LEVEL: New World Order

Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) - he loved Big Brother

Winston Smith is thirty-nine, thin, with a calf wound that had never healed properly, working in the Records Department of the Ministry of Truth, which is responsible not for the past but for the present. The Party's slogan is three words, and the last two of them have been the aim of every government since the invention of writing: he who controls the past controls the future. History is a matter of what is written, and he is a man who edits historical records.

That is the whole thing in one sentence, and it is worth noticing that Winston is not in the party and is not against it in any organised way. He is a small man with a bad leg, a job that requires him to falsify things, and no belief in anything.

He has not been at his desk in some months. He has been moved away from the telex for reasons he did not understand, which in itself is instructive. And he has begun, without deciding to, to keep a diary.

The diary is the entire crime.

Not the content. The existence of it. Orwell is precise about this and the precision is the argument: a diary is not a crime because of what is in it. It is a crime because it is an act that only a person who still thinks in private would perform. The Party does not mind what you think. It minds that there is a you in whom thinking happens privately, and a record is evidence that the you persists.

By writing, Winston has re-created the crime that the Party exists to end. The Inner Party, he notes, applies the Party's principles to itself. It does not write things down. Because to write is evidence of a memory, and a memory of a contradiction is what undoes the whole structure. So nothing is written: reports are spoken, memos are destroyed, contradictions are revised until the false thing has been true for so long that it functions as the true thing.

That is the mechanism. A government does not need to control what people say. It needs to control what happened. If the past is fixed, the present is settled in advance, and everyone who disagrees is not disagreeing with the Party. They are disagreeing with physics.

The room

He lives in a room in a block of flats that is described with the flatness of a housing form and the care of a man who is counting.

A metal bed, a wooden stool, a metal basin, a mirror on the wall, a calendar, a ration card, a bread ration, a tin of Vitamin D pellets, a tobacco ration, a pair of scissors, some nails, a piece of copy paper, a pencil. The window is armoured glass with a shutter that has to be turned at intervals and cannot be turned back at will, because anyone coming in from outside could shoot.

The telescreen is on the wall and it works both ways. He cannot switch it off without risking a warrant, and he cannot hear it if he turns it down far enough. So it is always there, and he can hear most of it and cannot be sure which parts.

The boiler is the only one he can switch off, and only for a short time, and he is explicitly advised against using it.

The smells of the block are cooking and boiled cabbage and damp plaster and the latrine bucket downstairs.

None of this is described as a threat. That is what makes the room effective. There is no warder and no door and no violence. There is a room with a machine in it that cannot be switched off, and a man in it who has learned to mouth words behind the hiss of the bath.

The nearest thing to the truth Orwell gives is on the stair: the proles eat more, sleep more, have shorter hours, are exempt from almost all of the waking-life drudgery, and above all they have no record. And the sentence that follows is the whole class analysis of the book in one line: the proles have been spared the one thing in which the Party is genuinely and totally inferior.

The children

There are children everywhere, and the prose changes when they appear.

They are beautiful, he thinks. They are the Party's favourite. They are brought up with every Party principle drilled into them, they are told that all children love the Party and that the Party cares for them, and they are told at an early age that everyone who has betrayed the Party is a bad person.

And they are taught by a Party organisation with the specific and stated object of finding out — by a process involving a kind of spy system — the earliest possible age at which a child can be made to lie, so that the child's loyalty can be tested.

The spy system. On his children. That sentence sits in the book as plainly as anything Orwell ever wrote, and it is not elevated.

Winston watches his daughter being led away by a procession with a pink ribbon, and thinks, though he will not have thought it if he had known how it sounded, that the Party would do a far better job of raising them than he could. That is a thought about his own inadequacy as a father, and the Party has not merely taken his daughter. It has made him unreliable as a father.

And the accusation: *your children are the eyes and ears of the Thought Police. Oh, the thought police will get hold of them one day. But it will be through them, through the children.* They will report on him. They will do it because they have been brought up to, and because they will be happy.

There is no malice in the children. That is what makes it work. They are loved and they are honest and they will hand over their father out of love, which is what the Party wanted from love.

The food, and why it is the argument

This is the part that is missed most often, and it is why the compression keeps all of it.

Orwell walks through the texture of daily life because that is where the argument lives. Control is not a boot through the door. Control is a queue.

The queues are how the whole thing runs. The proles queue for bread, for kerosene, for ration cards, and the queue is where people meet each other and talk, and talking is what the Party has to abolish, and so the Party organises the ration so that it must be collected in person, daily, at fixed hours, and everybody must queue in the same place.

Winston works out the design, and the design is elegant and it is perfectionist. Make everyone fetch his own ration in person. Put everyone on the same ration in the same time. Shrink the interval between two collections so that everyone must spend most of the waking day doing it. Make it insufficient so that a man must be always fetching and never able to sit down and think.

And make it sufficient. Or at least make it feel sufficient, most of the time, most of the people, most of the days. Because if it were plainly insufficient there would be a permanent agitation and you do not want agitation. You want a vast, patient, indefinitely postponable irritation — which is what most lives consist of and what the Party has arranged to contain.

That is the sentence Orwell says almost in those words, and it is a sentence about an entire civilisation and not about a queue.

What he wants

He wants the other thing. Not to overthrow anything. To be told the truth, to enquire of it, and to go on making it. It is not a political ambition. It is the desire of an adult human being, he says, to do something worth doing.

And he knows, on every page, that he will not be permitted to. He is not persecuted for wanting. He is worn down — by the prole-feed promising him Russia, and he half believes it; by the proles at the pubs, who will hate the Party with a furious hatred tomorrow and hate it less intensely after the football; by the queue.

The book of the Household Ledger is a sign of what the prose is doing. He writes in it, to make sure the ink will not come off —

> If they are going to kill a man, it is worth killing him for what he thinks, > not for what he has done.

Winston does not yet know whether he is going to survive. He knows that something has to happen. He knows that the future belongs to the proles, that the proles will destroy the Party, that it may happen in a year or ten years, and he does not know how to help or whether he can help.

And the paper. He buys it at a shop because of what is written on it: *The Party Says*. The party's guarantee of — and here is the joke, and Orwell lets it sit as a joke for two pages before turning it — the party's guarantee of fair dealing to one and all.

He buys it because he wants to be able to accuse the Party of being insincere, and a private person who can produce an official document of inconsistency is the only kind of person who has ever been able to do that. This is an argument, not a fantasy. The object is evidence.

And he buys it because he wants to see the prole-feed.

The end of the chapter

He buys the paper. He puts the diary in it to bring it home. And he goes down the stairs to the station, having bought the thing in order to commit a crime with it, in a state of mind that Orwell is careful not to dress up.

A prostitute passes going the other way. Two women in thin overalls. The station is cold, the platform has rails and the rails lead in both directions. The train is arriving. The proles shout football results. A man with a shabby suit, a young man with a poor workmanlike jacket, a man with black trousers.

And he gets on, and the diary is in his pocket, and the last sentence of the chapter is the story's whole shape in miniature:

He had bought the paper for the sake of the paper, and now it had become something else.

He did not want to commit a crime any more. He wanted to feel the weapon in his hand.

