the tormentor and to cultivate denial—the erasing of what has happened, the abolition of the past; this has become a principle of government: “All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary” (p. 41). “If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened—that surely was more terrifying than mere torture and death” (p. 35).


    * Here is an instance of “family collusion” from the memoirs of Lucy Boston (1979), an English writer born in 1895. The author describes herself reaching puberty. Her mother, then a widow, never mentioned sex to her but started to treat her with suspicion, “seeing evil where none was”. The mother interfered with an innocent friendship with a very nice boy whom the mother suddenly characterized as “dangerous.” In contrast, the girl was encouraged to stay with her aunt and uncle. Lucy describes her uncle as having an air of “rolling self-confidence and gusto. He had the twinkling little eyes of a porker. They now took notice of me. After a few displeasing signals of his intentions, he one day caught me on the landing and carried me fighting like a bull calf into a bedroom where he flung me onto the bed and his twenty stone on top of me. From this extremity I was rescued by one of his sons calling his father to order. The old man was not put out of countenance. ‘Ah, well. All right, my boy.’ Neither man seemed to think it out of the ordinary. A few days later when Mother wished to send me with a message to her sister, I refused to go, saying Uncle was too dangerous. He wouldn’t let me alone. ‘Nonsense, you silly child,’ she replied. ‘It’s only Uncle’s way.’ This was her side of the family and therefore perfectly conformable. But she was right—it was Uncle’s way, and there was to be no help from her” (p. 81).


    D.’s Denial

    ….In 1984 Orwell describes this power of denial, of being able to split one’s responsible awareness (“It is like trying to write on water,” Freud is alleged to have said of how one patient dealt with his interpretations), as part of the principle of doublethink:

    To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing both . . . to forget, then to draw it back into the memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all to apply the same process to the process itself . . . consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then once again to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word “doublethink” involved the use of doublethink. (p. 36; my italics)


    Orwell mentions hypnosis, and the passage is relevant to the autohypnosis so often used by victims of soul murder to effect nonregistration and denial . . . Therapeutically, the patient needs to become aware of using doublethink and autohypnosis, and, harder still, to become responsible for using them.


    Anal Defense


    It is necessary for the patient to get away from the torment of overstimulation and the rage and murderousness it brings forth by identifying with the tormentor and turning the rage on the self and on others. I conceive of what happens defensively as a regression to the so-called anal-sadistic period of development (between the ages of 18 months and 42 months), during which the child usually evolves defenses against a burgeoning aggressive drive; this regression may also be conceived of as an enhancement of the anal-sadistic period and eventually as a fixation on it. The regression is of course partial and subject to great individual variation . . . .

    . . . becoming able to control the anal sphincter (a momentous developmental achievement) has its psychic counterpart in the control of aggressively charged emotion (that is, murderous emotion). There is a primitive kind of shutting off of feeling as well as a primitive kind of letting go of feeling. We all require some amount of obsessive-compulsive defensive structuring (which implies anal defensive structuring)—the developmental conversion of impulse and action into thought—and the kind of emotional sphincter control that goes along with the possibility of isolating feeling from idea. Optimally, this obsessive-compulsive scaffolding is not so constrictive as to prohibit subsequent emotional development toward the capacity to care about and love others; this is a goal that severe obsessive-compulsive characters with anal fixations (such as D.) do not achieve. We all have to master hate, but those who have been abused as children have more hate to master than most, and they frequently do not have the needed help of a loving parent. What results can be a massive recourse to obsessive-compulsive defenses, to anal mechanisms, symptoms, and erogeneity.* The overuse of the emotional sphincter makes for a kind of anal-sadistic universe with all the contradictions that this entails.

    Repression, isolation, and excessive emotional control (which can result in a kind of zombie existence) can be found alongside outbursts of intense, hate-filled sadism and masochism (sometimes covered over, as in D., by a very different “as if” facade of “normality”). In 1984 the enforced, docile conformity coexists with perpetual war and daily hate sessions.

    In our patients there are myriad combinations of these contradictions, which usually subsist unsynthesized, side by side, in fragments or compartments, and result in the confusing variety of clinical pictures we find.


    *A specific instance for Orwell occurred when he was hospitalized in his early thirties for pneumonia. His sister Avril reported “the nurse telling her that when Eric had been delirious, he had talked incessantly about money: one of the obsessions of his life emerging, as it were, from the unconscious and demanding to be heard . . . ‘We reassured him that everything was all right, and he needn’t worry about money. But it turned out that it wasn’t actually his situation in life as regards money that he was worrying about, it was actual cash—he felt that he wanted cash sort of under his pillow’” (Stansky and Abrahams 1980, 47). Orwell was regressing to anal defensiveness at a time when his life was in danger—holding on with his anal sphincter to try to keep control (see Shengold 1988).

    Before toilet training anal consciousness is cloacal consciousness, and control of the urethral sphincter plays its important but lesser part in asserting a kind of instinctual defensive mastery alongside control of the anal sphincter. Urethral control is usually attained first. Bed-wetting, a frequent response in children subjected to neglect or overstimulation (and a cry for help from them—Orwell illustrates both), means an unconscious relinquishment of urethral control. This probably involves a regression that enhances the anal organization and defensive need for the anal sphincter; here is one explanation for the terror that accompanies loss of the sphincter’s integrity for bed wetters like Orwell. This would underlie Orwell’s fear of rats (and Winston Smith’s): as in the florid fantasies of Freud’s Rat Man, these animals are endowed with the power of penetrating the body by eating through sphincters.


    pages 3-15:

    Victims of attempts at soul murder find it very difficult to be responsible for their mental pictures of themselves, of others, and of the world around them. They often cannot properly register what they want and what they feel, or what they have done and what has been done to them.

    Child abuse is the abuse of power. We do not have a coherent psychology of power; much is unknown. Soul murder is as old as human history, as old as the abuse of the helpless by the powerful in any group—which means as old as the family. But soul murder has a particular resonance with the twentieth century—with the world of Orwell’s—and a particular relevance to it. This is the century of the computer, the concentration camp, and the atomic bomb, of the presence of such destructive potential that all life on earth is threatened, and of a centralized power so monolithic and intrusive that it has been aimed at mastery over the individual’s mind as well as body. This power has been implemented by twentieth-century discoveries in psychology and communications that have made brainwashing and mind control easily attained effects of terror and torture. ****** and Stalin have proven that the strongest adults can be broken and deprived of their individuality and even of their humanity. That is one of the lessons of Orwell’s 1984—one that can also be learned from the lives of those who have grown up in the charge of crazy, cruel, and capricious parents, in the totalitarian family ambience that Randall Jarrell calls “one of God’s concentration camps” (1963, p. 146).

    In relation to both our external and our inner psychic lives, Freud viewed as all-important the influence of those first carriers of the environment and first objects of our instinctual drives, the parents: what they do, what they evoke in the child, how they are registered within the mind of the child and become part of its mental structure, how they are separated out to leave the child with its own individuality. For the developing infant, these gods of the nursery (or their caretaker substitutes) are the environment. They have power over the helpless, and they can easily get away with misrule and tyranny. They are also under a powerful unconscious compulsion to repeat the circumstances of their own childhood. We regularly find that abusers of children have been abused as children by their own parents. This is not heredity (although we cannot completely rule that out) but rather a passing down of a traumatic past from generation to generation. The sins of the father are laid upon the children . . . . we have learned that in the terrible circumstances of parents who do not love, are indifferent, or hate, children will turn to seduction, even to provocation to be beaten, to fulfill the imperative need for some parental attention. Those who have devised procedures for causing mental breakdown in inmates of prisons and concentration camps have resorted to a regimen of emotional deprivation and isolation, alternating with humiliation and torture.

    We find in our patients that they regularly identify with the aggressor. To identify means to be and not to see someone. It follows that when these people find their own victims they do not experience them as separate individuals—they do not empathize with them. The abused child’s siblings, already subject to the primal displacement of murderous impulse from the parent to the intruding infant (this is the theme of the story of Cain and Abel), tend to be the first scapegoats of the abused child. Although individual variations may ensue, usually the hostility is eventually displaced onto people outside the family: underlings, especially those who play vague parental roles and yet are dependent—like servants, porters, waiters. This kind of hostility that denies the other’s humanity is very often shifted onto those who are already the victims of persecution—the racially different, foreigners, “official” enemies, like the ever-changing warring opponents in 1984. (These can all unconsciously stand for the denied and projected bad aspects of one’s parent, self, and family.) Ultimately the compulsion to repeat a traumatic past focuses the rage of the former victims of attempted soul murder on children in general, and on their own children.



    https://bcbooklook.com/2018/01/18/th...eable-truth-2/

    “The Malleable Truth” by Beverly Cramp:

    . . . In Nineteen Eighty-Four, protagonist Winston Smith lives amid omnipresent government propaganda and surveillance in Airstrip One (formerly Great Britain), part of perpetually war-mongering Oceania. Torturers try to make him believe two and two does not equal four.

    “Orwell knew very well where the manipulation of truth and the malignant distortion of language can lead,” writes Stephen Wadhams, gatherer of The Orwell Tapes. “He’d seen it for himself in the Spanish Civil War and even done it himself as a BBC producer in wartime London, matching German propaganda with lies of his own, discovering the seductive power of being freed from normal constraints of truth telling.”

