# Part 1 Chapter 7 - George Orwell - Nineteen Eighty-Four

An episode of [George Orwell - 1984](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1795219843), 8 Feb 2025, 23 min.

Audio: https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/api.spreaker.com/download/episode/64271018/part_1_chapter_7_george_orwell_nineteen_eighty_four.mp3



## Transcript

[0:00] Speaker 1: Section seven of nineteen eighty four by George Orwell. This
[0:04] Speaker 1: legamous recording may be freely distributed and adapted for any purpose.
[0:09] Speaker 1: Part one, Chapter seven. If there is hope, wrote Winston,
[0:14] Speaker 1: it lies in the proles. If there was hope, it
[0:18] Speaker 1: must lie in the proles, because only there, in those swarming,
[0:21] Speaker 1: disregarded masses eighty five percent of the population of Oceania
[0:25] Speaker 1: could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated.
[0:29] Speaker 1: The Party could not be overthrown from within its enemies.
[0:32] Speaker 1: If it had any enemies, had no way of coming together,
[0:35] Speaker 1: or even of identifying one another. Even if the legendary
[0:39] Speaker 1: brotherhood existed, as just possibly it might, it was inconceivable
[0:43] Speaker 1: that its members could ever assemble in larger numbers than
[0:46] Speaker 1: twos and threes. Rebellion meant to look in the eyes
[0:49] Speaker 1: an inflection of the voice, at the most an occasional
[0:52] Speaker 1: whispered word. But the proles, if only they could somehow
[0:56] Speaker 1: become conscious of their own strength, would have no need
[0:59] Speaker 1: to conspire. They needed only to rise up and shake
[1:02] Speaker 1: themselves like a horse shaking off flies. If they chose,
[1:06] Speaker 1: they could blow the party to pieces to morrow morning. Surely,
[1:09] Speaker 1: sooner or later it must occur to them to do it.
[1:12] Speaker 1: And yet he remembered how once he had been walking
[1:16] Speaker 1: down a crowded street when a tremendous shout of hundreds
[1:19] Speaker 1: of voices, women's voices, had burst from a side street
[1:22] Speaker 1: a little way ahead. It was a great, formidable cry
[1:25] Speaker 1: of anger and despair, a deep loud oh that went
[1:30] Speaker 1: humming on like the reverberation of a bell. His heart
[1:33] Speaker 1: had leapt it started. He had thought a riot, the
[1:38] Speaker 1: pearls are breaking loose. At last, when he had reached
[1:41] Speaker 1: the spot, it was to see a mob of two
[1:43] Speaker 1: or three hundred women crowding round the stalls of a
[1:45] Speaker 1: street market, with faces as tragic as though they had
[1:48] Speaker 1: been the doomed passengers on a sinking ship. But at
[1:52] Speaker 1: this moment the general despair broke down into a multitude
[1:55] Speaker 1: of individual quarrels. It appeared that one of the stalls
[1:58] Speaker 1: had been selling tin saucepans. They were wretched, flimsy things,
[2:02] Speaker 1: but cooking pots of any kind were always difficult to get.
[2:05] Speaker 1: Now the supply had unexpectedly given out. The successful women,
[2:09] Speaker 1: bumped and jostled by the rest, were trying to make
[2:11] Speaker 1: off with their saucepans. While dozens of others clamored round
[2:14] Speaker 1: the stall, accusing the stall keeper of favoritism and of
[2:17] Speaker 1: having more saucepan somewhere in reserve. There was a fresh
[2:21] Speaker 1: outburst of yells. Two bloated women, one of them with
[2:24] Speaker 1: her hair coming down, had got hold of the same
[2:26] Speaker 1: saucepan and were trying to tear it out of one
[2:28] Speaker 1: another's hands. For a moment, they were both tugging, and
[2:31] Speaker 1: then the handle came off. Winston watched them disgustedly, and yet,
[2:36] Speaker 1: just for a moment, what almost frightening power had sounded
[2:39] Speaker 1: in that cry from only a few hundred throats. Why
[2:42] Speaker 1: was it that they could never shout like that about
[2:44] Speaker 1: anything that mattered? He wrote, Until they become conscious, they
[2:49] Speaker 1: will never rebel, And until after they have rebelled, they
[2:52] Speaker 1: cannot become conscious. That he reflected, might almost have been
[2:56] Speaker 1: a transcription from one of the party text books. The
[3:00] Speaker 1: party claimed, of course, to have liberated the proles from bondage.
