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BOOKONENOTES
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU. DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER. 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. The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp. Then the face of Big Brother faded away again and instead the three slogans of the Party stood out in bold capitals: WAR IS PEACE FREEDOM IS SLAVERY IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH Whether he went on with the diary, or whether he did not go on with it, made no difference. The Thought Police would get him just the same. He had committed— would still have committed, even if he had never set pen to paper— the essential crime that contained all others in itself. Thoughtcrime, they called it. Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed forever. Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull. 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! Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull. Tragedy, he perceived, belonged to the ancient time. If all records told the same tale — then the lie passed into history and became truth. He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past. Doubleplusungood. If there is hope... it lies in the proles. If there is hope... it lies in the proles. Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. He wondered, as he had many times wondered before, whether he himself was a lunatic. Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one.