LITMIR.BIZ

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ou moved. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU stood on the poster.

      Inside the flat you could hear a deep and pleasant voice talking about the Ninth Three-Year Plan. It came from a piece of metal that looked like a mirror which was PART of the right-hand wall. Winston turned a switch and the voice got quieter, though you could still understand everything that it said. You could not turn off the instrument (the telescreen, it was called) completely. He moved over to the window. He looked very small in the blue uniform of the party. His hair was very fair, his skin was rough because of the soap and razor blades and the cold of the winter that had just ended.

      Outside, even through the shut window, the world looked cold. The sun was shining and the sky was blue, but there seemed to be no colour in anything, except the posters that were everywhere. There was one on the house opposite Victory Mansions. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the poster said, and the dark eyes looked deep into Winston's own. Down at street level another poster with the single word INGSOC. Somewhere far away there was the police patrol, looking into people's windows. The patrols did not matter, however. Only the Thought Police mattered.

      Behind Winston's back the voice from the telescreen was still talking about the Ninth Three-Year Plan. Winston knew that so long as he was within the field of vision of the telescreen, he could be seen as well as heard. You couldn't know when the Thought Police were watching you and when they were not. You could only guess. It was even possible that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could watch you whenever they wanted to. You had to live – and lived – as if every sound you made was heard, and, except in darkness, every movement seen.

      Winston stood with his back turned to the telescreen. It was safer. A kilometre away there was the Ministry of Truth, his place of work. He looked at the landscape. This was London, the main city of Airstrip One, in Oceania. He tried to remember whether London had always been in ruins quite like this. But it was no use, he could only remember some people standing there in silence against no background.

      The Ministry of Truth – Minitrue, in Newspeak – was different from any other object in sight. It was a huge white building, 300 metres high. From where Winston stood he could read the three slogans of the Party:

      WAR IS PEACE

      FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

      IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

      It was said that in the Ministry of Truth there were thousands of rooms above and below ground. In London there were just three other buildings of similar appearance and size. You could see all four of them at the same time from the roof of Victory Mansions. They were the homes of the four Ministries. The Ministry of Truth, which controlled news, entertainment, education, and the fine arts. The Ministry of Peace, which dealt with war. The Ministry of Love, which was responsible for law and order. And the Ministry of Plenty, which dealt with economic affairs. Their names, in Newspeak: Minitrue, Minipax, Miniluv, and Miniplenty.

      The Ministry of Love was the really frightening one. There were no windows in it at all. Winston had never been inside the Ministry of Love or come close to it. You could only go inside on official business. It was like a maze with steel doors and hidden machine-guns. It was guarded by men in black uniforms armed with truncheons.

      Winston turned round. He had the expression of quiet optimism on his face. He crossed the room into the small kitchen. By leaving the Ministry at this time of day he had missed his lunch in the canteen. There was no food in the kitchen except dark-coloured bread which he wanted to eat for tomorrow's breakfast. He took a bottle of colourless liquid with a white label that said VICTORY GIN. Winston drank it like medicine.

      His face turned bright red and the water ran out of his eyes. When you drank the gin, it felt like you were hit on the back of the head. The next moment, however, the world began to look better. He took a cigarette from a packet that said VICTORY CIGARETTES and held it upright. The tobacco fell out on to the floor. With the next he was more successful. He went back to the living-room and sat down at a small table that stood to the left of the telescreen. From the table drawer he took out a pen, a bottle of ink, and a thick empty book.

      For some reason the telescreen in the living-room was not in the end wall, but in the longer wall, opposite the window.

      To one side of it there was an alcove in which Winston was now sitting. When he sat in the alcove and kept well back, Winston could not be seen. He could be heard, of course. He was about to do something because his room had this alcove.

      He was about to do it also because he had the book. It was a beautiful book. It was old and its paper was a little yellow. Such books had not been made for the last forty years at least. He could guess, however, that the book was much older than that. He had seen it in the window of a little shop in one of the quarters of the town and had wanted to buy it at once. Party members couldn't go into such shops, but they still did. There were things, such as razor blades, which you couldn't buy anywhere else. He had made sure no one had seen him and then had gone inside and bought the book for two dollars fifty. At the time he didn't know why he wanted it. Even if there was nothing written in it, he might get into trouble, because he had bought it.

      He was about to open a diary. This was not against the laws (nothing was against the laws, because there were no longer any laws), but if anyone knew, Winston would be sentenced to death, or at least to twenty-five years in a forced-labour camp. He cleaned the pen. Pens were rarely used even for signatures, and it wasn't easy to get one, but Winston felt that he had to write on the beautiful paper with a real pen instead of an ink-pencil. Actually he was not used to writing by hand. He wrote only very short notes and dictated everything else into the speakwrite. It was of course impossible to use the speakwrite for a diary. He took the pen and then stopped for just a second. It wasn't an easy decision to start writing. In small letters he wrote:

      April 4th, 1984.

      He felt helpless. To begin with, he wasn't sure that this was 1984. It must be round about that date. He was quite sure that his age was thirty-nine, and he believed that he had been born in 1944 or 1945; but now you could never know any date for sure.

      For whom was he writing this diary? For the future, he thought. How could you communicate with the future? It was impossible. If the future were like the present, it would not listen to him; if it were different from the present, then writing the diary would be meaningless.

      For some time he sat looking stupidly at the paper. The telescreen was playing military music. Winston couldn't put thoughts into words; he had even forgotten what he had wanted to say. He had thought that he would only need to be brave to write. Writing would be easy. All he had to do was to write down the monologue that had been running inside his head for years. At this moment, however, even the monologue had stopped. His leg had begun hurting again. The seconds were flying by. The page in front of him was empty, his leg hurt, he heard the music from the telescreen, and felt a bit drunk on the gin.

      He began writing so quickly that didn't quite realize what he was writing down. He wrote that he had watched a war film last night. It was about a ship that was bombed somewhere in the Mediterranean. On it, there was a woman with a boy who was very frightened. When the ship sank, the viewers laughed. From where the proles were sitting, a woman shouted that they shouldn't show such films in front of the children. The police turned her out, but Winston didn't think that anything had happened to her.

      Winston stopped writing, partly because of his leg. He did not know why he had just written it. But while he was writing it he had remembered something totally different. He now realized, it was the reason why he had decided to come home and begin the diary today.

      It had happened that morning at the Ministry.

      It was nearly eleven hundred. In the Records Department, where Winston worked, they were getting ready for the Two Minutes Hate. Two people whom he knew by sight, but had never spoken to, came into the room. One of them was a girl of about twenty-seven with freckles and thick dark hair. He did not know her name, but he knew that she worked in the Fiction Department. She had an emblem of the Junior Anti-Sex League. Winston had disliked her from the very first moment of seeing her. He disliked nearly all women, and especially the young and pretty ones. But this girl seemed to him more dangerous than most. He had even thought that she might be one of the Thought Police. But it was very unlikely. Still, he continued to feel uneasy,

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