[3:03] Speaker 1: Before the revolution, they had been hideously oppressed by the capitalists.
[3:07] Speaker 1: They had been starved and flogged, women had been forced
[3:10] Speaker 1: to work in the coal mines. Women still did work
[3:12] Speaker 1: in the coal mines as a matter of fact, children
[3:15] Speaker 1: had been sold into the factories at the age of six.
[3:18] Speaker 1: But simultaneously, true to the principles of doublethink, the party
[3:22] Speaker 1: taught that the proles were natural inferiors who must be
[3:24] Speaker 1: kept in subjection like animals, by the application of a
[3:27] Speaker 1: few simple rules. In reality, very little was known about
[3:31] Speaker 1: the proles. It was not necessary to know much so
[3:35] Speaker 1: long as they continued to work and breed. Their other
[3:38] Speaker 1: activities were without importance, left to themselves like cattle turned
[3:42] Speaker 1: loose upon the plains of Argentina. They had reverted to
[3:45] Speaker 1: a style of life that appeared to be natural to them,
[3:48] Speaker 1: a sort of ancestral pattern. They were born, They grew
[3:51] Speaker 1: up in the gutters. They went to work. At twelve,
[3:54] Speaker 1: they passed through a brief, blossoming period of beauty and
[3:56] Speaker 1: sexual desire. They married at twenty, there were middle aged
[4:00] Speaker 1: at thirty. They died for the most part at sixty.
[4:04] Speaker 1: Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty
[4:07] Speaker 1: quarrels with neighbors, films, football, beer, and above all, gambling
[4:11] Speaker 1: filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them
[4:14] Speaker 1: in control was not difficult. A few agents of the
[4:17] Speaker 1: thought police moved always among them. Spreading false rumors and
[4:20] Speaker 1: marking down and eliminating the few individuals who were judged
[4:23] Speaker 1: capable of becoming dangerous, But no attempt was made to
[4:27] Speaker 1: indoctrinate them with the ideology of the party. It was
[4:30] Speaker 1: not desirable that the proles should have strong political feelings.
[4:34] Speaker 1: All that was required of them was a primitive patriotism,
[4:37] Speaker 1: which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to
[4:39] Speaker 1: make them accept longer working hours or shorter rations. And
[4:43] Speaker 1: even when they became discontented, as they sometimes did, their
[4:46] Speaker 1: discontent led to nowhere, because, being without general ideas, they
[4:50] Speaker 1: could only focus it on petty, specific grievances. The larger
[4:54] Speaker 1: evils invariably escaped their notice. The great majority of proles
[4:58] Speaker 1: did not even have telescreens in their Even the civil
[5:01] Speaker 1: police interfered with them very little. There was a vast
[5:05] Speaker 1: amount of criminality in London, a whole world within a
[5:08] Speaker 1: world of thieves, bandits, prostitutes, drug peddlars and racketeers of
[5:12] Speaker 1: every description. But since it all happened among the proles themselves,
[5:16] Speaker 1: it was of no importance in all questions of morals.
[5:19] Speaker 1: They were allowed to follow their ancestral code. The sexual
[5:22] Speaker 1: puritanism of the Party was not imposed upon them. Promiscuity
[5:26] Speaker 1: went unpunished, divorce was permitted. For that matter, even religious
[5:30] Speaker 1: worship would have been permitted if the proles had shown
[5:32] Speaker 1: any sign of needing or wanting it. They were beneath suspicion.