    Joseph Goebbels, ******’s propaganda minister, had said “The secret of propaganda is repetition,” and ******, in his 1925 book, Mein Kampf, had already identified the propaganda technique of the Big Lie—a lie so extreme that no one would believe that someone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.”

    It was George Orwell who revealed to a global audience how easy it is to manipulate people, how fragile our individuality can be, and how complete control of media and other technology can give rise to totalitarianism.

    Now Stephen Wadhams’ interviews for The Orwell Tapes provide a unique prism for understanding the 20th century’s most prophetic voice of caution.

    Eric Arthur Blair (pen name George Orwell) was born in 1903 in Motihari, then part of Bengal, but now called Bihar, which is in India. At the time, opium was legal and a big money-producer for the British Empire. Orwell’s father, Richard Blair, was an opium agent in the Indian Civil Service. Orwell’s mother was the much-younger Ida Blair, the half-French daughter of a tea merchant from Burma.

    With parents from the lower rungs of the British Raj elite, Orwell joked he was, “born into what you might describe as the lower-upper-middle class.”

    Eric Blair’s family and a rigidly conformist society conspired to shape him in a particular way.

    “His parents certainly wanted him to conform,” writes Wadhams. “They made considerable financial sacrifices to send him to ‘good’ schools where he would meet the right people. But from the beginning he appears to have tried to break out of the mould. The consensus among his childhood friends and schoolmates is that the young Eric Blair was always strangely on the outside, observing but rarely joining in – and then usually to challenge and find fault. The picture given is that of an abrasive, free-thinking individual, but intelligent fault-finding is a far cry from open revolt; the young Blair was not a radical.”

    That may explain why Orwell would study hard to eventually finish his education at Eton, one of the top boarding schools in Britain, and upon graduation spent five years in the colonial police force in Burma. It was expected of him. But the five years he spent in Burma deeply changed the young man.

    “The inequities and oppression he saw there had a lasting effect on him,” says Wadhams. “In his writing he describes these years as traumatic. The ‘dirty end of Empire’ left him with an ‘enormous weight of guilt,’ which he felt he could expunge only by understanding and identifying with the oppressed classes of his own country.”

    Thereafter, the young Eric Blair shifted his social climbing from up to down the ladder. But even though Orwell took up the underclasses as his adult cause, he retained many of the very English ways that he learned at British boarding schools.

    At St. Cyprian’s, Orwell’s first boarding school, he became known for bookish ways. A fellow student there remembers, “He was round-faced, with straight hair, not in the least the bearded, long-faced number he turned out to be. I don’t think he was any good at sports. Blair and my brother both got bullied. I can remember very well the whole school booing and chasing them and getting them up against the wall of the gymnasium, with a view to bashing at them. I can’t think what anyone would have had against Blair. He was quite harmless. I think he was a born bookworm and would have liked to have been left in peace to pursue his own line of studies.”

    Wadhams editorializes that Orwell probably didn’t suffer more than any other English boy, “uprooted from hearth and home and planted in the tough, regimented society of an English prep school. His early letters home offer glimpses of a boy coming to terms fairly cheerfully with his new environment.”

    Orwell’s scholastic ability was noticed and he became one of the few “scholarship boys” that won free entry to the more reputable Wellington and later Eton School.

    On holidays back at home, Orwell developed a lifelong love of the English countryside and fishing, rather conservative passions one doesn’t associate with a radical thinker. He also became attracted to Jacintha Buddicom, a girl two years’ older than him. Buddicom revealed that books were a common denominator between the two and that Blair dreamed of being a famous writer.

    “I was never without a book in my hand and nor was he,” she said. “He was always going to write, and he was always going to be a Famous Writer. He used to say, ‘When I’m a famous…’ and I used to say, ‘When you’re a famous writer…’ That was his trademark, Eric the Famous Writer.”

    Buddicom inspired the young Orwell to write a poem about her independent spirit. By then, he had already published a poem in a local newspaper at the age of 11, a patriotic ditty called “Awake! Young Men of England.”

    From 1917 – 1922, Orwell was a King’s Scholar at Eton. A fellow Etonion recalls that Eric Blair loved arguing: “Endless arguments about all sorts of things, in which he was one of the great leaders. He was one of those boys who thought for himself, and at an age when a good many schoolboys haven’t graduated out of thinking the way they’d been taught to think.”

    Upon graduation from Eton, Blair chose not to continue onto Oxford or Cambridge. He hadn’t studied hard enough to win a scholarship and his parents couldn’t afford to send him. In those days, the usual career path was chosen based on who your father knew. In Blair’s case, it was the Indian Civil Service in Burma. And that was how Blair came to leave England for a job with the Burmese Police on October 27, 1922.

    We see what Orwell discovered in the five following years in one of his early novels, Burmese Days. The fictional character, John Flory is angered by the sham of Imperial Britain and how it has made him, “a creature of the despotism, tied tighter than a monk or a savage by an unbreakable system of taboos.”

    After Orwell’s first trip back home to England in 1927, he chose not to return to Burma, telling his family that he wanted to be a writer instead. It caused a small scandal according to longtime residents of the seaside town of Southwold where Orwell’s parents eventually retired.

    “…he had socialist ideas I suppose, hadn’t he? And Mr. Blair Senior wouldn’t really agree with that. Also, I think there was a bit of a row when he gave up his job. I mean, young men didn’t give up jobs in those days. They did what their fathers wanted them to, more or less.”

    Another resident remembered, “…Eric used to go on long walks across the marshes, looking for birds and flowers. He was very keen on that. And he was always talking to whoever he was with; it was usually only one person. He had his opinions which nobody really took any notice of till just before he died. Sad, wasn’t it? His first books were no use. When Down and Out was published as George Orwell, everybody here knew it was Eric. We were all rather horrified at it – his being a tramp, you know. We thought it was rather a funny thing to do. I think his parents thought so too.”

    Even the local tailor agreed that Orwell was unusual, saying “He was looked upon here as a little bit eccentric,” later adding that Orwell’s father was a snob and that if the tailor, who was not considered ‘society’, encountered the elder Blair on a Sunday, the old autocrat would walk straight past him with no gesture of recognition. “Avril [Orwell’s younger sister] was a bit the same. It was a bit of an honour to be served cakes by her! They’d all got a bit of that. I didn’t notice it with Eric so much, though.”

    Shortly after Orwell returned from Burma, he was asked to define his own politics. He replied, “Tory anarchist.” Wadhams notes here that although Orwell later embraced socialism in the 1930s, “he never lost his suspicion of organizations and institutions.”

    Wadhams describes Orwell’s socialism as not being so much about changing human society based on some doctrine. “Orwell’s socialism sprang from a simple, passionate desire to support the underdog, to right obvious wrongs. If the role of the underdog shifted from the worker to the boss, Orwell was more than likely to switch sides. This made him a contradictory character without the apparent consistency of orthodox reformers who were more willing to adhere to theories long after the supporting facts had changed.”

    Wadhams contends it was Orwell’s hatred of injustice that led him to write about poverty. “And with a straightforward and powerful subject came his equally straightforward and powerful writing style,” writes Wadhams.

    Orwell started “tramping” in East London in the autumn, 1927 followed by a stint in Paris the following spring. That may account for his first professional article being published in Le Monde in 1928.

    Although slumming it provided the material for another early book, Down and Out in London and Paris [1933], it likely strained his health says Wadhams. “Orwell always felt that he had to write from experience…and was constantly stimulating his imagination by going out into the world to find ‘experiences.’ And in doing so – as investigator, journalist, and novelist – Orwell always got his hands dirty. If he was going to write about tramps, he would live with tramps. If he was to document the poverty of the depressed mining communities of the north of England, he would live among the unemployed and go down into the mines himself. There is no doubt that Orwell damaged his health by ‘slumming it’ in London and Paris and trudging around Wigan, Barnsley and Liverpool in February and March 1936.”

    In February 1929, Orwell spent several weeks in Paris’s Hôpital Cochin with pneumonia. Then, before Christmas in 1933, he came down with pneumonia again. Clearly, he had weak lungs. In 1938, Orwell suffered a tubercular lesion in one lung and entered a sanitorium in Kent – a harbinger of what his last years would be like.

    Before Orwell’s father died, he saw his son’s first published book. A friend, Mabel Fierz helped Orwell find the publisher Victor Gollancz.

    Orwell bared his heart to Fierz. “That was a great sorrow to him, that he never came up to his father’s expectations. His father didn’t think he’d ever make money as a writer, and when his father was dying [1939] they were able to show him Orwell’s latest book, and that was a great comfort to Eric. So, his father and he parted friends when his father died. That was the reason he changed his name – that if his book was an absolute failure, he didn’t want the name Blair, his father’s name, to be thought badly of.”

    Fierz also sheds light on Orwell’s early romantic life. “He used to say the one thing he wished in this world was that he’d been attractive to women. He liked women and had many girlfriends, I think, in Burma. He had a girl in Southwold and another girl in London. He was rather a womanizer, yet he was afraid he wasn’t attractive.”

    It was through Fierz that Orwell met his first wife Eileen O’Shaughnessy in 1935. She had graduated in English from Oxford University. Her friend Lydia Jackson recalled the meeting.

