Orwell George

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.

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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

Orwell George - 1984

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