[5:37] Speaker 1: As the party slogan put it, prolls and animals are free.
[5:42] Speaker 1: Winston reached down and cautiously scratched his varicus ulsa. It
[5:45] Speaker 1: had begun itching again. The thing he invariably came back
[5:49] Speaker 1: to was the impossibility of knowing what life before the
[5:52] Speaker 1: Revolution had really been like. He took out of the
[5:55] Speaker 1: drawer a copy of a children's history textbook which he
[5:57] Speaker 1: had borrowed from Missus Parsons, and began copying a passage
[6:00] Speaker 1: into the diary. In the old days it ran before
[6:05] Speaker 1: the glorious Revolution, London was not the beautiful city that
[6:08] Speaker 1: we know to day. It was a dark, dirty, miserable
[6:11] Speaker 1: place where hardly anybody had enough to eat, and where
[6:14] Speaker 1: hundreds and thousands of poor people had no boots on
[6:17] Speaker 1: their feet and not even a roof to sleep under.
[6:20] Speaker 1: Children no older than you had to work twelve hours
[6:23] Speaker 1: a day for cruel masters who flogged them with whips
[6:25] Speaker 1: if they worked too slowly, and fed them on nothing
[6:28] Speaker 1: but stale bread crusts and water. But in among all
[6:31] Speaker 1: this terrible poverty, there were just a few great, big,
[6:34] Speaker 1: beautiful houses that were lived in by rich men who
[6:37] Speaker 1: had as many as thirty servants to look after them.
[6:40] Speaker 1: These rich men were called capitalists. There were fat, ugly
[6:44] Speaker 1: men with wicked faces, like the one in the picture
[6:46] Speaker 1: on the opposite page. You can see that he is
[6:49] Speaker 1: dressed in a long black coat which was called a
[6:51] Speaker 1: frock coat, and a queer shiny hat shaped like a stovepipe,
[6:55] Speaker 1: which was called a top hat. This was the uniform
[6:58] Speaker 1: of the capitalists, and no no one else was allowed
[7:00] Speaker 1: to wear it. The capitalists owned everything in the world,
[7:04] Speaker 1: and every one else was their slave. They owned all
[7:07] Speaker 1: the land, all the houses, all the factories, and all
[7:09] Speaker 1: the money. If any one disobeyed them, they could throw
[7:13] Speaker 1: them into prison, or they could take his job away
[7:15] Speaker 1: and starve him to death. Whenever any ordinary person spoke
[7:19] Speaker 1: to a capitalist, he had to cringe and a bow
[7:21] Speaker 1: to him, and take off his cap and address him
[7:23] Speaker 1: as sir. The chief of all the capitalists was called
[7:26] Speaker 1: the king, and but he knew the rest of the catalog.
[7:31] Speaker 1: There would be mentioned of the bishops in their lawn sleeves,
[7:34] Speaker 1: the judges in their ermine robes, the pillory, the stocks,
[7:37] Speaker 1: the treadmill, the Catennine tales, the lord mayor's banquet, and
[7:41] Speaker 1: the practice of kissing the pope's toe. There was also
[7:44] Speaker 1: something called the us prima noctis, which would probably not
[7:48] Speaker 1: be mentioned in a text book for children. It was
[7:51] Speaker 1: the law by which every capitalist had the right to
[7:53] Speaker 1: sleep with any woman working in one of his factories.
[7:57] Speaker 1: How could you tell how much of it was lies?
[8:00] Speaker 1: It might be true that the average human being was
[8:02] Speaker 1: better off now than he had been before the Revolution.