    “A fellow student of ours gave a party. George and Richard Rees were there, and I remember looking at the two of them. They were both standing by the fireplace, leaning on it, and I thought what unattractive men they were. Rather faded and worn. That was my impression. Anyway, after that party in London she told me that Eric Blair ‘sort of’ proposed to her, saying that he wasn’t much good, but even so perhaps she would consider him. And I said, ‘And did you?’ and she said yes. I was rather appalled…But Eileen had said before, that when she reached thirty she would get married. George talked in a way that intrigued her, interested her, because he was an unusual person. I’m very doubtful if she was in love with him. I think it must have been his outspokenness that attracted her.

    The next year Orwell moved to a small cottage in Wallington, Hertfordshire where he married Eileen. In the rented cottage, Orwell divided his time between writing The Road to Wigan Pier and acting as the village shopkeeper. He hoped to earn a small income and “some independence from the ups and downs of life as a moderately successful author,” writes Wadhams.

    In any event, less than a year later, in January 1937, Orwell went to Spain to fight for the Spanish Republican Government as it was under attack by General Franco. Eileen followed, arriving in Barcelona in February, visiting Orwell at the front for two days in the middle of March.

    “Fighting with a group of mainly British volunteers who, like him, had gone to Spain to combat fascism and prevent the wider war many believed was otherwise inevitable, Orwell felt at one with the working class,” says Wadhams. “He was noting what he saw, and his observations would no doubt end up in print, but he was also fighting shoulder to shoulder with British working men, and for a working-class cause: an elected government that sought to challenge the traditional Spanish elite.”

    Two events from this time period might catch the casual Orwell reader by surprise. The first, and one that is well-known to Orwell scholars and historians is that although Orwell was initially inspired by the revolutionary atmosphere in Barcelona, by the time he left six months later with a throat wound (he had been shot through the throat while fighting), the atmosphere had turned poisonous. Turns out that among the socialist militias who came to the Republican Government’s aid, there were Trotskyists. As a result, the communists who controlled the Spanish Republicans began persecuting Orwell’s militia.

    “Orwell claimed he was in danger of being arrested, imprisoned or even shot by the communists, working men who had earlier been his comrades,” says Wadhams. Orwell himself wrote, “It was a queer business. We started off by being heroic defenders of democracy, and ended up by slipping over the border with the police at our heels.”

    Orwell was shocked to see his fellow workers spending more time and energy fighting each other than their common enemy. He also believed that the Soviet Union had become an anti-revolutionary force, helping to suppress many of the socialists fighting in Spain. For these reasons, Orwell no longer supported the Soviet Union. He wrote this into his account of the Spanish experience in Homage to Catalonia. The book thereafter put Orwell at odds with many other communists and socialists in England.

    The second happening recalled by one of Orwell’s fellow fighters, was that Orwell diligently fought when he had to and likely killed people on the Fascist side. “We were attacking a troublesome salient, and Orwell wanted a hand grenade and I gave him one,” says Douglas Moyle who was in Orwell’s contingent. “He threw it, and there was a scream from a person being wounded, or perhaps even being killed by it.”

    But as Moyle adds, the military action was rare and he often found Orwell reading to pass time in the trenches. “I was surprised to find him sitting quietly by himself, sheltering from the cold wind, reading a little volume of Shakespeare’s plays. He didn’t speak, and I realized he would rather be left alone. We thought he was rather ‘putting it on,’ but as a literary man he was doing no more than taking some exercise in the sort of thing he liked doing.”


    The youngest soldier in Orwell’s group, 18-year-old Stafford Cottman says Orwell was a natural leader. “He had the common touch. He could talk to anyone,” recalls Cottman. “You had respect for him. He knew what he was talking about, you felt he did. There are people who one is more inclined to listen to than others, and George Orwell was such a man.”

    Orwell returned to his Wallington cottage in England with Eileen where he wrote Homage. His fellow Spanish fighters often visited him, including Moyle who notes that Eileen cooked a lovely dinner with all the trimmings. Afterwards Moyle and Orwell went on long walks in the countryside, taking Orwell’s dog along. “He was a lovely French poodle, and he was called Marx.”

    After spending time in a Kent sanatorium for a tubercular lesion, Orwell and Eileen travelled to Morocco in the winter of 1938 for Orwell’s health. Here, Orwell wrote the novel Coming Up for Air that warned of war and included themes he would fully explore in his tour de force, Nineteen Eight Four.

    When the second world war started, Eileen moved to London to work in the Censorship Department. Orwell was to follow in August 1941, taking a job at BBC Radio as a producer in the Indian Service. They kept the Wallington cottage for weekends.

    Just prior to the BBC job, Orwell wrote and published a short book, that called for an English revolution. While at the home of this book’s future publisher, Frederic Warburg, Orwell met Tosco Fyvel. “He was tall, gaunt, with deep grooves in his face. Poor hair, poor skin, and a poor little mustache. He looked like a sort of seedy sahib, one of the many British Imperial administrators I’d met in the Middle East,” says Fyvel of his first impression of Orwell. “At the time we all believed you could have both patriotism and socialism. Orwell was trying to identify himself with England in its finest hour. Out of this meeting came the project for Searchlight Books. I insisted Orwell should write the first one. It was called The Lion and the Unicorn. In it Orwell wrote as a patriotic socialist. He hoped for a British revolution, but it had to be a patriotic revolution. So my credit was, I managed to extract from Orwell, with this book, the only really positive, optimistic book he ever wrote.”

    Whether or not Fyvel can take all the credit for what he described as Orwell’s “moment of hope” is up for conjecture. But he quotes Orwell as supporting the upper-class Etonians who could be counted on to fight for their country. “He always said that the British ruling classes might be politically and financially corrupt, but they were not morally corrupt…I mean when the hour came, they were all ready to fight and give their lives for the country.”

    Orwell was refused war service due to his bad health. To contribute, he became a sergeant for the Home Guard. His publisher Warburg was in the same St. John’s Wood company. He recalled, that, “there was practically nothing about the Home Guard that didn’t suit Orwell’s temperament, until it began to be efficient.”

    Henry Swanzy joined the BBC at the same time as Orwell. The two became friends and Orwell invited Swanzy to his and Eileen’s London flat for tea. “I always remember the extraordinary remark he made about her before I met her. He said, ‘Well, come along to tea on Sunday, my wife isn’t a bad old stick.’ Don’t you think that was a very odd expression? Of course that is a phrase that was used very much in middle-class circles, really, and I did notice in Orwell a kind of arrogance, or superiority towards materialism and the whole money society, the sort of attitude where it wasn’t altogether done to make a lot of money, where to be Left was an anti-materialistic thing.”

    In addition to his radio work, Orwell freelanced articles for Horizon, Partisan Review, Tribune, The Observer and other publications. He resigned from the BBC in 1943 to work on a new book. He met a young translator of Ibsen and Strindberg named Michael Meyer who thought it would be a good idea to arrange a meeting between Orwell and the novelist Graham Greene. The three met in a Soho restaurant on a hot June day. Meyer worried that it might not go well because Greene thought George was a good writer, but not a good novelist. And Orwell thought any religion, which was so important to Greene, was more or less humbug.

    “I felt very small, because I’m only five foot eight, and Graham Greene is six foot two and Orwell was six foot four. But they liked each other at once and got on very well. They were both very straight, unaffected men. They hated any kind of affectation, they were both very independent thinkers, and so appealed to each other.”

    Meyer found that Orwell wasn’t good at describing the plots of his books although he floated his story ideas and theories to his many friends and fellow writers. “I once asked George what he was doing, and he said, ‘I’m writing a kind of parable, about people who are blind to the dangers of totalitarianism.’ He described the new book as being about a farm run by people, where the animals take over and make just as bad a job of it so they call in the humans again. And that was Animal Farm…It’s so marvelously simple, one of the wisest and deepest books ever written. When I read it, I was staggered and delighted because it bore no relation to his awful summary.”

    Orwell and his wife adopted a baby boy, Richard, before Animal Farm was published. Tragically, Eileen died shortly afterwards while under anesthetic for an operation. Orwell hired a housekeeper to look after himself and Richard. It could have been a difficult time because many publishers had shied away from Animal Farm. The problem being, writes Wadhams the book’s “clear anti-Soviet theme made publishers nervous; Stalin was still a vital ally of the British Government.”


    When the Book-of-the-Month Club in the United States chose Animal Farm in 1946 and gave it an initial printing of half a million copies, Orwell finally had financial security for the first time in his life.

    Fellow writer and friend Malcom Muggeridge saw Animal Farm as a masterpiece satire although he understood the reluctance of publishers at the time. “It’s a beautiful piece of work, and it was refused by fourteen publishers (twelve in the USA), so that’s a good sign! I asked Gollancz [Victor] once how he felt about turning down Animal Farm, and he said, ‘Well, I regret it as a publisher, but I don’t regret it as a citizen, because at that time it was right not to have something which was an obvious attack on the USSR.’ Even that wasn’t quite true, you know, because although it was the USSR that people had in mind, at the same time I think that George was really making a case against every form of authoritarian government, and it just happened that the model available at that time was the USSR. What obsessed George in writing Animal Farm was that human beings were going to lose their taste for freedom. And I think that was a just fear. This is what he dreaded.”

    If Orwell was now financially free to devote his time to writing, he was also a very sick man writes Wadhams. “From the moment Orwell began writing Nineteen Eighty-Four in the summer of 1946, he knew there was a danger that the ill health that had shadowed him all his life might prevent him from committing to paper the ideas he had been formulating for several years.”

