It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking
thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an
effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass
doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a
swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him.
The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. At one end of
it a coloured poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked
to the wall. It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a metre
wide: the face of a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black
moustache and ruggedly handsome features. Winston made for the
stairs. It was no use trying the lift. Even at the best of times it
was seldom working, and at present the electric current was cut off
during daylight hours. It was part of the economy drive in
preparation for Hate Week. The flat was seven flights up, and
Winston, who was thirty-nine and had a varicose ulcer above his
right ankle, went slowly, resting several times on the way. On each
landing, opposite the lift-shaft, the poster with the enormous face
gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so
contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER
IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran.
Inside the flat a fruity voice was reading out a list of figures
which had something to do with the production of pig-iron. The
voice came from an oblong metal plaque like a dulled mirror which
formed part of the surface of the right-hand wall. Winston turned a
switch and the voice sank somewhat, though the words were still
distinguishable. The instrument the telescreen, it was called
could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off
completely. He moved over to the window: a smallish, frail figure,
the meagreness of his body merely emphasized by the blue overalls
which were the uniform of the party. His hair was very fair, his
face naturally sanguine, his skin roughened by coarse soap and
blunt razor blades and the cold of the winter that had just
ended.
Outside, even through the shut window-pane, the world looked cold.
Down in the street little eddies of wind were whirling dust and
torn paper into spirals, and though the sun was shining and the sky
a harsh blue, there seemed to be no colour in anything, except the
posters that were plastered everywhere. The blackmoustachio''d face
gazed down from every commanding corner. There was one on the
house-front immediately opposite. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the
caption said, while the dark eyes looked deep into Winston''s own.
Down at streetlevel another poster, torn at one corner, flapped
fitfully in the wind, alternately covering and uncovering the
single word INGSOC. In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down
between the roofs, hovered for an instant like a bluebottle, and
darted away again with a curving flight. It was the police patrol,
snooping into people''s windows. The patrols did not matter,
however. Only the Thought Police mattered.
Behind Winston''s back the voice from the telescreen was still
babbling away about pig-iron and the overfulfilment of the Ninth
Three-Year Plan. The telescreen received and transmitted
simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a
very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he
remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque
commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course
no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given
moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in
on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that
they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could
plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live -- did
live, from habit that became instinct -- in the assumption that
every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every
movement scrutinized.
Winston kept his back turned to the telescreen. It was safer,
though, as he well knew, even a back can be revealing. A kilometre
away the Ministry of Truth, his place of work, towered vast and
white above the grimy landscape. This, he thought with a sort of
vague distaste -- this was London, chief city of Airstrip One,
itself the third most populous of the provinces of Oceania. He
tried to squeeze out some childhood memory that should tell him
whether London had always been quite like this. Were there always
these vistas of rotting nineteenth-century houses, their sides
shored up with baulks of timber, their windows patched with
cardboard and their roofs with corrugated iron, their crazy garden
walls sagging in all directions? And the bombed sites where the
plaster dust swirled in the air and the willow-herb straggled over
the heaps of rubble; and the places where the bombs had cleared a
larger patch and there had sprung up sordid colonies of wooden
dwellings like chicken-houses? But it was no use, he could not
remember: nothing remained of his childhood except a series of
bright-lit tableaux occurring against no background and mostly
unintelligible.
The Ministry of Truth——Minitrue, in Newspeak——was startlingly
different from any other object in sight. It was an enormous
pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up,
terrace after terrace, 300 metres into the air. From where Winston
stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in
elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
The Ministry of Truth contained, it was said, three thousand rooms
above ground level, and corresponding ramifications below.