[8:05] Speaker 1: The only evidence to the contrary was the mute protest
[8:08] Speaker 1: in your own bones, the instinctive feeling that the conditions
[8:11] Speaker 1: you lived in were intolerable, and that at some other
[8:13] Speaker 1: time they must have been different. It struck him that
[8:16] Speaker 1: the truly characteristic thing about modern life was not its
[8:19] Speaker 1: cruelty and insecurity, but simply its bareness, its dinginess, its listlessness. Life,
[8:25] Speaker 1: if you looked about, you, bore no resemblance, not only
[8:28] Speaker 1: to the lies that streamed out of the telescreens, but
[8:31] Speaker 1: even to the ideals that the Party was trying to achieve.
[8:34] Speaker 1: Great areas of it, even for a party member, were
[8:37] Speaker 1: neutral and non political, a matter of slogging through dreary jobs,
[8:41] Speaker 1: fighting for a place on the tube, darning a worn
[8:43] Speaker 1: out sock, cadging a sacquer and tablet, saving a cigarette end.
[8:48] Speaker 1: The ideal set up by the Party was something huge,
[8:51] Speaker 1: terrible and glittering. A world of steel and concrete, of
[8:54] Speaker 1: monstrous machines and terrifying weapons, A nation of warriors and
[8:58] Speaker 1: fanatics marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the same
[9:02] Speaker 1: thoughts and shouting the same slogans, perpetually working, fighting, triumphing,
[9:06] Speaker 1: persecuting three hundred million people, all with the same face.
[9:11] Speaker 1: The reality was decaying, dingy cities where underfed people shuffled
[9:15] Speaker 1: to and fro in leaky shoes, in patched up nineteenth
[9:18] Speaker 1: century houses that smelt always of cabbage and bad lavatories.
[9:22] Speaker 1: He seemed to see a vision of London, vast and
[9:24] Speaker 1: ruinous city of a million dustpins, and mixed up with
[9:28] Speaker 1: it was a picture of missus Parsons, a woman with
[9:30] Speaker 1: lined face and wispy hair, fiddling helplessly with a blocked
[9:34] Speaker 1: waist pipe. He reached down and scratched his ankle again.
[9:40] Speaker 1: Day and night. The telescreens bruised duryas with statistics proving
[9:43] Speaker 1: that people to day had more food, more clothes, better houses,
[9:46] Speaker 1: better recreations, that they lived longer, worked shorter hours, were bigger, healthier, stronger, happier,
[9:53] Speaker 1: more intelligent, better educated than the people of fifty years ago.
[9:57] Speaker 1: Not a word of it could ever be proved or disproved.
[10:00] Speaker 1: The Party claimed, for example, that to day forty percent
[10:03] Speaker 1: of adult prolls were literate. Before the revolution, it was
[10:06] Speaker 1: said the number had only been fifteen percent. The Party
[10:09] Speaker 1: claimed that the infant mortality rate was now only one
[10:12] Speaker 1: hundred and sixty per thousand, whereas before the Revolution it
[10:15] Speaker 1: had been three hundred and So it went on. It
[10:18] Speaker 1: was like a single equation with two unknowns. It might
[10:21] Speaker 1: very well be that literally every word in the history books,
[10:24] Speaker 1: even the things that one accepted without question, was pure fantasy.
[10:28] Speaker 1: For all he knew, there might never have been any
[10:30] Speaker 1: such law as the use premnoctis, or any such creature
[10:33] Speaker 1: as a capitalist, or any such garment as a top hat.
[10:38] Speaker 1: Everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasure
[10:42] Speaker 1: was forgotten. The lie became truth. Just once in his
[10:45] Speaker 1: life he had possessed after the event. That was what
[10:48] Speaker 1: counted concrete, unmistakable evidence of an act of falsification. He
[10:53] Speaker 1: had held it between his fingers for as long as
[10:55] Speaker 1: thirty seconds in nineteen seventy three. It must have been,
[10:59] Speaker 1: at any rate, it was about at the time when
[11:01] Speaker 1: he and Catherine had parted, but the really relevant date
[11:04] Speaker 1: was seven or eight years earlier. The story really began
[11:08] Speaker 1: in the middle sixties, the period of the Great Purges,
[11:10] Speaker 1: in which the original leaders of the revolution were wiped
[11:13] Speaker 1: out once and for all. By nineteen seventy none of
[11:17] Speaker 1: them was left except Big Brother himself. All the rest
[11:20] Speaker 1: had by that time been exposed as traitors and counter revolutionaries.
