like a bluebottle, and darted away again with a curving flight. It was the police
patrol, sno oping into people’s windows. The patrols did not m atter, 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 tele-
screen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made,
above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, s o long
as he remained within the field of vision which the me tal 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 vas t 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 s queeze 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 p oss ible 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 com-
pletely 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, entertain-
ment, 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
2