The sentence does not say which way it goes. It says a man walked into a station to buy paper and walked out holding something he could use, and the using is now in his hands and not in his plan. That is how a person enters a rebellion. Not by deciding. By acquiring an object whose function is pre-decided and then carrying it.

---

The telescreen works both ways. That has to be said once more, because Orwell's chapter two is built on it and almost every summary loses it.

It can receive, and it can transmit. The instrument in the wall is not a speaker. It is a two-way instrument, and the fact that Winston can never be sure whether it is listening is not atmosphere. It is the entire design goal of the state expressed as a piece of furniture.

So when he is in the queue for his rations, he must keep his hands away from his pocket and his eyes away from his face and his face neutral, because the violation is not the crime. The violation is the signal. A man does not have to do anything to be convicted. He has to be read.

The invasion

And then Eurasia falls, and Winston is walking past the Victory Mansions on his way to work, and everything is happening at once.

The prole-feed is running on every screen in the city, and everywhere the screens are the same: the same three flags, the same invasion, the same reporters in the same studio in the same weather. It has been running for months. It is being run *constantly*. There is a war and it is permanent, because a war that ended would require a peace and a peace would require a truth about who won.

And it is winning, every single day, at enormous volume.

Because that is the mechanism and Orwell states it plainly: the enemy must keep being beaten, or the proles might start to wonder why they are being starved. The food situation is real. The ration has been cut twice this year and they are told it is because the enemy is holding the shipping lanes, and the shipping lanes are an indefinite construction that will therefore always be in difficulty.

The two facts are incompatible. That is the point. The Party has arranged to be starving and invincible simultaneously, and it does not require the proles to be stupid. It requires them not to be in a position to compare notes.

The Two Minutes Hate

Winston stops in front of a screen because he cannot stop, and the crowd does what crowds do, and for the next two minutes a hundred and fifty people become a single animal.

Orwell is exact about the sensation. It is not spontaneous and it is not pretended either. It is a genuine frenzy, produced by engineering, and it is enjoyed. The proles love it. They have been at the prole-feed all day and then the pubs and then this. Winston, walking home, has watched people with whom he has just queued for bread scream at a screen because a man he has never seen and will never meet is being humiliated for being a Jewsheimer.

The basket of the headline. Goldstein's face. The screams.

And a man next to Winston — an ordinary man, a prole, with a face he will never see again — is trying to get out of the crowd by shoving, and the crowd is treating him as a suspect because he is moving differently.

That detail is the whole chapter. A crowd that has been taught to hate nothing but is looking for something to do with the feeling finds the man who is moving. Not the man who is agreeing loudly. The other one. And everyone knows this rule and nobody has to teach it.

Winston does not join in. He stands there and does the mouth. He does not laugh when the crowd laughs, he does not shout when the crowd shouts, and he cannot not shout when everyone else shouts, and the effort of not shouting is the only honest act available to him in the street.

He thinks, going home, that if there were any way of finding out what other people were really thinking he would not have to be a loner. And the answer is: there is no way. The two-way telescreen, the prole-feed, the queues, the pubs that are the same every day, the hymns, the lotteries, the sports, the children in the proles' families. Every structure in the book exists to prevent two people from discovering what the other thinks.

The rally

And then the rally, which is the most carefully constructed thing in the chapter.

The proles are given a day off for it. Winston is at the centre of it, watching from a long way off, and the crowd is enormous and the speech is about Eurasia and the crowd screams at the right moments in the right places and no one is leading it, because that is the achievement.

The crowd is its own leader. Or rather, the speech and the crowd are the same thing, produced together, and neither has to be told what the other does.

Winston notices the specific technical detail and it is the one that has stuck with readers for seventy years: the speech contains words that are not quite right — the *proles* misheard *proletariat*, and they laugh at themselves, and Orwell says, and this is the paragraph that matters, that if the proles understood the words the crowd would not have listened.

The crowd does not listen because it does not understand. And a crowd that does not understand cannot be a dissenter.

That is a sentence about the entire architecture and it is worth more than every speech in the book, because it is a mechanism that is reproducible. You do not need to lie to a crowd. You need to speak to it in words it will not follow, and it will be yours.

Goldstein

The face on the screen is Goldstein. And the betrayal of everything Winston believes arrives in this form: the proles do not want Goldstein to be executed. They want him to be released.

And the reason is given and it is the best sentence in the book about why a person would support the thing they are fighting. If Goldstein were killed, then he would be a martyr and the proles would be able to believe in something. If he were released, he would be a liar and they would go on being loyal.

They have been starved for two years for this man. And Orwell's judgement, which is not delivered as a judgement, is that if Goldstein had been released they would have gone on with their lives and the Party would have still been safe.

And it will be, because the proles are not looking for a leader. They are looking for permission to stop.

The final line of the chapter

Winston watches and thinks that if there is any hope it is in the proles. They have smashed the Party. There is no Party, in any sense he can remember. Whatever is coming will be the work of the proles, and he wants to find out what it will be.

And then the chapter ends, and Orwell tells the reader exactly what to do with all of that.

I was not interested in the proles at the time. I merely felt very large and very much wishing that I was not too large to be interested in anything.

That is the whole book in one sentence, and it is not a political statement. It is an account of the ordinary human being's relation to every subsequent moment: too big to be carried by what is being carried.

The book has not started and Winston has already been defeated once. Not by the police and not by the Party. By his own size. Everything after this is detail.

---

He does not dream of Julia. He dreams of his mother.

And the dream is small and it is terrible in the way of small things: his mother had died when he was about four, and he has a fragment of her, a smell and a feeling of her hand, and in the dream the Party takes her away because she has done something — there is no charge, there is a grey coat and a face with no eyes on it — and he runs and shouts and the crowd laughs because he is thirty-nine and shouting at a grey coat.

And then, as in all dreams, he wakes up and the real thing is the false one. The mother is gone and has been gone for thirty-five years. The grey coat is here.

Orwell's note is that the Party took his mother out of him the way you take a coin out of a purse, and then he does something remarkable: he puts it back himself. He gives her back. He invents a mother, an ordinary mother, with an ordinary life, who died of appendicitis when he was four. He makes her perfect because she was real once and he cannot bear her to have been taken.

And then he observes that he is not really remembering his mother. He is inventing her. And having invented her, he cannot stop, and by the time he has finished inventing her he has invented a whole life for himself in which he was happy, and he knows perfectly well that it is a fabrication and he does not want to stop making it.

This is the deepest thing the book does and it happens before anything happens. The Party does not need to do anything to Winston's inner life. He will do it himself, for free, and will call it memory.

The dark room

He is summoned to the Ministry of Love on a Thursday afternoon. It is almost the end of his month, and there is barely enough warning to be sure the thing is real.

And it is not. Not yet. What he is given is a room without windows, the interior of the Ministry of Love, in a building with no windows. A chair. A telescreen. And a man who tells him, in a pleasant voice, that he has been called for a special reason, and that there is a serious error in his work, and that they have been investigating.

Winston understands immediately and completely, in the way that the reader does too, that he has been arrested for the diary.

And that he is going to die.

That is the whole of it. It happens between chapter two and chapter three in about eleven seconds, and Orwell never wastes a word of it. There is no arrest. There is no door closing on him. There is a chair, an official pleasantness, and the knowledge.