[11:24] Speaker 1: Goldstein had fled and was hiding no one knew where,
[11:27] Speaker 1: and of the others a few had simply disappeared, while
[11:30] Speaker 1: the majority had been executed after spectacular public trials at
[11:34] Speaker 1: which they made confession of their crimes. Among the last
[11:38] Speaker 1: survivors were three men named Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford. It
[11:43] Speaker 1: must have been in nineteen sixty five that these three
[11:45] Speaker 1: had been arrested. As often happened, they had vanished for
[11:48] Speaker 1: a year or more so that one did not know
[11:51] Speaker 1: whether they were alive or dead, and then had suddenly
[11:53] Speaker 1: been brought forth to incriminate themselves in the usual way.
[11:57] Speaker 1: They had confessed to intelligence with the enemy. At that
[12:00] Speaker 1: date too. The enemy was Eurasia, embezzlement of public funds,
[12:04] Speaker 1: the murder of various trusted party members, intrigues against the
[12:08] Speaker 1: leadership of Big Brother which had started long before the
[12:11] Speaker 1: revolution happened, and acts of sabotage causing the deaths of
[12:14] Speaker 1: hundreds of thousands of people. After confessing to these things,
[12:18] Speaker 1: they had been pardoned, reinstated in the party, and given
[12:21] Speaker 1: posts which were in fact sinecures, but which sounded important.
[12:25] Speaker 1: All three had written long, abject articles in the Times,
[12:28] Speaker 1: analyzing the reasons for their defection and promising to make amends.
[12:34] Speaker 1: Some time after their release. Winston had actually seen all
[12:36] Speaker 1: three of them in the Chestnut Tree Cafe. He remembered
[12:40] Speaker 1: the sort of terrified fascination with which he had watched them.
[12:42] Speaker 1: Out of the corner of his eye. There were men
[12:45] Speaker 1: far older than himself, relics of the ancient world, almost
[12:49] Speaker 1: the last great figures left over from the heroic days
[12:51] Speaker 1: of the Party. The glamor of the underground struggle in
[12:54] Speaker 1: the Civil War still faintly clung to them. He had
[12:57] Speaker 1: the feeling, though already at that time facts and days
[13:00] Speaker 1: were growing blurry, that he had known their names earlier
[13:03] Speaker 1: than he had known that of Big Brother. But also
[13:05] Speaker 1: there were outlaws, enemies, untouchables, doomed with absolute certainty to
[13:10] Speaker 1: extinction within a year or two. No one who had
[13:14] Speaker 1: once fallen into the hands of the thought police ever escaped.
[13:16] Speaker 1: In the end, there were corpses waiting to be sent
[13:19] Speaker 1: back to the grave. There was no one at any
[13:23] Speaker 1: of the tables nearest to them. It was not wise
[13:26] Speaker 1: even to be seen in the neighborhood of such people.
