One Hundred and Ninety-Four

Author: (British) George Orwell / Country: Mainland China
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-08-01
Features: George Orwell (1903—1950) was a great British humanitarian writer, journalist, and social critic, as well as a renowned English stylist. 1984 is Orwell's masterpiece, a celebrated anti-utopian and anti-totalitarian political satire novel in world literature. The terms he coined in the novel, such as "Big Brother," "doublethink," and "Newspeak," have been included in authoritative English dictionaries. Even terms derived from his surname, like "Orwellian" and "Orwellism," frequently appear in international news reports, demonstrating the profound influence of his works in English-speaking countries. In early April, the weather was cold and clear, and the clock struck thirteen. Winston Smith, hunching his shoulders to ward off the wind, quickly slipped into the glass door of Victory Mansions, but his movements were not swift enough to prevent a gust of sand from following him in. The lobby had the smell of boiled cabbage and old mats. At one end of the lobby, a colorful poster was nailed to the wall, slightly too large for indoor display. It depicted a large face, over a meter wide: the face of a man in his early fifties, with thick black whiskers and ruggedly handsome features. Winston walked toward the stairs. There was no need to try the elevator. Even on good days, the elevator was rarely used, and now, with the power out during the daytime, it was being saved for Hate Week. Winston’s apartment was on the seventh floor. He was thirty-nine years old and suffered from varicose veins in his right ankle, which made climbing the stairs slow, and he had to rest several times. On each landing, directly opposite the elevator door, the poster with the large face stared down. This was one of those types of posters where, no matter where you went, the eyes in the painting seemed to follow you. The caption read: Big Brother is watching you. Inside his apartment, a round voice recited a series of numbers related to iron production. The sound came from an oval metal plate resembling frosted glass, part of the wall on his right. Winston pressed a switch, and the voice became quieter, though the words were still clearly audible. This device (called a telescreen) could lower the volume but could not be completely turned off. He walked to the window. His figure was thin and frail, and his blue work uniform—party attire—made his thinness even more pronounced. His hair was pale, and his complexion naturally rosy, but his skin, roughened by harsh soap and blunt razors, as well as the recent harsh winter, had a slightly weathered look. Outside, even through the closed glass window, it looked cold. In the street below, small whirlwinds swept up dust and scraps of paper. Despite the bright sunshine and blue sky, everything seemed colorless except for the posters everywhere. The face with the black beard looked down from every key point. On the front of the opposite building, another poster read: Big Brother is watching you. The black eyes stared intently at Winston’s eyes. On the street below, another poster had a corner torn off, fluttering in the wind, sometimes covering and sometimes revealing only the single word "Ministry of Truth." In the distance, a helicopter buzzed over the rooftops like a green fly, hovered for a while, then turned and flew away. That was the police patrol, watching people’s windows. But the patrol was not frightening; only the Thought Police were. Behind Winston, the telescreen continued to drone on about the output of iron and the overachievement of the Ninth Year Plan. The telescreen could receive and transmit simultaneously. Any sound Winston made, as long as it was louder than a whisper, could be picked up; and as long as he remained within the field of view of the metal plate, he could be both heard and seen. Of course, there was no way to know, at any given moment, whether your every word and action was being monitored. How often the Thought Police actually monitored someone, or under what schedule they intercepted their signals, you could only guess. It was even possible to imagine that they were watching everyone, from beginning to end. Anyway, whenever they pleased, they could plug into your line. You could only live under the assumption—already a habit ingrained in you—that every sound you made was heard, and every action you took, unless in the dark, was closely observed. Winston continued to face away from the telescreen. It was safer that way; but he also knew very well that even his back could sometimes betray him. A kilometer away, his workplace, the Ministry of Truth, loomed above the gloomy cityscape, a tall, white building. This—the thought came to him with a vague sense of revulsion—was London, the main city of Zone One, the third most populous province in Oceania. He tried to squeeze out some memories of his childhood, something that could tell him if London had always been like this. If it had always been filled with these sights: dilapidated houses from the 19th century, propped up with wood, windows boarded up, roofs covered with corrugated iron, garden walls leaning at odd angles; the dust-choked, rubble-strewn sites of air raids, overgrown with weeds; the places where bombs had cleared large patches of land, suddenly revealing dirty wooden houses like chicken coops. But it was useless; he couldn’t remember. His childhood left little more than a series of backgroundless, indistinct, and brightly lit scenes. P1-3