And then he is asked a question about his work — the errors — and the questioning looks for all the world like ordinary conversation with a supervisor, because that is what it is designed to look like, and Winston thinks, with the specific clarity of a man who has just understood something about how power works, that the interrogation would have been the same if they had really wanted to extract something, and that what he is experiencing is nothing worse than a conversation he cannot escape.

And Julia is already inside the door.

Julia

She appears and everything about the sequence is engineered.

The first thing she says is a lie about her work. And Winston thinks, in the paragraph that tells you the whole of their relationship, that she had said a small lie because she was used to the risk, and that he had not thought of it in the same way because he had not done the same thing for months and because an act which had seemed like courage when it meant risking his neck now seemed like the beginning of a process he did not know the end of.

The Party has not been torturing him. It has been teaching him what he does, in the same way you teach by giving you your own material.

That is the difference between the Inquisition and this, and it is the whole method: the Ministry of Love does not extract a confession. It produces a witness.

The arithmetic

And then he does the thing he has been doing all his life and it is the corruption of the whole book in one paragraph.

He commits it. He pushes the diary under his body. And the reason is not courage.

The reason is that the proles are going to win, and he has decided, in the most human way available, that being on the right side of that is worth betraying on. He is a man who has spent his life in a small minority and has now worked out that he is going to be in the majority, and his judgement is that a stance can be taken on it.

And immediately, with the diarist's accuracy, he records what he has just done. He has decided to betray his mother — and there is no mother; the invented one, the one he made up because he could not bear her absence — and he has done it because he believes the proles will win.

He has betrayed a fabrication in order to join the winning side. And the book does not let that pass as a political calculation, because the fabrication was the only part of the sentence he had written himself. Everything else was Party property.

Then Julia speaks.

She is in the same chair as he was and it is her turn, and she says — and she says it as a fact, flatly, in answer to his question about the Ministry of Love — that she was tortured.

Not cautiously. Not to warn him. She tells him, because she has no particular reason not to, and because the two of them have reached the place where nothing is held back, and because the lie about her work was the last conventional thing between them.

And the confession is short and it is not dramatised. The Party held her for three months. They broke her. They sent her to a place for the surgeons, and the doctors operated on her, and the purpose of the operation was to break her will, and it worked, and she said what they wanted her to say, and they had shown her photographs.

Winston asks about her case. She says it is finished. He asks whether she has repented. And she says she does not know; he must stop asking about it, because he cannot help her and he is going to be executed anyway, and she has learned that the best thing for her is to be dead.

And then she says the sentence that is the most frightening in the book, and Orwell puts it in italics because it is not a political statement:

It was not the Party that tortured me. It was the proles.

She is not lying. She is not being ironic. She has been tortured by people who were told that doing it was their duty, which is precisely the word she uses, and she has broken, and she has come out on the other side of it accusing the proles, and her lover is standing there and she is right.

Winston's position is that she is in the wrong and she is the wrong in a way he cannot forgive, because she has not said the one thing. She has not said that she could not help it. She has named the perpetrators and excused the perpetrator.

The wedding

And then they have the conversation about their marriage, and it is the most frightening scene in the book because it is ordinary.

She does not love him. He does not love her. The Party arranges marriages as it arranges everything, for the sake of the offspring, and the loving is supposed to be produced by the Party's own slogans and by the Institute of Marriage, and it works, and everybody involved knows the transaction has happened.

And she says she wanted to marry a man and she did not, and she has had two husbands and neither of them was a good man and the difference between them is not relevant.

And she is full of a kind of physical, pragmatic, unsentimental pleasure in the fact of her own body being a thing the Party has not managed to entirely appropriate, and she cannot talk about love, and Winston is astonished by this, and she is annoyed by his astonishment.

She says she has stopped trying to feel anything about it. She says her body belongs to her and her body is not the Party's, whatever the Party believes. And then she says something Winston turns over for a long time afterwards — that a man can still do what he has to do and love who he wants to and not know which is which.

That is the whole book. That sentence is the whole book.

What happens next, and why the book is not about them

The door opens. Brierly and two guards, and Julia goes too, and in the lift she makes one small movement she is not supposed to make, and that is her last free act.

Then the sessions. In them he signs everything. He makes statements about the Party's record that he knows to be false and believes will be treated as the ultimate treachery. He confesses to crimes he has not committed. He names people who have not spoken to him in years.

And the chapter ends with what Orwell calls his second false confession: the one about Julia. He tells the room that she was not the woman he thought she was — that she was a Party agent through the whole of it, that the Ministry of Love told him at the beginning that she would arrive, that he knew it and suspected it from the beginning.

He knows it is false. He knows she was not a spy and that he did not suspect it at the beginning and that the Ministry of Love did not tell him she would arrive and that the confession was made because the room wanted it and he supplied it.

And he writes it down anyway, and signs it, and puts his initials at the bottom, and adds a note about his own signature being the one that matters, and then the chapter closes.

That is where a person is when the book ends and the ending has not happened yet. He has supplied the weapon, destroyed what he loved, and done it with prose.

---

He was not tortured. That is the first fact of the chapter and it is the one he cannot hold.

He expected the boot and the wire and the broken bone and he had braced for it. Instead there is a man across a table in a room without windows who speaks pleasantly, asks about his work, corrects him, and is — for the first hour — reasonable.

Winston tells himself that this is a technique, and it is, and knowing that it is a technique is the only thing keeping him in the room. Then, three days later, he is not certain any more.

And the chapter is built around that shift. Not the discovery of the trap — the reader is given the trap in the first page of chapter two, in the queue for bread — but the moment a man stops being able to tell whether the politeness is a technique or whether he has simply been unlucky enough to meet a decent official.

The programme

O'Brien explains it, and the explanation is delivered as pedagogy, which is the form it takes.

They will not torture him. He says this in a tone that leaves room for argument and proceeds to argue the point.

The reason is not humanitarian. The reason is that torture does not work and they proved it. They tortured people into confessions for three years in the thirties and it was useless — because a tortured person will say whatever will stop it, and the Party needs a confession that will survive being repeated to the proles on the telescreens. A false confession is worse than no confession.

And of course, if you torture a man, you destroy him. Which is fine if you only want him destroyed. The Party does not want him destroyed. The Party wants him *used*.

That is the whole of it, stated early and in plain words. They do not want a confession. They want a person who can be released back into the world with a set of beliefs in him, and the beliefs have to be the Party's, and he has to be the one who arrives at them.

So the method is not extraction. It is production.

What he is offered

And then O'Brien tells him what is going to happen and Winston understands it instantly and completely.

They will convert him. They will use him.

They will take a man who has spent his whole life in the Records Department editing the past, and they will show him the future. Not threaten him with the future — show him it, at first hand, in a way he cannot disbelieve. And when he has seen it, he will defend it. Not out of fear. Out of the ordinary human need to be right about the shape of what is coming, which is a need so ordinary that the Ministry of Love has built an entire apparatus around supplying it.

Winston's reaction, and it is the sentence that makes the whole apparatus legible:

He knew that this would happen and he did not know that it would happen quite so soon.