    Orwell spent time living in a stone farmhouse that summer in the northern part of Jura, an underpopulated island in the Inner Hebrides on the Scottish west coast. “There in his stuffy upstairs bedroom, with his hand-rolled cigarette dangling from his lips, he worked on the manuscript of Nineteen Eighty-Four, looking up occasionally to watch the ocean waves crashing on the shore a few yards away,” writes Wadhams.

    Orwell was driven to warn the English and the wider Western world of what he claimed in a letter as, “perversions to which a centralized economy is liable and which have already been partly realized in Communism and Fascism.” Orwell added that he believed, “totalitarian ideas have taken root in the minds of intellectuals everywhere and I have tried to draw these ideas out to their logical consequences.”

    Orwell’s working title for the book was “The Last Man in Europe,” because that was how he saw himself says Wadhams, “a solitary man fighting against the powerful forces of an advancing machine society, a mass society that would drain from the individual the taste for freedom.”



    from Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell; pages v-vi (“A Note on the Text” by Peter Davison):

    As a child Orwell was fascinated by H. G. Wells’s Modern Utopia. He told Jacintha Buddicom that he might one day write a similar type of book. He was introduced to Yevgeny Zamyatine's We by Gleb Struve, and he told him on 17 February 1944, ‘I am interested in that kind of book, and even keep making notes for one myself that may get written sooner or later.’ Orwell began writing his last novel in earnest at Barnhill, Jura, in the summer of 1946 and by the autumn had typed some fifty pages of which pages 25-38 (Goldstein’s Testament) survive. These form part of the draft of the novel, about 40 per cent of which still exists and has been reproduced in facsimle (ed. P. Davison, 1984). From this it can be established that Orwell completed his first draft in the early autumn of 1947 (of which ten pages survive) and revised the whole novel in the summer and autumn of 1948. He was by now very sick and in pain, but he struggled through November to retype the whole book, revising it as he did so, and he posted copies to Fredric Warburg and his agent, Leonard Moore, on 3 December 1948; a third copy was sent to New York. The draft has many points of interest, but two are particularly worth recording here.

    As a result of Orwell’s novel, the year 1984 became a legend before it arrived. However, that was not the year Orwell initially intended. He first set his story in 1980, but, as the time taken to write the book dragged on (partly because of his illness), that was changed to 1982 and, later, to 1984. The second interesting feature is a passage Orwell cut out from the final version. After their meeting with O’Brien, Julia and Winston depart separately. In the draft, Julia waits for Winston. This is part of the passage cut out from the conclusion to Part II, section viii (page 186):


    He had gone perhaps two hundred metres, and was in the dark patch midway between two street lamps, when he was startled by something soft bumping against him. The next moment Julia’s arms were clinging tightly round him.

    ‘You see I’ve broken my first order,’ she whispered with her lips close against his ear. ‘But I couldn’t help it. We hadn’t fixed up about tomorrow. Listen.’ In the usual manner, she gave him instructions about their next meeting. ‘And now, good-night, my love, good-night!’

    She kissed his cheek almost violently a number of times, then slipped away into the shadow of the wall and promptly disappeared. Her lips had been cold, and in the darkness it had seemed to him that her face was pale. He had a curious feeling that although the purpose for which she had waited was to arrange another meeting, the embrace she had given him was intended as some kind of good-bye.


    - page viii:

    Orwell’s first book, Down and Out in Paris and London, and several thereafter suffered from ‘in-house censorship’. His last underwent the same fate in at least one of its many editions and translations. A Spanish version for publication in Argentina was the subject of the very last surviving letter to Orwell from his agent, Leonard Moore, dated 22 November 1949, two months before his death. Moore told Orwell that the Argentine publishers wanted cuts made of some 140 lines because ‘the Spanish language is cruder than the English’ and the authorities might be induced to ban Nineteen Eighty-Four ‘on some quite irrelevant point of morality’. That would mean the loss of a book the basic philosophy of which was ‘aimed directly against some of the most powerful movements of our time’. Among passages causing particular concern in Argentina were page 70, lines 3-23 and much of pages 131-3.



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    - Pages 130-33:

    ‘Look!’ whispered Julia.

    A thrush had alighted on a bough not five metres away, almost at the level of their faces. Perhaps it had not seen them. It was in the sun, they in the shade. It spread out its wings, fitted them carefully into place again, ducked its head for a moment, as though making a sort of obeisance to the sun, and then began to pour forth a torrent of song. In the afternoon hush the volume of sound was startling. Winston and Julia clung together, fascinated. The music went on and on, minute after minute, with astonishing variations, never once repeating itself, almost as though the bird were deliberately showing off its virtuosity. Sometimes it stopped for a few seconds, spread out and resettled its wings, then swelled its speckled breast and again burst into song. Winston watched it with a sort of vague reverence. For whom, for what, was that bird singing? No mate, no rival was watching it. What made it sit at the edge of the lonely wood and pour its music into nothingness? He wondered whether after all there was a microphone hidden somewhere near. He and Julia had spoken only in low whispers, and it would not pick up what they had said, but it would pick up the thrush. Perhaps at the other end of the instrument some small, beetle-like man was listening intently — listening to that. But by degrees the flood of music drove all speculations out of his mind. It was as though it were a kind of liquid stuff that poured all over him and got mixed up with the sunlight that filtered through the leaves. He stopped thinking and merely felt. The girl’s waist in the bend of his arm was soft and warm. He pulled her round so that they were breast to breast; her body seemed to melt into his. Wherever his hands moved it was all as yielding as water. Their mouths clung together; it was quite different from the hard kisses they had exchanged earlier. When they moved their faces apart again both of them sighed deeply. The bird took fright and fled with a clatter of wings.

    Winston put his lips against her ear. ‘Now,’ he whispered.

    ‘Not here,’ she whispered back. ‘Come back to the hide- out. It’s safer.’

    Quickly, with an occasional crackle of twigs, they threaded their way back to the clearing. When they were once inside the ring of saplings she turned and faced him. They were both breathing fast. but the smile had reappeared round the corners of her mouth. She stood looking at him for an instant, then felt at the zipper of her overalls. And, yes! it was almost as in his dream. Almost as swiftly as he had imagined it, she had torn her clothes off, and when she flung them aside it was with that same magnificent gesture by which a whole civilization seemed to be annihilated. Her body gleamed white in the sun. But for a moment he did not look at her body; his eyes were anchored by the freckled face with its faint, bold smile. He knelt down before her and took her hands in his.

    ‘Have you done this before?’

    ‘Of course. Hundreds of times—well scores of times anyway.’

    ‘With Party members.’

    ‘Yes, always with Party members.’

    ‘With members of the Inner Party?’

    ‘Not with those swine, no. But there’s plenty that would if they got half a chance. They’re not so holy as they make out.’

    His heart leapt. Scores of times she had done it: he wished it had been hundreds—thousands. Anything that hinted at corruption always filled him with a wild hope. Who knew, perhaps the Party was rotten under the surface, its cult of strenuousness and self-denial simply a sham concealing iniquity. If he could have infected the whole lot of them with leprosy or syphilis, how gladly he would have done so! Anything to rot, to weaken, to undermine! He pulled her down so that they were kneeling face to face.

    ‘Listen. The more men you’ve had, the more I love you. Do you understand that?’

    ‘Yes, perfectly.’

    ‘I hate purity, I hate goodness! I don’t want any virtue to exist anywhere. I want everyone to be corrupt to the bones.

    ‘Well then, I ought to suit you, dear. I’m corrupt to the bones.’

    ‘You like doing this? I don’t mean simply me: I mean the thing in itself?’

    ‘I adore it.’

    That was above all what he wanted to hear. Not merely the love of one person but the animal instinct, the simple undifferentiated desire: that was the force that would tear the Party to pieces. He pressed her down upon the grass, among the fallen bluebells. This time there was no difficulty. Presently the rising and falling of their breasts slowed to normal speed, and in a sort of pleasant helplessness they fell apart. The sun seemed to have grown hotter. They were both sleepy. He reached out for the discarded overalls and pulled them partly over her. Almost immediately they fell asleep and slept for about half an hour.

    Winston woke first. He sat up and watched the freckled face, still peacefully asleep, pillowed on the palm of her hand. Except for her mouth, you could not call her beautiful. There was a line or two round the eyes, if you looked closely. The short dark hair was extraordinarily thick and soft. It occurred to him that he still did not know her surname or where she lived.

    The young, strong body, now helpless in sleep, awoke in him a pitying, protecting feeling. But the mindless tenderness that he had felt under the hazel tree, while the thrush was singing, had not quite come back. He pulled the overalls aside and studied her smooth white flank. In the old days, he thought, a man looked at a girl’s body and saw that it was desirable, and that was the end of the story. But you could not have pure love or pure lust nowadays. No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred. Their embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory. It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act.

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    - Pages 9-22:

    For whom, it suddenly occurred to him to wonder, was he writing this diary? For the future, for the unborn. His mind hovered for a moment round the doubtful date on the page, and then fetched up with a bump against the Newspeak word doublethink. For the first time the magnitude of what he had undertaken came home to him. How could you communicate with the future? It was of its nature impossible. Either the future would resemble the present, in which case it would not listen to him: or it would be different from it, and his predicament would be meaningless.