Scattered about London there were just three other buildings of
similar appearance and size. So completely did they dwarf the
surrounding architecture that from the roof of Victory Mansions you
could see all four of them simultaneously. They were the homes of
the four Ministries between which the entire apparatus of
government was divided. The Ministry of Truth, which concerned
itself with news, entertainment, education, and the fine arts. The
Ministry of Peace, which concerned itself with war. The Ministry of
Love, which maintained law and order. And the Ministry of Plenty,
which was responsible for 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, nor within half a kilometre of it. It was a place impossible
to enter except on official business, and then only by penetrating
through a maze of barbed-wire entanglements, steel doors, and
hidden machine-gun nests. Even the streets leading up to its outer
barriers were roamed by gorilla-faced guards in black uniforms,
armed with jointed truncheons.
Winston turned round abruptly. He had set his features into the
expression of quiet optimism which it was advisable to wear when
facing the telescreen. He crossed the room into the tiny kitchen.
By leaving the Ministry at this time of day he had sacrificed his
lunch in the canteen, and he was aware that there was no food in
the kitchen except a hunk of dark-coloured bread which had got to
be saved for tomorrow''s breakfast. He took down from the shelf a
bottle of colourless liquid with a plain white label marked VICTORY
GIN. It gave off a sickly, oily smell, as of Chinese rice-spirit.
Winston poured out nearly a teacupful, nerved himself for a shock,
and gulped it down like a dose of medicine.
Instantly his face turned scarlet and the water ran out of his
eyes. The stuff was like nitric acid, and moreover, in swallowing
it one had the sensation of being hit on the back of the head with
a rubber club. The next moment, however, the burning in his belly
died down and the world began to look more cheerful. He took a
cigarette from a crumpled packet marked VICTORY CIGARETTES and
incautiously held it upright, whereupon 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
penholder, a bottle of ink, and a thick, quarto-sized blank book
with a red back and a marbled cover.
For some reason the telescreen in the living-room was in an unusual
position. Instead of being placed, as was normal, in the end wall,
where it could command the whole room, it was in the longer wall,
opposite the window. To one side of it there was a shallow alcove
in which Winston was now sitting, and which, when the flats were
built, had probably been intended to hold bookshelves. By sitting
in the alcove, and keeping well back, Winston was able to remain
outside the range of the telescreen, so far as sight went. He could
be heard, of course, but so long as he stayed in his present
position he could not be seen. 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. It was a peculiarly beautiful book. Its smooth
creamy paper, a little yellowed by age, was of a kind that had not
been manufactured for at least forty years past. He could guess,
however, that the book was much older than that. He had seen it
lying in the window of a frowsy little junk-shop in a slummy
quarter of the town just what quarter he did not now remember and
had been stricken immediately by an overwhelming desire to possess
it. Party members were supposed not to go into ordinary shops
''dealing on the free market'', it was called, but the rule was not
strictly kept, because there were various things, such as shoelaces
and razor blades, which it was impossible to get hold of in any
other way. He had given a quick glance up and down the street and
then had slipped inside and bought the book for two dollars fifty.
At the time he was not conscious of wanting it for any particular
purpose. He had carried it guiltily home in his briefcase. Even
with nothing written in it, it was a compromising possession.
The thing that he was about to do was to open a diary. This was not
illegal nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws,
but if detected it was reasonably certain that it would be punished
by death, or at least by twenty-five years in a forced-labour camp.
Winston fitted a nib into the penholder and sucked it to get the
grease off. The pen was an archaic instrument, seldom used even for
signatures, and he had procured one, furtively and with some
difficulty, simply because of a feeling that the beautiful creamy
paper deserved to be written on with a real nib instead of being
scratched with an ink-pencil. Actually he was not used to writing
by hand. Apart from very short notes, it was usual to dictate
everything into the speak-write which was of course impossible for
his present purpose. He dipped the pen into the ink and then
faltered for just a second. A tremor had gone through his bowels.
To mark the paper was the decisive act. In small clumsy letters he
wrote:
April 4th, 1984.
購物車/收銀台(0) | 在線留言板
| 付款方式
| 聯絡我們
| 運費計算
| 幫助中心 |
加入書簽
HOME
新書上架