[13:29] Speaker 1: They were sitting in silence before glasses of the gin
[13:31] Speaker 1: flavored with cloves, which was the speciality of the cafe
[13:35] Speaker 1: of the Three. It was Rutherford whose appearance had most
[13:38] Speaker 1: impressed Winston. Rutherford had once been a famous caricaturist, whose
[13:42] Speaker 1: brutal cartoons had helped to inflame popular opinion before and
[13:46] Speaker 1: during the Revolution. Even now, at long intervals his cartoons
[13:50] Speaker 1: were appearing in the times. There was simply an imitation
[13:53] Speaker 1: of his earlier manner, and curiously lifeless and unconvincing. Always
[13:58] Speaker 1: they were a rehashing of the ancient thiets, slum tenements,
[14:01] Speaker 1: starving children, street battles, capitalists in top hats. Even on
[14:06] Speaker 1: the barricades, the capitalists still seemed to cling to their
[14:09] Speaker 1: top hats, an endless, hopeless effort to get back into
[14:12] Speaker 1: the past. He was a monstrous man, with a mane
[14:15] Speaker 1: of greasy gray hair, his face pouched and seamed with
[14:19] Speaker 1: thick negroid lips. At one time he must have been
[14:22] Speaker 1: immensely strong. Now his great body was sagging, sloping, bulging,
[14:26] Speaker 1: falling away in every direction. He seemed to be breaking
[14:30] Speaker 1: up before one's eyes, like a mountain crumbling. It was
[14:34] Speaker 1: the lonely hour of fifteen. Winston could not now remember
[14:38] Speaker 1: how he had come to be in the cafe at
[14:39] Speaker 1: such a time. The place was almost empty. A tinny
[14:43] Speaker 1: music was trickling from the telescreens. The three men sat
[14:46] Speaker 1: in their corner, almost motionless, never speaking. Uncommanded, the waiter
[14:51] Speaker 1: brought fresh glasses of gin. There was a chessboard on
[14:54] Speaker 1: the table beside them, with the pieces set out, but
[14:57] Speaker 1: no game started. And then, for perhaps half a minute
[15:00] Speaker 1: in all, something happened to the telescreens. The tune that
[15:03] Speaker 1: they were playing changed, and the tone of the music
[15:06] Speaker 1: changed too. There came into it, but it was something
[15:09] Speaker 1: hard to describe. It was a peculiar, cracked, braying, jeering note.
[15:14] Speaker 1: In his mind, Winston called it a yellow note. And
[15:18] Speaker 1: then a voice from the telescreen was singing, under the
[15:21] Speaker 1: spreading chestnut tree, I sold you, and you sold me.
[15:26] Speaker 1: There lie they, and here lie we under the spreading
[15:30] Speaker 1: chestnut tree. The three men never stirred, but when Winston
[15:35] Speaker 1: glanced again at Rutherford's ruinous face, he saw that his
[15:38] Speaker 1: eyes were full of tears, and for the first time
[15:41] Speaker 1: he noticed, with a kind of inward shudder, and yet
[15:44] Speaker 1: not knowing at what he shuddered, that both Eronson and
[15:47] Speaker 1: Rutherford had broken noses. A little later, all three were
[15:52] Speaker 1: re arrested. It appeared that they had engaged in fresh
[15:55] Speaker 1: conspiracies from the very moment of their release. At their
[15:59] Speaker 1: second trial, they confessed to all their old crimes over
[16:02] Speaker 1: again with a whole string of new ones. They were executed,
[16:06] Speaker 1: and their fate was recorded in the party histories, a
[16:08] Speaker 1: warning to posterity. About five years after this, in nineteen
[16:13] Speaker 1: seventy three, Winston was unrolling a wad of documents which
[16:16] Speaker 1: had just flopped out of the pneumatic tube onto his desk.
[16:19] Speaker 1: When he came on a fragment of paper which had
[16:21] Speaker 1: evidently been slipped in among the others and then forgotten.
[16:24] Speaker 1: The instant he had flattened it out he saw its significance.
[16:28] Speaker 1: It was a half page torn out of the Times
[16:30] Speaker 1: of about ten years earlier, the top half of the
[16:33] Speaker 1: page so that it included the date, and it contained
[16:36] Speaker 1: a photograph of the delegates at some party function in
[16:38] Speaker 1: New York. Prominent in the middle of the group were Jones,
[16:42] Speaker 1: Ernson and Rutherford. There was no mistaking them in any case.
[16:46] Speaker 1: Their names were in the caption at the bottom. The
[16:49] Speaker 1: point was that at both trials all three men had
[16:52] Speaker 1: confessed that on that date there had been on Eurasian soil.