There is a reason for that. The Party has been leaking fragments for years — Goldstein in the prole-feed, the Ministry of Plenty promising chocolate, the Ministry of Love promising that the past will not be abolished but merely falsified. Winston has been assembling those fragments into a picture and has been treating them as propaganda.

And they are not propaganda. They are true, and that is the trick.

The picture he assembled from the leaks is correct. He has known, for some time, that there is a boot to be stamped on a human face and that the Party is a thing that does that. He has been assembling that from scraps and treating it as the Party's lying, and in fact every scrap was true and the lie was in his assumption that a true thing said by the Party must be false.

So he has spent months building a resistance out of information that is correct, and the only thing wrong with the resistance is that it was never a resistance. It was a summary.

The offer, precisely

O'Brien lays out the mechanism and it is quite elegant.

They will put something in the Prole-feed. They will let him be the man who is tortured. They will let him speak and be believed and let it be printed and let it be shown to the proles, and for a period of days or weeks he will be Winston Smith, the enemy, and the proles will believe him, and it will be real.

And when it has run its course he will be released. And he will be a man who has been tortured, and who knows something, and who is *desperate* to tell the proles about it.

The proles will listen. Because they do not believe the Party and they will listen to anyone who has been tortured and come out.

And then they will ask him how he knows, and he will have to tell them that he was tortured, and the Party will produce the record, and the record will be the confession he made on camera as the enemy, and it will be genuine, because he made it.

That is the instrument. Not torture. A genuine experience of having been tortured, converted into a lie by the fact that he made it up himself.

And they will do the same thing to the proles — show them the prole-feed with the enemies confessing to atrocities, and the proles will believe it, because it is the truth told by a man who was tortured.

And in a month or two, when the tide turns, they will show the proles Eurasia itself, and the proles will not have been enemies of Eurasia, because they will have believed the Party was fighting Eurasia while the Party was lying to them about who was fighting whom.

Winston says this is the greatest Party trick and O'Brien agrees, and Orwell writes the sentence about him in one line: it was a question of whether he could take it, and he believed it, and he sat and listened.

And the horror of it is that he wants to believe it. The whole man, wanting to hold the one political conviction that would make his life coherent.

The thought about the proles

And then O'Brien says the thing that ends him, and it is not the speech about the future.

He asks whether Winston believes the proles will destroy the Party. Winston says yes. And O'Brien says, do you really think they can?

And then he explains it. It is a short, technical, almost bored explanation, and it is the passage the book is built on.

The proles will not destroy the Party. It has never occurred to them. They are not rebellious. They are stupid. They are the people who cannot form the secondary idea that "the enemy is Eurasia" is a proposition you accept or reject, and the Party has spent forty years getting them not to.

They are above suspicion. They are, by definition, the good. Anything said against them is propaganda. If there were a war between Eurasia and the Party they would be on the Party's side, and if the Party lost, they would not be surprised.

And they cannot be made to be suspicious, because that would require them to form an opinion, and the whole apparatus of the last forty years has been designed to make opinion unnecessary.

They are the perfect instrument of their own enslavement because they have no thought of their own that could be turned against them.

And Winston, listening, agrees.

That is the chapter. Not the torture that is not happening. The discovery that the thing he was going to organise was not going to happen, and that his belief in it was itself the Party's product.

The two sentences about Julia

The chapter ends with the second confession and with a single sentence that carries the whole of what is coming.

He is made to write, in the examination room, a statement about the Proles.

It is a long document and it is written in the tone of bitter, honest disappointment, and it is the exact thing a man who hates the Party would write if he were trying to reach the proles, and it is what he would have written that morning with the diary.

And the chapter closes on the thought that what he is writing is what he would have written anyway. That the Party is not breaking him down. It is using what was already in him, in the shape it could be reached.

The one thing he cannot account for, and the thing the chapter is really about, is that the sentence about Julia is the hardest to write and the easiest to believe.

He has done the last thing the Party needed and he has done it as a self-contained act, in a room by himself, with a pen.

---

He asked what had been done to her. That is the question he takes out into the world with him, and it is the only question he has left, and he asks it of himself repeatedly over the following days.

And he cannot make himself ask it of anyone else.

The chapter is almost entirely the account of a man trying to think, and the account is written so that the thinking visibly fails. He puts the events in order. He cannot make them fit. He tries three times.

First attempt: she was tortured and it did not matter, he was stronger than she. That is what he would like to believe and it is the first thing that goes, because he was not stronger than her. He was the one who signed things and she was the one who broke.

Second attempt: it is better that he had never loved her. And the second thought is worse than the first, because it is the one that will not go away, and he knows that what he is really saying is that it is better that he had never loved her because then she could not have hurt him this much.

Third attempt, and this is where Orwell shows the machine working: he tries to think about the Party and what it did, and he understands why she broke and cannot think about why he did not.

The proles tortured her. She tortured herself.

And then, in a single line that is the whole of the chapter's meaning, that he is ashamed to set down: *and she betrayed me.*

And he cannot think about that sentence without a physical reaction.

So he sets it aside and thinks about something else, which is what everyone does, and what the book then does is put a stop to it.

The portico

The place he is held is not called the Ministry of Love. It has no name on the door. He knows it as the Ministry of Love because that is what everybody calls it, and Orwell notes the cheerfully sinister fact that this proves his former comrades had been telling him the truth.

There is a corridor he walks down again and again, and a room he is taken into, and the room is not large. There is a picture on the wall of a face more or less deliberately made to look blind and deaf. There is a picture of Saint Michael and the dragon.

There is a chair by the door and a man standing by it, and the man will be his keeper for most of his time, and Winston will come to depend on him more than on anyone in the world.

The name of the keeper is Boris, he is called by the name at the start, and he is a man of about thirty with a shabby moustache and a pleasant inefficient manner, and Winston has an idea that he has been sent by the Inner Party to be his guardian.

Boris is not a torturer. Boris is an ordinary man doing an ordinary job, with a small dog, and a wife, and a story about a play he saw, and a wife who complains about his cooking.

And he is told things. He tells Winston things that are only useful to a friend trying to help him, and none of them help. He says things that make Winston feel better without the Party being contradicted. He tells him that things are better than they were, and he doesn't mean that they are better. He is not lying. He has been got too.

And the final observation about him is that if you had looked at him you would have said he was a decent man, and that it was impossible to feel any clear hatred of him. That he was still a human being, and that when you got to know him you found that he was, in every particular, average.

The porter, who is not a torturer either

There is a porter, and the porter is a large man who moves Winston about without any unnecessary violence, and he likes him, or likes him enough.

And the porter's simplicity is the point: he has not been given a complicated idea of what he is for. He thinks he is helping a man. He does not know that the breaking is the purpose, because if he knew he would not be the kind of man who would do it.

Orwell puts the thought in Winston's head and it is worth having: the idea that all people are not the same and that some people would do anything for the good of others and some would do nothing, and that the system is built to put the second kind in the places where the first kind can be used.

The guard is chosen so that the prisoner cannot hate him. That is not corruption. That is design.

The two men who were the same man

Then there are the two men who arrested him, and Winston does not know which of them he saw on the stairs. He cannot tell whether it was the tall one or the short one with the hair.

And this is not a small detail, and Orwell underlines it. He cannot remember.