    For some time he sat gazing stupidly at the paper. The telescreen had changed over to strident military music. It was 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 of the skin above his ankle, the blaring of the music, and a slight booziness caused by the gin.

    Suddenly he began writing in sheer panic, only imperfectly aware of what he was setting down. His small but childish handwriting straggled up and down the page, shedding first its capital letters and finally even its full stops:

    April 4th, 1984. Last night to the flicks. All war films. One very good one of a ship full of refugees being bombed somewhere in the Mediterranean. Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away with a helicopter after him, first you saw him wallowing along in the water like a porpoise, then you saw him through the helicopters gunsights, then he was full of holes and the sea round him turned pink and he sank as suddenly as though the holes had let in the water, audience shouting with laughter when he sank. then you saw a lifeboat full of children with a helicopter hovering over it. there was a middle-aged woman might have been a jewess sitting up in the bow with a little boy about three years old in her arms. little boy screaming with fright and hiding his head between her breasts as if he was trying to burrow right into her and the woman putting her arms round him and comforting him although she was blue with fright herself, all the time covering him up as much as possible as if she thought her arms could keep the bullets off him. then the helicopter planted a 20 kilo bomb in among them terrific flash and the boat went all to matchwood. then there was a wonderful shot of a child’s arm going up up up right up into the air a helicopter with a camera in its nose must have followed it up and there was a lot of applause from the party seats but a woman down in the prole part of the house suddenly started kicking up a fuss and shouting they didnt oughter of showed it not in front of kids they didnt it aint right not in front of kids it aint until the police turned her turned her out i dont suppose anything happened to her nobody cares what the proles say typical prole reaction they never

    Winston stopped writing, partly because he was suffering from cramp. He did not know what had made him pour out this stream of rubbish. But the curious thing was that while he was doing so a totally different memory had clarified itself in his mind, to the point where he almost felt equal to writing it down. It was, he now realized, because of this other incident that he had suddenly decided to come home and begin the diary today.

    It had happened that morning at the Ministry, if anything so nebulous could be said to happen.

    It was nearly eleven hundred, and in the Records Department, where Winston worked, they were dragging the chairs out of the cubicles and grouping them in the centre of the hall opposite the big telescreen, in preparation for the Two Minutes Hate. Winston was just taking his place in one of the middle rows when two people whom he knew by sight, but had never spoken to, came unexpectedly into the room. One of them was a girl whom he often passed in the corridors. He did not know her name, but he knew that she worked in the Fiction Department. Presumably—since he had sometimes seen her with oily hands and carrying a spanner she had some mechanical job on one of the novel-writing machines. She was a bold-looking girl, of about twenty- seven, with thick hair, a freckled face, and swift, athletic movements. A narrow scarlet sash, emblem of the Junior Anti-Sex League, was wound several times round the waist of her overalls, just tightly enough to bring out the shapeliness of her hips. Winston had disliked her from the very first moment of seeing her. He knew the reason. It was because of the atmosphere of hockey-fields and cold baths and community hikes and general clean- mindedness which she managed to carry about with her. He disliked nearly all women, and especially the young and pretty ones. It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy. But this particular girl gave him the impression of being more dangerous than most. Once when they passed in the corridor she gave him a quick sidelong glance which seemed to pierce right into him and for a moment had filled him with black terror. The idea had even crossed his mind that she might be an agent of the Thought Police. That, it was true, was very unlikely. Still, he continued to feel a peculiar uneasiness, which had fear mixed up in it as well as hostility, whenever she was anywhere near him.

    The other person was a man named O’Brien, a member of the Inner Party and holder of some post so important and remote that Winston had only a dim idea of its nature. A momentary hush passed over the group of people round the chairs as they saw the black overalls of an Inner Party member approaching. O’Brien was a large, burly man with a thick neck and a coarse, humorous, brutal face. In spite of his formidable appearance he had a certain charm of manner. He had a trick of resettling his spectacles on his nose which was curiously disarming—in some indefinable way, curiously civilized. It was a gesture which, if anyone had still thought in such terms, might have recalled an eighteenth-century nobleman offering his snuffbox. Winston had seen O’Brien perhaps a dozen times in almost as many years. He felt deeply drawn to him, and not solely because he was intrigued by the contrast between O’Brien’s urbane manner and his prize-fighter’s physique. Much more it was because of a secretly held belief—or perhaps not even a belief, merely a hope—that O’Brien’s political orthodoxy was not perfect. Something in his face suggested it irresistibly. And again, perhaps it was not even unorthodoxy that was written in his face, but simply intelligence. But at any rate he had the appearance of being a person that you could talk to if somehow you could cheat the telescreen and get him alone. Winston had never made the smallest effort to verify this guess: indeed, there was no way of doing so. At this moment O’Brien glanced at his wrist-watch, saw that it was nearly eleven hundred, and evidently decided to stay in the Records Department until the Two Minutes Hate was over. He took a chair in the same row as Winston, a couple of places away. A small, sandy-haired woman who worked in the next cubicle to Winston was between them. The girl with dark hair was sitting immediately behind.

    The next moment a hideous, grinding speech, as of some monstrous machine running without oil, burst from the big telescreen at the end of the room. It was a noise that set one’s teeth on edge and bristled the hair at the back of one’s neck. The Hate had started.

    As usual, the face of Emmanuel Goldstein, the Enemy of the People, had flashed on to the screen. There were hisses here and there among the audience. The little sandy-haired woman gave a squeak of mingled fear and disgust. Goldstein was the renegade and backslider who once, long ago (how long ago, nobody quite remembered), had been one of the leading figures of the Party, almost on a level with Big Brother himself, and then had engaged in counter-revolutionary activities, had been condemned to death, and had mysteriously escaped and disappeared. The programmes of the Two Minutes Hate varied from day to day, but there was none in which Goldstein was not the principal figure. He was the primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the Party’s purity. All subsequent crimes against the Party, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations, sprang directly out of his teaching. Somewhere or other he was still alive and hatching his conspiracies: perhaps somewhere beyond the sea, under the protection of his foreign paymasters, perhaps even—so it was occasionally rumoured—in some hiding-place in Oceania itself.

    Winston’s diaphragm was constricted. He could never see the face of Goldstein without a painful mixture of emotions. It was a lean Jewish face, with a great fuzzy aureole of white hair and a small goatee beard—a clever face, and yet somehow inherently despicable, with a kind of senile silliness in the long thin nose, near the end of which a pair of spectacles was perched. It resembled the face of a sheep, and the voice, too, had a sheep-like quality. Goldstein was delivering his usual venomous attack upon the doctrines of the Party—an attack so exaggerated and perverse that a child should have been able to see through it, and yet just plausible enough to fill one with an alarmed feeling that other people, less level-headed than oneself, might be taken in by it. He was abusing Big Brother, he was denouncing the dictatorship of the Party, he was demanding the immediate conclusion of peace with Eurasia, he was advocating freedom of speech, freedom of the Press, freedom of assembly, freedom of thought, he was crying hysterically that the revolution had been betrayed—and all this in rapid polysyllabic speech which was a sort of parody of the habitual style of the orators of the Party, and even contained Newspeak words: more Newspeak words, indeed, than any Party member would normally use in real life. And all the while, lest one should be in any doubt as to the reality which Goldstein’s specious claptrap covered, behind his head on the telescreen there marched the endless columns of the Eurasian army—row after row of solid-looking men with expressionless Asiatic faces, who swam up to the surface of the screen and vanished, to be replaced by others exactly similar. The dull rhythmic tramp of the soldiers’ boots formed the background to Goldstein’s bleating voice.

    Before the Hate had proceeded for thirty seconds, uncontrollable exclamations of rage were breaking out from half the people in the room. The self-satisfied sheep-like face on the screen, and the terrifying power of the Eurasian army behind it, were too much to be borne: besides, the sight or even the thought of Goldstein produced fear and anger automatically. He was an object of hatred more constant than either Eurasia or Eastasia, since when Oceania was at war with one of these Powers it was generally at peace with the other. But what was strange was that although Goldstein was hated and despised by everybody, although every day and a thousand times a day, on platforms, on the telescreen, in newspapers, in books, his theories were refuted, smashed, ridiculed, held up to the general gaze for the pitiful rubbish that they were in spite of all this, his influence never seemed to grow less. Always there were fresh dupes waiting to be seduced by him. A day never passed when spies and saboteurs acting under his directions were not unmasked by the Thought Police. He was the commander of a vast shadowy army, an underground network of conspirators dedicated to the overthrow of the State. The Brotherhood, its name was supposed to be. There were also whispered stories of a terrible book, a compendium of all the heresies, of which Goldstein was the author and which circulated clandestinely here and there. It was a book without a title. People referred to it, if at all, simply as the book. But one knew of such things only through vague rumours. Neither the Brotherhood nor the book was a subject that any ordinary Party member would mention if there was a way of avoiding it.