[16:55] Speaker 1: They had flown from a secret air field in Canada
[16:58] Speaker 1: to a rendezvous somewhere in Siberia, and had conferred with
[17:01] Speaker 1: members of the Eurasian General staff, to whom they had
[17:04] Speaker 1: betrayed important military secrets. The date had stuck in Winston's
[17:08] Speaker 1: memory because it chanced to be Midsummer day, but the
[17:11] Speaker 1: whole story must be on record in countless other places
[17:14] Speaker 1: as well. There was only one possible conclusion the confessions
[17:19] Speaker 1: were lies. Of course, this was not in itself a discovery.
[17:24] Speaker 1: Even at that time Winston had not imagined that the
[17:26] Speaker 1: people who were wiped out in the purges had actually
[17:28] Speaker 1: committed the crimes that they were accused of. But this
[17:31] Speaker 1: was concrete evidence. It was a fragment of the abolished past,
[17:35] Speaker 1: like a fossil bone which turns up in the wrong
[17:37] Speaker 1: stratum and destroys the geological theory. It was enough to
[17:41] Speaker 1: blow the party to atoms if in some way it
[17:43] Speaker 1: could have been published to the world and its significance
[17:46] Speaker 1: made known. He had gone straight on working as soon
[17:51] Speaker 1: as he saw what the photograph was and what it meant.
[17:54] Speaker 1: He had covered it up with another sheet of paper. Luckily,
[17:57] Speaker 1: when he unrolled it it had been upside down from
[17:59] Speaker 1: the point of view of the telescreen. He took his
[18:02] Speaker 1: scribbling pad on his knee and pushed back his chair
[18:05] Speaker 1: so as to get as far away from the telescreen
[18:07] Speaker 1: as possible. To keep your face expressionless was not difficult,
[18:11] Speaker 1: and even your breathing could be controlled with an effort.
[18:14] Speaker 1: But you could not control the beating of your heart,
[18:16] Speaker 1: and the telescreen was quite delicate enough to pick it up.
[18:20] Speaker 1: He let what he judged to be ten minutes go by,
[18:22] Speaker 1: tormented all the while by the fear that some accident,
[18:25] Speaker 1: a sudden draft blowing across his desk, for instance, would
[18:28] Speaker 1: betray him. Then, without uncovering it again, he dropped the
[18:32] Speaker 1: photograph into the memory hole, along with some other waste papers.
[18:36] Speaker 1: Within another minute, perhaps it would have crumbled into ashes.
[18:42] Speaker 1: That was ten eleven years ago to day. Probably he
[18:45] Speaker 1: would have kept that photograph. It was curious that the
[18:48] Speaker 1: fact of having held it in his fingers seemed to
[18:51] Speaker 1: him to make a difference, even now, when the photograph itself,
[18:54] Speaker 1: as well as the event it recorded, was only memory.
[18:58] Speaker 1: Was the party's hold upon the past le strong, he wondered,
[19:01] Speaker 1: because a piece of evidence which existed no longer had
[19:04] Speaker 1: once existed, but to day, supposing that it could be
[19:08] Speaker 1: somehow resurrected from its ashes, the photograph might not even
[19:12] Speaker 1: be evidence. Already. At the time when he made his discovery,
[19:16] Speaker 1: Oceania was no longer at war with Eurasia, and it
[19:19] Speaker 1: must have been to the agents of East Asia that
[19:21] Speaker 1: the three dead men had betrayed their country. Since then,
[19:24] Speaker 1: there had been other changes two three He could not
[19:27] Speaker 1: remember how many, very likely the confessions had been rewritten
[19:31] Speaker 1: and rewritten until the original facts and dates no longer
[19:34] Speaker 1: had the smallest significance. The past not only changed, but
[19:38] Speaker 1: changed continuously. What most afflicted him with the sense of
[19:42] Speaker 1: nightmare was that he had never clearly understood why the
[19:44] Speaker 1: huge imposture was undertaken. The immediate advantages of falsifying the
[19:49] Speaker 1: past were obvious, but the ultimate motive was mysterious. He
[19:53] Speaker 1: took up his pen again and wrote, I understand how
[19:57] Speaker 1: I do not understand why. He He wondered, as he
[20:00] Speaker 1: had many times wondered before, whether he himself was a lunatic.