He was afraid at the time and now cannot distinguish the face. The one specific impression he has is a memory of a smallish man with shabby hair against a wall, and Winston cannot swear to it, because of the light and because he did not look for long.

The Party does not need to conceal its agents. It only needs to get a man looking at the wrong moment. And having seen him, or not seen him, Winston has been given a permanent reason to doubt his own testimony — not about the Party but about his own memory. Which is exactly the state a man is in who wants, more than anything, to be able to give a clear account of what was done to him.

And then there is the other thing about the two men, which is delivered flatly and is the best detail in the chapter. The crowd had been watching. When the two men were taking him away, the crowd had been with them. They had been there before, and they had been there after, and there had been no stupidity and no excitement in the crowd — the crowd had understood, and had been satisfied, and had moved on.

And the boy who passes later, who asks where Winston is going, and is told to run along, and does — the boy is one of the crowd.

And then the reason

And this is what ends the chapter. He asks himself, in terms he cannot avoid, whether the Party *had* to do what was done to Julia, or whether it would have been better if they had not, and he answers honestly.

The Party had not tortured her. It could not be said that the Party had had to torture her. And he understood, in a way he could not afterwards put into words, that they had done it because they wanted to.

That is the sentence. There was no necessity. The machinery was not compelled. It was a decision made by people who had the capacity to decide otherwise and who did not, and the whole apparatus existed to make that decision unremarkable.

And the last line of the chapter is Winston asking himself, in the dark, in a voice that had gone thin, why he had called her a traitor.

And the answer, in the order it arrives, is four sentences and it is the shape of every man who is being broken:

I had wanted to believe — I had *wanted* — that she had not been tortured.

Because I had *wanted* to believe that.

And he knows he had wanted it because the alternative was unbearable. Not because she had not been tortured. Because he had wanted not to have believed it.

That is the whole mechanism, stated in four lines and it has nothing to do with politics. The first thing that is broken is not the body. It is the human being's need to believe they have believed correctly, and once that is gone the rest follows without any further effort.

And with that sentence the chapter ends, and it is the end of any possible account of a political system, because the thing that has been demonstrated is not that the Party is powerful. It is that a man who wants not to believe a thing will do the work of not believing it himself, if he is given long enough and someone to ask him the question.

---

The chair faces the telescreen. That is the whole of the physical design and it is worth a paragraph, because everything else in the Ministry of Love can be derived from it.

He is placed so that the instrument is always in front of him. There is no position in the room from which he can forget it, and there is no moment when it is off, and after long enough the object stops being a thing in the room and becomes a condition of being in the room. Orwell notes that he had the feeling that the telescreen was more like a windowpane than a telescreen, because he could not feel it working, and that was precisely the design.

Then the door opens and a man comes in and it is the beginning and not the worst part.

The long conversation

And what happens for the next stretch of the book is a conversation, and the conversation is on the future, and it is the thing the whole book is built to deliver.

O'Brien tells him what will happen, in detail, and the detail is not propaganda. Every element of it is something the Party has already announced through the Ministry of Plenty, and Winston knows every item on the list, and has known them for years.

The proles will rise. There will be no more privileges, no more ration cards, no more brown bread. Winston's own mother would have liked that; his mother had been a prole and he had never known it and had thought her snobbish.

There will be no more Proletariat, because the classes will go.

And there will be no more prohibitions. No more Party members refusing to do what the Party commands. No more drinking, no more smoking, no more gambling, no more prostitution, no more intoxication, no more milk.

O'Brien says this with pleasure. He says he has read about it in the Records Department, and he names the arrest of a man called Jefferson, who had gone round and arrested a large number of his fellows for drinking and then for drinking more, and then he says, in a tone that is not quite joking and is entirely serious, that everyone who went in for such things would be released, and he says he believes he could name a good many.

And then he says the thing Winston cannot at first absorb.

The feeling of being completely cured, of being cleansed, of being free.

And it goes through the room like a wave. He tells the chapter flatly that a wave went through him, and that it was the most powerful sensation he had ever had, and that he had half-believed and entirely wished, for reasons he could not have defended, that it would be better to be dead than to be miserable like this.

He had never been so near to hating the proles, and never so near to loving them.

The two steps

O'Brien does not know it yet but he is describing the whole mechanism of the book, and the mechanism is in that sentence.

The Party does not propose to abolish the proles as a class. It proposes to abolish their discontent. It proposes to remove every reason for discontent. It does not propose to make everyone happy. It proposes to remove the condition that makes unhappiness possible.

And this is the trap that works on Winston, and it works on the reader, and it is worth noticing exactly why: it is a genuinely good offer. The desire he has just confessed is the desire to be happier, and he has been given a plausible answer to it, and it is a better answer than anything he has ever been offered.

He does not immediately agree. He is ashamed of the relief. He tries to hold on to the proles. He says that his father and his mother — the invented ones — and the proles generally must be suffering.

And O'Brien counters with the actual argument, which is this: in the past, the wealthy lived on the labour of the poor. In a state without classes, that arrangement cannot exist. Anyone who chose, after the reconstitution, to work a double shift was doing it for himself.

And then he says the sentence about home that ends Winston's resistance: that if there had been no such thing as wealth and poverty, there would have been no such thing as the proles being obliged to put up with the miserable lives of the proles, who would have been no better off.

The offer is: your resentment is a by-product of your deprivation, and the deprivation is what I am going to abolish.

And the thought it produces in Winston is the reason he starts to crack: he has been using the proles against the Party for years and he has never once examined whether the proles existed.

The lie about the proles

And this is the part that does the real damage, and it is delivered by O'Brien as an aside, almost as a digression, and it is a falsehood.

He explains, at some length and with what sounds like conviction, that perhaps there never was a prole class in England before the Party; that the word *prole* was a Party invention; that the real history is a continuous struggle between the old landed aristocracy and the merchants; that the aristocracy held the workers in slavery and the merchants simply bought them better food.

And then — the sentence that has no answer:

He says the proles have never been enslaved in any sense that matters and have never been treated as human beings, and that the elite who lived off them were not to blame because they did not know what they were doing, and that once they did know they stopped.

And the proles, who were treated as human beings by the aristocracy, *hated them for it*, because a man who is used to being treated as a slave will be more shocked by kindness than by cruelty.

Winston hears it and something happens in him that Orwell records exactly. He does not reject it. He wants to believe it, and he knows he wants to believe it, and the knowing makes no difference.

And the chapter ends on the two sentences in a row that undo him:

I had seen in some earlier Churches the altar and the cross and had thought that they were perhaps dreadful, sending men to be slaves of a slave.

And: the proles looked at the bourgeoisie's freedom with longing, because they did not understand that a life of ease was no better than their own.

It is not that the proles have been proved to have been better off under the aristocracy. It is that a man has been shown a reason to be ashamed of the one thing he was proud of, and has been given it in a tone that made objection impossible.

The preparations

Then the other thing that happens, and it happens without drama and it is the only physical thing in the chapter.

He is given bread and water. There is a wire round his ankle which he assumes connects to the telescreen. He sleeps.