    In its second minute the Hate rose to a frenzy. People were leaping up and down in their places and shouting at the tops of their voices in an effort to drown the maddening bleating voice that came from the screen. The little sandy- haired woman had turned bright pink, and her mouth was opening and shutting like that of a landed fish. Even O’Brien’s heavy face was flushed. He was sitting very straight in his chair, his powerful chest swelling and quivering as though he were standing up to the assault of a wave. The dark-haired girl behind Winston had begun crying out ‘Swine! Swine! Swine!’ and suddenly she picked up a heavy Newspeak dictionary and flung it at the screen. It struck Goldstein’s nose and bounced off; the voice continued inexorably. In a lucid moment Winston found that he was shouting with the others and kicking his heel violently against the rung of his chair. The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge-hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp. Thus, at one moment Winston’s hatred was not turned against Goldstein at all, but, on the contrary, against Big Brother, the Party, and the Thought Police; and at such moments his heart went out to the lonely, derided heretic on the screen, sole guardian of truth and sanity in a world of lies. And yet the very next instant he was at one with the people about him, and all that was said of Goldstein seemed to him to be true. At those moments his secret loathing of Big Brother changed into adoration, and Big Brother seemed to tower up, an invincible, fearless protector, standing like a rock against the hordes of Asia, and Goldstein, in spite of his isolation, his helplessness, and the doubt that hung about his very existence, seemed like some sinister enchanter, capable by the mere power of his voice of wrecking the structure of civilization.

    It was even possible, at moments, to switch one’s hatred this way or that by a voluntary act. Suddenly, by the sort of violent effort with which one wrenches one’s head away from the pillow in a nightmare, Winston succeeded in transferring his hatred from the face on the screen to the dark-haired girl behind him. Vivid, beautiful hallucinations flashed through his mind. He would flog her to death with a rubber truncheon. He would tie her naked to a stake and shoot her full of arrows like Saint Sebastian. He would ravish her and cut her throat at the moment of climax. Better than before, moreover, he realized why it was that he hated her. He hated her because she was young and pretty and sexless, because he wanted to go to bed with her and would never do so, because round her sweet supple waist, which seemed to ask you to encircle it with your arm, there was only the odious scarlet sash, aggressive symbol of chastity.

    The Hate rose to its climax. The voice of Goldstein had become an actual sheep’s bleat, and for an instant the face changed into that of a sheep. Then the sheep-face melted into the figure of a Eurasian soldier who seemed to be advancing, huge and terrible, his sub-machine gun roaring, and seeming to spring out of the surface of the screen, so that some of the people in the front row actually flinched backwards in their seats. But in the same moment, drawing a deep sigh of relief from everybody, the hostile figure melted into the face of Big Brother, black-haired, blackmoustachio’d, full of power and mysterious calm, and so vast that it almost filled up the screen. Nobody heard what Big Brother was saying. It was merely a few words of encouragement, the sort of words that are uttered in the din of battle, not distinguishable individually but restoring confidence by the fact of being spoken. Then the face of Big Brother faded away again, and instead the three slogans of the Party stood out in bold capitals:

    WAR IS PEACE
    FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
    IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH


    But the face of Big Brother seemed to persist for several seconds on the screen, as though the impact that it had made on everyone’s eyeballs was too vivid to wear off immediately. The little sandyhaired woman had flung herself forward over the back of the chair in front of her. With a tremulous murmur that sounded like ‘My Saviour!’ she extended her arms towards the screen. Then she buried her face in her hands. It was apparent that she was uttering a prayer.

    At this moment the entire group of people broke into a deep, slow, rhythmical chant of ‘B-B! . . . B-B!’—over and over again, very slowly, with a long pause between the first ‘B’ and the second-a heavy, murmurous sound, somehow curiously savage, in the background of which one seemed to hear the stamp of naked feet and the throbbing of tom-toms. For perhaps as much as thirty seconds they kept it up. It was a refrain that was often heard in moments of overwhelming emotion. Partly it was a sort of hymn to the wisdom and majesty of Big Brother, but still more it was an act of self-hypnosis, a deliberate drowning of consciousness by means of rhythmic noise. Winston’s entrails seemed to grow cold. In the Two Minutes Hate he could not help sharing in the general delirium, but this sub-human chanting of ‘B- B! . . . B-B !’ always filled him with horror. Of course he chanted with the rest: it was impossible to do otherwise. To dissemble your feelings, to control your face, to do what everyone else was doing, was an instinctive reaction. But there was a space of a couple of seconds during which the expression of his eyes might conceivably have betrayed him. And it was exactly at this moment that the significant thing happened—if, indeed, it did happen.

    Momentarily he caught O’Brien’s eye. O’Brien had stood up. He had taken off his spectacles and was in the act of resettling them on his nose with his characteristic gesture. But there was a fraction of a second when their eyes met, and for as long as it took to happen Winston knew—yes, he knew!—that O’Brien was thinking the same thing as himself. An unmistakable message had passed. It was as though their two minds had opened and the thoughts were flowing from one into the other through their eyes. ‘I am with you,’ O’Brien seemed to be saying to him. ‘I know precisely what you are feeling. I know all about your contempt, your hatred, your disgust. But don’t worry, I am on your side!’ And then the flash of intelligence was gone, and O’Brien’s face was as inscrutable as everybody else’s.

    That was all, and he was already uncertain whether it had happened. Such incidents never had any sequel. All that they did was to keep alive in him the belief, or hope, that others besides himself were the enemies of the Party. Perhaps the rumours of vast underground conspiracies were true after all—perhaps the Brotherhood really existed ! It was impossible, in spite of the endless arrests and confessions and executions, to be sure that the Brotherhood was not simply a myth. Some days he believed in it, some days not. There was no evidence, only fleeting glimpses that might mean anything or nothing: snatches of overheard conversation, faint scribbles on lavatory walls—once, even, when two strangers met, a small movement of the hand which had looked as though it might be a signal of recognition. It was all guesswork: very likely he had imagined everything. He had gone back to his cubicle without looking at O’Brien again. The idea of following up their momentary contact hardly crossed his mind. It would have been inconceivably dangerous even if he had known how to set about doing it. For a second, two seconds, they had exchanged an equivocal glance, and that was the end of the story. But even that was a memorable event, in the locked loneliness in which one had to live.

    Winston roused himself and sat up straighter. He let out a belch. The gin was rising from his stomach.

    His eyes re-focused on the page. He discovered that while he sat helplessly musing he had also been writing, as though by automatic action. And it was no longer the same cramped, awkward handwriting as before. His pen had slid voluptuously over the smooth paper, printing in large neat capitals

    DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
    DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
    DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
    DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
    DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER

    over and over again, filling half a page.

    He could not help feeling a twinge of panic. It was absurd, since the writing of those particular words was not more dangerous than the initial act of opening the diary, but for a moment he was tempted to tear out the spoiled pages and abandon the enterprise altogether.

    He did not do so, however, because he knew that it was useless. Whether he wrote DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER, or whether he refrained from writing it, made no difference. Whether he went on with the diary, or whether he did not go on with it, made no difference. The Thought Police would get him just the same. He had committed—would still have committed, even if he had never set pen to paper—the essential crime that contained all others in itself. Thoughtcrime, they called it. Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed for ever. You might dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you.

    It was always at night—the arrests invariably happened at night. The sudden jerk out of sleep, the rough hand shaking your shoulder, the lights glaring in your eyes, the ring of hard faces round the bed. In the vast majority of cases there was no trial, no report of the arrest. People simply disappeared, always during the night. Your name was removed from the registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated: vaporized was the usual word.

    For a moment he was seized by a kind of hysteria. He began writing in a hurried untidy scrawl:

    theyll shoot me i don’t care theyll shoot me in the back of the neck i dont care down with big brother they always shoot you in the back of the neck i dont care down with big brother—

    He sat back in his chair, slightly ashamed of himself, and laid down the pen. The next moment he started violently. There was a knocking at the door.

    Already! He sat as still as a mouse, in the futile hope that whoever it was might go away after a single attempt. But no, the knocking was repeated. The worst thing of all would be to delay. His heart was thumping like a drum, but his face, from long habit, was probably expressionless. He got up and moved heavily towards the door.


    http://www.telelib.com/authors/O/Orw...part1sec3.html

    - Pages 28-33:

    Down in the street the wind flapped the torn poster to and fro, and the word INGSOC fitfully appeared and vanished. INGSOC. The sacred principles of INGSOC. Newspeak, doublethink, the mutability of the past. He felt as though he were wandering in the forests of the sea bottom, lost in a monstrous world where he himself was the monster. He was alone. The past was dead, the future was unimaginable. What certainty had he that a single human creature now living was on his side? And what way of knowing that the dominion of the Party would not endure for ever? Like an answer, the three slogans on the white face of the Ministry of Truth came back to him:

    WAR IS PEACE
    FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
    IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH


    He took a twenty-five cent piece out of his pocket. There, too, in tiny clear lettering, the same slogans were inscribed, and on the other face of the coin the head of Big Brother. Even from the coin the eyes pursued you. On coins, on stamps, on the covers of books, on banners, on posters, and on the wrappings of a cigarette Packet—everywhere. Always the eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, working or eating, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or in bed—no escape. Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.

    The sun had shifted round, and the myriad windows of the Ministry of Truth, with the light no longer shining on them, looked grim as the loopholes of a fortress. His heart quailed before the enormous pyramidal shape. It was too strong, it could not be stormed. A thousand rocket bombs would not batter it down. He wondered again for whom he was writing the diary. For the future, for the past—for an age that might be imaginary. And in front of him there lay not death but annihilation. The diary would be reduced to ashes and himself to vapour. Only the Thought Police would read what he had written, before they wiped it out of existence and out of memory. How could you make appeal to the future when not a trace of you, not even an anonymous word scribbled on a piece of paper, could physically survive?