[20:04] Speaker 1: Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one. At
[20:07] Speaker 1: one time, it had been a sign of madness to
[20:09] Speaker 1: believe that the earth goes round the sun to day,
[20:12] Speaker 1: to believe that the past is unalterable. He might be
[20:16] Speaker 1: alone in holding that belief, and if alone, then a lunatic.
[20:19] Speaker 1: But the thought of being a lunatic did not greatly
[20:22] Speaker 1: trouble him. The horror was that he might also be wrong.
[20:26] Speaker 1: He picked up the children's history book and looked at
[20:28] Speaker 1: the portrait of Big Brother which formed its frontispiece. The
[20:32] Speaker 1: hypnotic eyes gazed into his own. It was as though
[20:35] Speaker 1: some huge force were pressing down upon you, something that
[20:38] Speaker 1: penetrated inside your skull, battering against your brain, frightening you
[20:42] Speaker 1: out of your beliefs, persuading you almost to deny the
[20:45] Speaker 1: evidence of your senses. In the end, the party would
[20:48] Speaker 1: announce that two and two made five, and you would
[20:51] Speaker 1: have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should
[20:54] Speaker 1: make that claim sooner or later. The logic of their
[20:56] Speaker 1: position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but
[21:01] Speaker 1: the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by
[21:04] Speaker 1: their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And
[21:09] Speaker 1: what was terrifying was not that they would kill you
[21:11] Speaker 1: for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For
[21:15] Speaker 1: after all, how do we know that two and two
[21:17] Speaker 1: make four, or that the force of gravity works, or
[21:20] Speaker 1: that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and
[21:24] Speaker 1: the external world exist only in the mind, and if
[21:26] Speaker 1: the mind itself is controllable, what then? But no, His
[21:32] Speaker 1: courage seemed suddenly to stiffen of its own accord. The
[21:35] Speaker 1: face of O'Brien, not called up by any obvious association,
[21:38] Speaker 1: had floated into his mind. He knew with more certainty
[21:42] Speaker 1: than before that O'Brien was on his side. He was
[21:45] Speaker 1: writing the Diary for O'Brien too. O'Brien. It was like
[21:49] Speaker 1: an interminable letter which no one would ever read, but
[21:52] Speaker 1: which was addressed to a particular person, and took its
[21:54] Speaker 1: color from that fact. The party told you to reject
[21:58] Speaker 1: the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final,
[22:00] Speaker 1: most essential command. His heart sank as he thought of
[22:04] Speaker 1: the enormous power arrayed against him, the ease with which
[22:07] Speaker 1: any party intellectual would overthrow him in debate, the subtle
[22:10] Speaker 1: arguments which he would not be able to understand, much
[22:13] Speaker 1: less answer. And yet he was in the right. They
[22:16] Speaker 1: were wrong, and he was right. The obvious, the silly,
[22:19] Speaker 1: and the true had got to be defended. Truisms are true,
[22:23] Speaker 1: hold on to that the solid world exists, Its laws
[22:26] Speaker 1: do not change. Stones are hard. Water is wet. Objects
[22:30] Speaker 1: unsupported fall towards the Earth's center. With the feeling that
[22:34] Speaker 1: he was speaking to O'Brien, and also that he was
[22:36] Speaker 1: setting forth an important axiom, he wrote, Freedom is the
[22:40] Speaker 1: freedom to say that two plus two make four. If
[22:43] Speaker 1: that is granted, all else follows. End of section seven,

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