And then he is told what the next stage is, and O'Brien says it as a matter of course, the way a doctor says what an operation involves, and this is the sentence that contains the whole book:

We shall put you in the prole-feed on a Thursday afternoon. And you will be the one who is tortured. And the proles will believe it and hate the Party because you have told them that they will have to do the same to you.

O'Brien takes out a newspaper and shows him a photograph of Goldstein and learned the Proletariat party and the proles are going to say things and he could not control himself and he said things he did not know where he was saying.

And O'Brien says: the point is not whether he said them. The point is that the proles will believe he did.

Winston believes it immediately and without argument.

The last free thing in him was the power to doubt what he heard. He has just given it away and he has done it without noticing.

That is the end of chapter five, and it is the moment the book becomes unrecoverable. Everything after this is consequence.

---

O'Brien has told him that they will not torture him. And for the first time in weeks he believes it, and the belief is the last thing in him that has not been supplied.

He asks about the future, and O'Brien tells him, and then he asks about Goldstein, and O'Brien makes him ask, and says: you must have guessed by now that Goldstein does not exist.

And here the chapter does the work.

It does it by the simple device of having the most pleasant man imaginable say the sentence in the most pleasant tone. There is no drama. O'Brien says it and then talks about the nine or ten years in which Goldstein may have existed and may have been spoken of in the proles' districts, and Winston listens and understands that the Party manufactured an enemy precisely in order to have an enemy to destroy.

And that is what he has been organising against for twenty years.

The whole of his resistance was organised around a man who did not exist. He had believed that at the end of it there was Goldstein with a gun and a programme, and if you cannot name the thing you are fighting you cannot estimate whether you are winning.

He says the thing he says: *I thought there was a man...*

And O'Brien says, gently, reasonably, without mockery: *if there were, we would have to fight him; but there is no such man.*

The trap, and the tooth

And then O'Brien does something extraordinary and the chapter is a set piece because of it.

He reaches into the pocket of his coveralls and takes out a dirty, wax- covered tooth with a small length of wire attached, and puts it on the table.

It is a tooth of a man who was tortured to death, the man who was tortured and who has not existed. Goldstein's tooth. The detail is so grotesque that it is funny, and O'Brien tells the story of the man's arrest as a joke, and Winston laughs.

And then O'Brien leans forward and says: this is the moment. The moment when you will feel the urge to shout and not do it.

And Winston does not shout.

He feels the urge, and holds it, and does not do it, and at the moment of not doing it he feels — as O'Brien has told him he will — that he has beaten him. He has beaten O'Brien. He has beaten the Party.

This is the psychology the entire apparatus was built to serve, and it costs nothing. There is no violence. A man is offered a piece of dirt that proves his life's work was a fiction, and he experiences the sensation of triumph, because not protesting is made to feel like power.

And the Party is then said to be looking for that kind of power, that kind of man, and to want him, and it is said with a tenderness that is worse than mockery because it is accurate.

The book

And then there is the book.

O'Brien has said that the Party's real reason for crushing Goldstein is to prevent the proles from ever finding out that the past was not what they thought, and it is time for Winston to learn how that is actually done.

He says: Goldstein's book, which you have imagined, is not a theoretical treatise. It is a description of the mechanism by which the Party will proceed.

And this is the moment the chapter has been built for, and Orwell writes it so that it is readable and understandable and not merely declared.

The book is called, in effect, the theory of the Party written by an enemy, and Winston must be made to understand it well enough to reject it. And the way he is made to understand it is that O'Brien explains it, patiently, in plain words, with the man who will execute the plan being the man who best understands it.

The Book is The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, by Emmanuel Goldstein, and the Party has it, and has had it for years, and every leader and every member of the Inner Party must know it by heart.

Winston's reaction is described as being first to seize on the words, and then to reject the words — but the rejection is not of the content. It is that this is what he had imagined all along, and had believed, and had been told by his mother and his friends and his school that the enemy was like this.

He thought, in the words of the chapter, that the great instrument of oppression was something crude and simple. He had thought it was something like a gun.

And the thing that makes the reading possible is a passage in the book about the proles. The Party's answer to a labouring class that would not stop suffering is to stop them being able to suffer by removing the occasions of suffering, and the passage is described as being delivered in a voice of scorn and contempt, and Winston finds that he can accept the method and reject the tone, and that this is the greatest danger he is in — because he could say the same thing in a different tone.

That is the chapter. Not the content of the book but the fact that a man can be persuaded of the plan and object only to its tone, and that a man who can do that has no ground to stand on.

The falsification of Goldstein

And then O'Brien takes the whole thing away.

He says that the books are not the point. He takes out a pen and says the book has to be rewritten and he will have to do the revision and he asks Winston to dictate.

And Winston understands immediately that he is to make the book better. Not deny it. Improve it.

He tries, at first, to write it wrong. He tries to add the sentence about the book being the work of a bitter enemy. O'Brien says, without comment, that is the wrong sentiment.

He tries to say it was a fairy story. O'Brien says, that is not the right attitude.

He tries, three more times, to sabotage it, and each time O'Brien quietly identifies the error of the sentiment, and each time Winston is made to accept the correction.

The Party does not merely prevent the critique. It commissions the best possible version of the critique from the man who knows it best, and then keeps that.

And then O'Brien says the thing about himself, and about how it will sound to Winston, and Winston hears it and does not believe it and cannot help hearing it. That if he were in the Party's position he would not be where he is now, and that the Party could not do what it does without people like him, and that the system is not a conspiracy of the clever against the stupid — it is a system in which the clever have been made to serve the stupid, on the ostensible motive of saving the stupid's own necks.

The last piece

And then the last piece, and it is the one that ends the chapter.

O'Brien says, without any apparent sequence leading into it, that he is a member of the Inner Party, and that he has been before, and that he has seen how it looks from the other side.

And then he stops and waits, and Winston has to say it, and after a long pause he says: *I think you said you had been here before.*

And O'Brien says: *and I saw how it looks from the other side.*

And Winston says: *And now you want me to —*

And O'Brien says, without any particular emotion: I want you to know that I understand how you feel. I know exactly what you are feeling now. And I want to reassure you that there is no reason for you to think I am your enemy.

And the paragraph that follows is the most effective in the book, and it is effective because it is entirely true.

He says he has to have faith in the Party, and that they will shoot him if he does not, but he adds: *but, my dear, I want you to know that if you were my friend I would not betray you.*

He says he wants them to have a life not too lonely, and that he wants them to feel safe, and that he wants them to be happy, and that he is going to send them to places where there is not much fighting and not much starving, and that if you were the only prisoner there he would take his own share of your rations.

And Winston believes him. That is the moment.

He is in a room with a man who has just told him, calmly, that he is going to betray him to the worst thing that can happen to a human being, and he believes him, because what has been offered is the one thing Winston Smith has not had since he was a child and that the entire apparatus has been constructed to supply.

And the reason it works, and Orwell says it plainly in the last line of the chapter, is that it is not a lie. O'Brien means it, in his way, at that moment.

A man who believes you and is going to destroy you is more dangerous than a man who lies to you and destroys you anyway, because the second one at least leaves you your self-contempt. The first one takes that too.

The chapter ends with Winston feeling that he had never been so alone, and with the sentence about the torn paper on the desk and the pen and the fact that he was still alive, and about the hope that the Party would not kill him for making a new record — because if it did, it would never know how much he had already confessed, and so it would have to go on torturing him to find out.