    The telescreen struck fourteen. He must leave in ten minutes. He had to be back at work by fourteen-thirty.

    Curiously, the chiming of the hour seemed to have put new heart into him. He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear. But so long as he uttered it, in some obscure way the continuity was not broken. It was not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you carried on the human heritage. He went back to the table, dipped his pen, and wrote:

    To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone—to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone:

    From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink—greetings!


    He was already dead, he reflected. It seemed to him that it was only now, when he had begun to be able to formulate his thoughts, that he had taken the decisive step. The consequences of 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 might betray you. Some nosing zealot in the Ministry (a woman, probably: someone like the little sandy- haired woman or the dark-haired girl from the Fiction Department) might start wondering why he had been writing during the lunch interval, why he had used an oldfashioned pen, what he had been writing—and then drop a hint in the appropriate quarter. He went to the bathroom and carefully scrubbed the ink away with the gritty dark-brown soap which rasped your skin like sandpaper and was therefore well adapted for this purpose.

    He put the diary away in the drawer. It was quite useless to think of hiding it, but he could at least make sure whether or not its existence had been discovered. A hair laid across the page-ends was too obvious. With the tip of his finger he picked up an identifiable grain of whitish dust and deposited it on the corner of the cover, where it was bound to be shaken off if the book was moved.


    III

    WINSTON was dreaming of his mother.

    He must, he thought, have been ten or eleven years old when his mother had disappeared. She was a tall, statuesque, rather silent woman with slow movements and magnificent fair hair. His father he remembered more vaguely as dark and thin, dressed always in neat dark clothes (Winston remembered especially the very thin soles of his father’s shoes) and wearing spectacles. The two of them must evidently have been swallowed up in one of the first great purges of the fifties.

    At this moment his mother was sitting in some place deep down beneath him, with his young sister in her arms. He did not remember his sister at all, except as a tiny, feeble baby, always silent, with large, watchful eyes. Both of them were looking up at him. They were down in some subterranean place—the bottom of a well, for instance, or a very deep grave—but it was a place which, already far below him, was itself moving downwards. They were in the saloon of a sinking ship, looking up at him through the darkening water. There was still air in the saloon, they could still see him and he them, but all the while they were sinking down, down into the green waters which in another moment must hide them from sight for ever. He was out in the light and air while they were being sucked down to death, and they were down there because he was up here. He knew it and they knew it, and he could see the knowledge in their faces. There was no reproach either in their faces or in their hearts, only the knowledge that they must die in order that he might remain alive, and that this was part of the unavoidable order of things.

    He could not remember what had happened, but he knew in his dream that in some way the lives of his mother and his sister had been sacrificed to his own. It was one of those dreams which, while retaining the characteristic dream scenery, are a continuation of one’s intellectual life, and in which one becomes aware of facts and ideas which still seem new and valuable after one is awake. The thing that now suddenly struck Winston was that his mother’s death, nearly thirty years ago, had been tragic and sorrowful in a way that was no longer possible. Tragedy, he perceived, belonged to the ancient time, to a time when there was still privacy, love, and friendship, and when the members of a family stood by one another without needing to know the reason. His mother’s memory tore at his heart because she had died loving him, when he was too young and selfish to love her in return, and because somehow, he did not remember how, she had sacrificed herself to a conception of loyalty that was private and unalterable. Such things, he saw, could not happen today. Today there were fear, hatred, and pain, but no dignity of emotion, no deep or complex sorrows. All this he seemed to see in the large eyes of his mother and his sister, looking up at him through the green water, hundreds of fathoms down and still sinking.

    Suddenly he was standing on short springy turf, on a summer evening when the slanting rays of the sun gilded the ground. The landscape that he was looking at recurred so often in his dreams that he was never fully certain whether or not he had seen it in the real world. In his waking thoughts he called it the Golden Country. It was an old, rabbit-bitten pasture, with a foot-track wandering across it and a molehill here and there. In the ragged hedge on the opposite side of the field the boughs of the elm trees were swaying very faintly in the breeze, their leaves just stirring in dense masses like women’s hair. Somewhere near at hand, though out of sight, there was a clear, slow-moving stream where dace were swimming in the pools under the willow trees.

    The girl with dark hair was coming towards them across the field. With what seemed a single movement she tore off her clothes and flung them disdainfully aside. Her body was white and smooth, but it aroused no desire in him, indeed he barely looked at it. What overwhelmed him in that instant was admiration for the gesture with which she had thrown her clothes aside. With its grace and carelessness it seemed to annihilate a whole culture, a whole system of thought, as though Big Brother and the Party and the Thought Police could all be swept into nothingness by a single splendid movement of the arm. That too was a gesture belonging to the ancient time. Winston woke up with the word ‘Shakespeare’ on his lips.


    http://www.telelib.com/authors/O/Orw...part1sec3.html

    - Pages 35-8:

    Winston could not definitely remember a time when his country had not been at war, but it was evident that there had been a fairly long interval of peace during his childhood, because one of his early memories was of an air raid which appeared to take everyone by surprise. Perhaps it was the time when the atomic bomb had fallen on Colchester. He did not remember the raid itself, but he did remember his father’s hand clutching his own as they hurried down, down, down into some place deep in the earth, round and round a spiral staircase which rang under his feet and which finally so wearied his legs that he began whimpering and they had to stop and rest. His mother, in her slow, dreamy way, was following a long way behind them. She was carrying his baby sister—or perhaps it was only a bundle of blankets that she was carrying: he was not certain whether his sister had been born then. Finally they had emerged into a noisy, crowded place which he had realized to be a Tube station.

    There were people sitting all over the stone-flagged floor, and other people, packed tightly together, were sitting on metal bunks, one above the other. Winston and his mother and father found themselves a place on the floor, and near them an old man and an old woman were sitting side by side on a bunk. The old man had on a decent dark suit and a black cloth cap pushed back from very white hair: his face was scarlet and his eyes were blue and full of tears. He reeked of gin. It seemed to breathe out of his skin in place of sweat, and one could have fancied that the tears welling from his eyes were pure gin. But though slightly drunk he was also suffering under some grief that was genuine and unbearable. In his childish way Winston grasped that some terrible thing, something that was beyond forgiveness and could never be remedied, had just happened. It also seemed to him that he knew what it was. Someone whom the old man loved—a little granddaughter, perhaps had been killed. Every few minutes the old man kept repeating:

    ‘We didn’t ought to ’ave trusted ’em. I said so, Ma, didn’t I? That’s what comes of trusting ’em. I said so all along. We didn’t ought to ’ave trusted the buggers.’

    But which buggers they didn’t ought to have trusted Winston could not now remember.

    Since about that time, war had been literally continuous, though strictly speaking it had not always been the same war. For several months during his childhood there had been confused street fighting in London itself, some of which he remembered vividly. But to trace out the history of the whole period, to say who was fighting whom at any given moment, would have been utterly impossible, since no written record, and no spoken word, ever made mention of any other alignment than the existing one. At this moment, for example, in 1984 (if it was 1984), Oceania was at war with Eurasia and in alliance with Eastasia. In no public or private utterance was it ever admitted that the three powers had at any time been grouped along different lines. Actually, as Winston well knew, it was only four years since Oceania had been at war with Eastasia and in alliance with Eurasia. But that was merely a piece of furtive knowledge which he happened to possess because his memory was not satisfactorily under control. Officially the change of partners had never happened. Oceania was at war with Eurasia: therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia. The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible.

    The frightening thing, he reflected for the ten thousandth time as he forced his shoulders painfully backward (with hands on hips, they were gyrating their bodies from the waist, an exercise that was supposed to be good for the back muscles)—the frightening thing was that it might all be true. If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened—that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death?

    The Party said that Oceania had never been in alliance with Eurasia. He, Winston Smith, knew that Oceania had been in alliance with Eurasia as short a time as four years ago. But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his own consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated. And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’ And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. ‘Reality control’, they called it: in Newspeak, ‘doublethink’.

    ‘Stand easy!’ barked the instructress, a little more genially.

    Winston sank his arms to his sides and slowly refilled his lungs with air. His mind slid away into the labyrinthine world of doublethink. To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself. That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word ‘doublethink’ involved the use of doublethink.

    The instructress had called them to attention again. ‘And now let’s see which of us can touch our toes!’ she said enthusiastically. ‘Right over from the hips, please, comrades. One-two! One-two! . . .’

    Winston loathed this exercise, which sent shooting pains all the way from his heels to his buttocks and often ended by bringing on another coughing fit. The half-pleasant quality went out of his meditations. The past, he reflected, had not merely been altered, it had been actually destroyed. For how could you establish even the most obvious fact when there existed no record outside your own memory? He tried to remember in what year he had first heard mention of Big Brother. He thought it must have been at some time in the sixties, but it was impossible to be certain. In the Party histories, of course, Big Brother figured as the leader and guardian of the Revolution since its very earliest days. His exploits had been gradually pushed backwards in time until already they extended into the fabulous world of the forties and the thirties, when the capitalists in their strange cylindrical hats still rode through the streets of London in great gleaming motor-cars or horse carriages with glass sides. There was no knowing how much of this legend was true and how much invented. Winston could not even remember at what date the Party itself had come into existence. He did not believe he had ever heard the word INGSOC before 1960, but it was possible that in its Oldspeak form—’English Socialism’, that is to say—it had been current earlier. Everything melted into mist. Sometimes, indeed, you could put your finger on a definite lie. It was not true, for example, as was claimed in the Party history books, that the Party had invented aeroplanes. He remembered aeroplanes since his earliest childhood. But you could prove nothing. There was never any evidence. Just once in his whole life he had held in his hands unmistakable documentary proof of the falsification of an historical fact. And on that occasion—

    ‘Smith!’ screamed the shrewish voice from the telescreen. ‘6079 Smith W.! Yes, you! Bend lower, please! You can do better than that. You’re not trying. Lower, please! That’s better, comrade. Now stand at ease, the whole squad, and watch me.’

