It was partly the unusual geography of the room that had suggested to him the thing that he was now about to do. But it had also been suggested by the book that he had just taken out of the drawer. At six — a year early, by a special relaxation of the rules — he had joined the Spies, at nine he had been a troop leader.
It was the type that seemed to flourish best under the dominion of the Party. It was on a dark evening, in a narrow side-street near one of the big railway stations. But — though this was one of the crimes that the accused in the great purges invariably confessed to — it was difficult to imagine any such thing actually happening.
Rebellion meant a look in the eyes, an inflexion of the voice, at the most, an occasional whispered word. The story really began in the middle sixties, the period of the great purges in which the. No one who had once fallen into the hands of the Thought Police ever escaped in the end.
Then he went to the table in the alcove, sat down, and took the diary out of the drawer.
PART TWO
It was the middle of the morning, and Winston had left the cubicle to go to the lavatory. The girl nipped nimbly round the lions at the base of the monument and joined in the rush. She had immediately taken charge of the situation, just as she had done in the canteen.
From somewhere deeper in the heart of the wood came the droning of ring-doves. He lay back with his eyes shut, still sodden in the atmosphere of the dream. He sat down in the sluttish armchair and undid the straps of the brief-case.
War, however, is no longer the desperate, annihilating struggle that it was in the early decades of the twentieth century. It is precisely in the Inner Party that war hysteria and hatred of the enemy are strongest. In the past the need for a hierarchical form of society had been the doctrine specifically of the High.
Do you remember,’ he said, ‘the thrush that sang to us, that first day, at the edge of the wood?’.
PART THREE
It was even possible — he thought this because from time to time something seemed to tickle his leg — that there might be a sizeable bit of crust there. I could not help it!’ he added almost indignantly, raising his face to look at Winston. Has it ever occurred to you,’ he said, ‘that the whole history of English poetry has been determined by the fact that the English language lacks rhymes?’.
I shall save you, I shall make you perfect.’ He was not sure whether it was O’Brien’s voice; but it was the same voice that had said to him, ‘We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness,’ in that other dream, seven years ago. Do you remember,’ he went on, ‘writing in your diary, “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four”?’. Three thousand,’ he said, speaking over Winston’s head to the man in the white coat.
From the moment when he was inside the Ministry of Love — and yes, even during those minutes when he and Julia had stood helpless while the iron voice from the telescreen told them what to do — he had grasped the frivolity, the shallowness of his attempt to set himself up against the power of the Party. One day — but ‘one day’ was not the right expression; just as probably it was in the middle of the night: once — he fell into a strange, blissful reverie. At the time when it happens,’ she had said, ‘you do mean it.’ He had meant it.
Appendix
Between the verb and the noun form, when they were of the same root, there was never any variation, this rule of itself involving the destruction of many archaic forms. None of the now-existing adverbs was retained, except for a very few already ending in — WISE: the — WISE termination was invariable. There were also certain irregularities in word-formation arising out of the need for rapid and easy speech.
Without a full understanding of the principles of Ingsoc it was difficult to use these words correctly. Because of the great difficulty in securing euphony, irregular formations were commoner in the B vocabulary than in the A vocabulary. Some of the B words had highly subtilized meanings, barely intelligible to anyone who had not mastered the language as a whole.
As we have already seen in the case of the word FREE, words which had once borne a heretical meaning were sometimes retained for the sake of convenience, but only with the undesirable meanings purged out of them. Some words, on the other hand, displayed a frank and contemptuous understanding of the real nature of Oceanic society. It was perceived that in thus abbreviating a name one narrowed and subtly altered its meaning, by cutting out most of the associations that would otherwise cling to it.
The words of the B vocabulary even gained in force from the fact that nearly all of them were very much alike. Provided that the opinions which were quacked out were orthodox ones, it implied nothing but praise, and when ‘The Times’ referred to one of the orators of the Party as a DOUBLEPLUSGOOD DUCKSPEAKER it was paying a warm and valued compliment. Very few of the C words had any currency either in everyday speech or in political speech.
Any scientific worker or technician could find all the words he needed in the list devoted to his own speciality, but he seldom had more than a smattering of the words occurring in the other lists. One could, in fact, only use Newspeak for unorthodox purposes by illegitimately translating some of the words back into Oldspeak. The concept of political equality no longer existed, and this secondary meaning had accordingly been purged out of the word EQUAL.