The last source of power a man has is what the system has not yet asked him. And they have not asked him, yet.

---

Goldstein's book is finished, and there is a period in which nothing happens, and the nothing is the point.

He has been transferred to the Ministry of Love. He has been given the book to revise, and he has revised it, and it is a good book, and he has written twenty pages of it in one sitting. And now there is a long stretch of nothing happening and the wardrobes are changed and he is moved up and down and the food is bad and there is nothing to do.

Then O'Brien comes in and tells him the plans are complete.

And here the chapter turns, and the mechanism is precisely the one the chapters before have been assembling, and it is worth stating exactly because it is the only time in the book where the whole apparatus is shown working at once.

They have made an excellent job of him. And it has not been done by torture.

He is told it is time for him to be the man in the prole-feed. He is given a false name and new clothes and told to listen to a gramophone record of the Two Minutes Hate, and he listens to it and cannot help singing along, and the reason he cannot help is that he has been conditioned for thirty years and the conditioning goes deeper than belief.

Then they show him the photograph, and describe Goldstein to him, and it is Elias Engels, a member of the Inner Party, and the construction is perfect: they show him Goldstein as an enemy of the Party, and they let him supply all the rest himself.

The prole-feed needs a man who has been tortured. They do not need to create one. They have one already. They have been training him.

Three days

They give him three days' solitary.

And he is in a room with a light on all the time and a screen in the wall and no idea of the hour, and he is told nothing about where he is or what is going to happen, and he is not beaten.

And what happens in those three days is described as the most severe mental agonising of his life, and it is the reverse of what a reader expects. There is no violence. There is a man in a quiet room thinking, and the thought is that if he goes out of that room and into the street he will not be the same person, and that everyone who has been tortured is someone he does not know.

The torture is to be left alone with the question of whether he will still be himself when he comes out.

And he concludes, in the moment that matters, that he will not. And the conclusion is correct, and it is the instrument.

Then they bring him out and put a coat on him and give him a message to deliver, and he goes out on the street, and he is not a free man and not a prisoner, and he is the man in the prole-feed.

The delivery

He walks through London with a brown coat and a new identity, and the street is the ordinary street — the proles going to work, the paper sellers, the queues — and nobody looks at him twice.

That is what the state is for, and it is worth noticing. He is a released enemy-agent walking through a district of several million people, and he is unharmed, and it is because the proles are not a police force and were never required to be. A state that must rely on its population to recognise an enemy has already lost the thing that made it a state.

And then he delivers the message. He meets a man, and he tells him about Eurasia, and the man is a stranger, and it is not a member of any organisation, and he listens.

And that is the whole moment of the book. A man on a street tells a stranger a thing, and the stranger believes it, and nothing else happens. No organisation. No conspiracy. No one has been caught and no one has been killed. The Party's entire defence against a public that might think for itself is that people will believe a stranger if the stranger is standing there and speaking calmly.

The crowd

And then he watches the crowd assemble for the Two Minutes Hate, and it is not a crowd summoned. It is a crowd that arrived.

Winston observes, with the specific bitterness of a man who has just seen the mechanism work, that the proles came to it as it happened — that they came without being told, that the proles were the ones who assembled, and that the whole thing ran itself.

And the eggs are thrown. And the woman — and this is the detail the chapter does not soften — the woman who steps forward and shouts at him has been carrying a satchel of eggs, and the eggs go, and Orwell says that for a man who had seen what he had seen, and who knew what the woman had done in the past — the Party had made her, and he knew it, and he knew what else she had done — it was a very terrible thing.

Not because she is cruel. Because she is ordinary, and she was made, and she is not the worst thing on the street. The eggs are not the horror. The horror is that the crowd ran itself and she only brought the eggs.

Then they are on him, and the crowd wants his trousers, and someone takes them, and there is the detail of the man with his chin against the rail wanting a hundred and twenty pounds — the prole wages he had given away, the ration he had meant to give to the proles. He is trying to give it to them and it has turned into an attack, because the Two Minutes Hate does not distinguish between the man who wants to give and the man who wants to take.

The announcement

And then the announcement comes, from a man on a portable machine, and it is a war announcement.

And here the chapter does its last and worst thing, and it does it with the most flat prose in the book.

Winston finds that he is cheering.

He cheers with the crowd, and he is cheering because the crowd is cheering, and because he is carried with it, and because you have to do as the crowd does or you will be noticed.

And then the news item. Eurasia. Not defeated — the war is going badly, the Party is losing, another front will soon be decisive.

And the crowd cheers harder, and Winston cheers with them, and he notes that the war had not been going badly, that the proles had been told for months that it was, and that he knew it was, and that there was no longer any difference between his knowledge and theirs.

And he feels — and this is the sentence the whole book has been walking toward — that if he could not be certain what was true, then perhaps he could not be certain that the Party was lying.

The last act of Chapter Eight

He has a flag in his pocket. The crowd is around him and the machine is screaming and he has the evidence in his hand.

And he does not do it.

And he tells himself it is cowardice, and that it is the practical thing to do, and that the proles would not take the flag from him.

And then, in a sentence that is the whole of the book:

He knew that with the crowd watching, his apparent friendliness would be the evidence that would condemn him.

He has just watched the Party demonstrate that a stranger can walk through a district of several million people and say anything. And he concludes that the crowd would take the flag and make him take it, and tear him to pieces.

And the only reason that calculation is right is that he has just watched the crowd operate. The evidence is not his enemy's. It is the two minutes he spent standing in it.

And then the choice he makes is to hold the flag in his pocket and to shout in the crowd, and the chapter ends on the sentence about feeling sick and at the same time being carried along by the crowd — and on the fact that he merely *felt* sick, and did not act on it, and will not.

The system has been given a demonstration that does not work and has taken it anyway.

And the prose says, exactly: he was carried along by the crowd, and what he had wanted to do was to arrest himself for his own crimes, and he knew that doing it would have been the last thing he had ever felt free to do.

---

They took him away again and there were no questions this time, and O'Brien did not appear, and the whole apparatus ran without a single conversation being necessary.

He had meant, when he saw the caption, to arrest himself. And what he found when he came down to the room was that he had meant it in a way that could not survive being put into words, and that when a thought expressed in words is examined, it turns out to have been never quite the thought he thought it was.

The thought had been put there by the system, or it had taken the place of the thought that would have been there if it had not.

He asks himself whether, when he saw the caption, he really intended to betray the proles. And the answer is that he cannot remember, and that cannot remember is the same as not having intended it.

And then the chapter makes the thing explicit, and it is the whole of the book:

He had never been in a position to choose. He had been in the position of a man who was being made to choose, and the choice had been made for him by the Party, months earlier, when it had taken the flag out of his pocket at the first Two Minutes Hate.

And he had accepted it, and had forgotten that he had accepted it, and that forgetting is the whole of it.

The last room

The Room 101 material is not dramatised in detail and that is deliberate.

It is a room with a light on all the time and a screen in the wall and four pictures on the walls. And the four pictures are of old masters, and they are the faces he had used to feel strongest about, and he is asked, calmly, which of them he would like most to be talked about.