    A sudden hot sweat had broken out all over Winston’s body. His face remained completely inscrutable. Never show dismay! Never show resentment! A single flicker of the eyes could give you away. He stood watching while the instructress raised her arms above her head and—one could not say gracefully, but with remarkable neatness and efficiency—bent over and tucked the first joint of her fingers under her toes.

    ‘There, comrades! That’s how I want to see you doing it. Watch me again. I’m thirty-nine and I’ve had four children. Now look.’ She bent over again. ‘You see my knees aren’t bent. You can all do it if you want to,’ she added as she straightened herself up. ‘Anyone under forty-five is perfectly capable of touching his toes. We don’t all have the privilege of fighting in the front line, but at least we can all keep fit. Remember our boys on the Malabar front! And the sailors in the Floating Fortresses! Just think what they have to put up with. Now try again. That’s better, comrade, that’s much better,’ she added encouragingly as Winston, with a violent lunge, succeeded in touching his toes with knees unbent, for the first time in several years.







    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWrWt27p5I4
    Last edited by HERO; 06-26-2018 at 08:47 AM.

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    George Orwell - ISTJ Gorky

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    "George Orwell VI and more! (free pr0n)"

    now we know how people come to this forum

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    Quote Originally Posted by CoViD Spurdo 007 View Post
    I know this will be a polemic typing, but he's neither IEE nor EIE-Ni nor LSI. He's SEI-Si. I read his books when I was 11 and was really fascinated. Read them again this summer. Definitely see the boosted Ti HA/drained Fe creative.


    “There will be no curiosity, 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 stamping on a human face— forever. ” ― George Orwell, 1984
    This gloomy prediction is depicting a world devoid of Ne-Si(no curiosity, no pleasures) and full of Se-Ni(intoxication of power, thrill of victory). Si doms can be intellectuals, but not in the way intuitives are. As Jung said:

    "We could say that introverted sensation transmits an image which does not so much reproduce the object as spread over it the patina of age-old subjective experience and the shimmer of events still unborn. The bare sense impression develops in-depth, reaching into the past and future, while extraverted sensation seizes on the momentary existence of things open to the light of day. Above all, the development of the introverted sensor alienates him from the reality of the object, leaving him at the mercy of his subjective perceptions, which orient his consciousness to an archaic reality…Actually he lives in a mythological world, where men, animals, locomotives, houses, rivers, and mountains appear either as benevolent deities or as malevolent demons."

    This is what this image of the demonic boot stamping on humanity's face is about.

    PS: I would be interested if some SEIs relate to him. @Tallmo? @Rusal?
    Last edited by lkdhf qkb; 09-20-2020 at 12:20 AM.

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    What's the purpose of SEI? Tallmo's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by lkdhf qkb View Post

    This gloomy prediction is depicting a world devoid of Ne-Si(no curiosity, no pleasures) and full of Se-Ni(intoxication of power, thrill of victory). Si doms can be intellectuals, but not in the way intuitives are. As Jung said:

    "We could say that introverted sensation transmits an image which does not so much reproduce the object as spread over it the patina of age-old subjective experience and the shimmer of events still unborn. The bare sense impression develops in-depth, reaching into the past and future, while extraverted sensation seizes on the momentary existence of things open to the light of day. Above all, the development of the introverted sensor alienates him from the reality of the object, leaving him at the mercy of his subjective perceptions, which orient his consciousness to an archaic reality…Actually he lives in a mythological world, where men, animals, locomotives, houses, rivers, and mountains appear either as benevolent deities or as malevolent demons."

    This is what this image of the demonic boot stamping on humanity's face is about.

    PS: I would be interested if some SEIs relate to him. @Tallmo? @Rusal?
    I don't know his type. The image of "A boot stamping on humanity's face" is not Si though. Sounds more like Ni. Jung is simply talking about the inner sense impression that the outside world evokes in Si types. Si is just psychic "patina", a certain "coloring" that's almost impossible to explain. It's not a developed "image" in the normal sense of the word.
    The decisive thing is not the reality of the object, but the reality of the subjective factor, i.e. the primordial images, which in their totality represent a psychic mirror-world. It is a mirror, however, with the peculiar capacity of representing the present contents of consciousness not in their known and customary form but in a certain sense sub specie aeternitatis, somewhat as a million-year old consciousness might see them.

    (Jung on Si)

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    @Tallmo are you sure? I thought the imagery would be coming from "archaic" Ne, from the unconscious. It wouldn't be from Si at all. But I'd imagine perhaps to the Si dominant they won't know what produces the imagery in their mind, especially since the imagination generates imagery in the minds of all people.

    Regarding 1984, it's also shows a society in which people don't have rights and are slaves to the govt and its ideology. Only the very few at the top can get high off the power. Everyone else is a prisoner. So really Se is denied as well.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Tallmo View Post
    I don't know his type. The image of "A boot stamping on humanity's face" is not Si though. Sounds more like Ni. Jung is simply talking about the inner sense impression that the outside world evokes in Si types. Si is just psychic "patina", a certain "coloring" that's almost impossible to explain. It's not a developed "image" in the normal sense of the word.
    Imo he is beta quadra simply due to what he writes in 1984. The alteration of language to control ppl's thoughts (Ti), the worldview is very Ni-Se.

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    What's the purpose of SEI? Tallmo's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by inumbra View Post
    @Tallmo are you sure? I thought the imagery would be coming from "archaic" Ne, from the unconscious.
    It's Si all the way imo. All introverted functions see things through the psyche:

    He judges and acts as [p. 504] though he had such powers to deal with; but this begins to strike him only when he discovers that his sensations are totally different from reality.
    Everybody here can agree that Si has something to do with how we perceive things and aesthetics, right? But it's introverted, it comes from the subject! So how do you describe it then? You can't just say that it is a beautiful scenery or something. Jung is focusing on this introverted component. The problem is that even a SEI (or especially a SEI) has a hard time understanding that he sees things this way (just as Jung says).

    Regarding the inferior function in SxI types: Jung describes inferior Ne in the last paragraph of the section "Introverted sensation type":

    His unconscious is distinguished chiefly by the repression of intuition, which thereby acquires an extraverted and archaic character. Whereas true extraverted intuition has a characteristic resourcefulness, and a 'good nose' for every possibility in objective reality, this archaic, extraverted intuition has an amazing flair for every ambiguous, gloomy, dirty, and dangerous possibility in the background of reality. In the presence of this intuition the real and conscious intention of the object has no significance; it will peer behind every possible archaic antecedent of such an intention. It possesses, therefore, something dangerous, something actually undermining, which often stands in most vivid contrast to the gentle benevolence of consciousness. So long as the individual is not too aloof from the object, the unconscious intuition effects a wholesome compensation to the rather fantastic and over credulous attitude of consciousness. But as soon as the unconscious becomes antagonistic to consciousness, such intuitions come to the surface and expand their nefarious influence: they force themselves compellingly upon the individual, releasing compulsive ideas about objects of the most perverse kind. The neurosis arising from this sequence of events is usually a compulsion neurosis, in which the hysterical characters recede and are obscured by symptoms of exhaustion. [p. 505]
    Last edited by Tallmo; 09-20-2020 at 01:26 PM.
    The decisive thing is not the reality of the object, but the reality of the subjective factor, i.e. the primordial images, which in their totality represent a psychic mirror-world. It is a mirror, however, with the peculiar capacity of representing the present contents of consciousness not in their known and customary form but in a certain sense sub specie aeternitatis, somewhat as a million-year old consciousness might see them.

    (Jung on Si)

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    Eh everyone should understand the context of Si's inferiority. It is really like that when they become suspcious about one thing. Everything goes wrong etc and there is no way out.

    This is usually where Ne base picks up their battles.
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    Archaic Ne in Si leads:

    Quote Originally Posted by Rusal View Post
    the individual can feel somewhat at the mercy of reality, in which case they shield themselves with archaic Ne: ‘I cannot attack reality, I will at least protect myself from it’ is the unconscious proclivity and hence the ‘flair’ for ‘every dangerous possibility’.
    Also related: self-fulfilled prophecies and a good nose for unpleasant or dangerous personal developments.
    Sicuramente cercherai il significato di questo.

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    ^ I haven't read 1984. But damn that's quite a harangue of beta ST powers gone dark side. He's either a beta NF that had serious problems with beta ST cognition or an IEE that clearly doesn't value Se and Ti.
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    The only problem socionics has given me is a propensity to analyze every relationship from the lens of socionics and I also see that it is worse in my boyfriend. Nothing makes any sense that way and it does not really solve any problems.





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    People apparently described him as uncoordinated and bit weird. He liked hang out with less fortunate. Not sure but sounds like high Ne type.
    MOTTO: NEVER TRUST IN REALITY
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