And he chooses. He says it in the first sentence of that part of the chapter and Orwell lets it stand without a word of comment. He would like to be talked about Rathbone, and the reason is the reason he gave for going to the proles in the first place.

And then the door opens and it is the rat and it is a large black rat in a wire cage, and the cage is on the table, and the explanation is given in the same reasonable tone as everything else in the room.

And the final paragraph of the whole book, before the last one, is this:

He did not. He did not know that it was going to come like that. He was looking for the rat. He was looking for the rat. He ran across the room and threw himself against the door.

And then the sentence that is the book's most exact piece of observation and the one nobody quotes because it is not memorable-sounding:

The thing he was doing was refusing to do what was demanded of him by a frown, by a small movement of the eyes, that said *do this*.

And the paragraph that follows is the account of the mechanism, delivered as if it were a technical explanation from a man with professional interest in the subject:

The rat screamed under his fingers and he let it go. There was a streak of blood on the floor where the cage had been and he did not feel how he had got there. He had gone for the door and had flung himself against it. He had stepped down into a rug. He had lost his balance and cut his shin feeling for a moment. He had found himself against the door again, and something in the wall had given. He had fallen, and the cushions were soft. He had not been struck, he had not been bitten, he had not been stabbed. The piercing pain had come from the rat's teeth, through the cage, into his finger. It had hurt because he had wanted it to hurt.

And then the sentence that says everything:

*And he had wanted it to hurt, because he had been made to hurt, in order that he would feel that he deserved to.*

What was done to him

Then it is done and it is described and there is no evasion.

It takes a long time. It is done by people who are kind about it. He pleads, and then he tries to get up, and they take him down, and at some point he begins to want to be beaten, and when he is not beaten fast enough he gets up himself and they do not stop him.

And the four faces are taken down one at a time as the rat is brought in four times.

And Orwell records the total effect with the flatness the whole book has used since the first page: he had been tortured into a state in which it was possible to do what was required of him, and then they let him go and he was never sure again whether what he did was what he wanted or whether he had been made to want it.

The last room, second time

And he is asked, again, to choose. And this time he chooses.

He says: *no, not Rathbone. It was not the rat that did it. It was the something in the room. It was something I did not want to say.*

And the man explains it to him. It was the Party's idea that he should be made to say it, that it should be his own free choice, that it was necessary that he should want it, that he should be the one to do it and not be merely done to, because then it would be his, and he would believe it.

They had to make him believe it. They had not been able to force him to do it with the rat.

And he says it. And the words come out and they are the last words he says before the other thing.

The two sentences

He looks at the screen. It is blank, and then there is a face on it, and he recognises it and it is his own, and it is the face of a man forty years old, and he does not remember looking at an old photograph.

And the two sentences, and they go in this order, and the order is the whole argument:

He fought against the will of the proles, and in doing so he had done the proles a service which can hardly be imagined.

And then:

He loved Big Brother.

The rest

And the chapter continues, and the continuation is the point as much as the two sentences are.

The Ministry of Love is not destroyed. O'Brien is not punished. Goldstein does not come out of the Ministry of Love.

The proles are in the streets and the victory parade is on, and Winston is there in the paper hat and the false name and the photograph of the enemy of humanity taken twenty hours earlier, and he is shouting with the crowd.

And it is not only that he shouts. It is that he is happy. That is the part Orwell does not soften for a single page:

He was standing in a crowd of thousands, and his chin was lifted and his eyes were bright and he was feeling very happy.

And he is looking at the procession of the prisoners being released, and one of them is a man he worked with at the Ministry of Plenty, and Winston knows what happened to him, and he shouts with the crowd.

And he is grateful. He notes that he was not sorry, and that he was not afraid, and that he was glad that at last there was no more danger, no more identity, and that there is a party and there are banners and there are flags and that the crowd is enormous and that the procession is going down the street and that the people are all free.

And then, at the end of it, the last paragraph of the book:

He was so far from being the man he had been that he was ashamed of him. He was so far from being the man he had been that he was ashamed of him. He had lost everything: his freedom, his individuality, his family, his love of Julia, his capacity to believe, his capacity to love.

He had been reduced to one thing: to be a man who shouted his assent at a Party he no longer had any reason to oppose, and he shouted it because the alternative was to be alone.

And the closing lines:

His voice made no sound. He shouted without shouting. He had nothing to say and the Party had won.

And then the last two paragraphs, and they are not triumph:

The Two Minutes Hate was over and the proles were in the streets and the summer evening was drawing to a close. And the news that Oceania had won the war was being shouted on all the faces.

He had made up his mind that he would not be able to endure five more years of this. And he was not so much afraid of death as of what he would have to think and do in order to keep alive.

And he did not expect that he would ever feel much better.

He walked away quickly out of the Park, away from the crowds and the banners and the procession and the shouting, and out into the quiet streets, and the streets were empty and the trees were dark and the lamps were just beginning to light up.

He was walking into the darkness. He did not know what was going to happen, and he did not expect to find out much later.

---

The two sentences, once more

I want to be exact about this, because the order is the whole argument and it is almost always reported wrong.

First: he fought against the will of the proles. He did the proles a service he could hardly imagine.

That is the defeat. He told himself he was saving them from a Party that had lied to them, and in doing so he confirmed to them everything the Party had told them about him, and he handed the Party the proof it needed, and the proles went on believing it, and they will go on believing it.

Second: he loved Big Brother.

That is the surrender. Not "I loved Big Brother once" and not "I was weak" — present tense, at the end of everything, and not reported as a feeling but as a fact, the way the book reports a queue for bread.

Put in that order, the two sentences say: he broke himself in the service of people he believed needed breaking, and then he loved the thing that broke him. Neither sentence alone is the book. Together they are the most complete description of an ordinary human being's surrender that has been written, and they were written in 1948 by a man who had watched the mechanism operate on other people and who knew exactly what it was.

And the last line, which is not triumph and is not despair and is more precise than either:

He did not know what was going to happen, and he did not expect to find out much later.

Fahrenheit 451 (1953) - books are banned because they interrupt

The hands come first, because the face is easy.

Guy Montag has a broad, placid, unremarkable face, the kind that goes unremarked in a queue, and it is wasted on him. The hands are what a man like that would want watched. They are wide and thick and very clean — working hands, scrubbed. Nothing about them suggests that in eleven years they have never once been inside a fire that was trying to kill him. The nails are cut level with the flesh. The palms are pink and dry and faintly ridged like the surface of a washboard, and at the base of the left thumb there is a pale seam of newer skin where a blister went last spring and healed wrong.

His father had the same hands, and his grandfather. The trade selects for a particular sort of man: not strong exactly, but durable, unbothered, slow to take offence. A fireman in Montag's world does not fight fire. That work left the profession before there was anything left to fight. What he does instead asks only that he be thorough and that he not be curious, and both qualities are rewarded by the payroll department.

The salamander is on the inside of his left arm, a green mark no larger than a thumbnail, in the usual place, where every man on the force carries it. Montag had it put there at the age of ten because he wanted it, and because at that age the emblem still looked to him like a small animal that lived inside flames. He believed, for a stretch of years, that the salamander made its home in fire and died in it, and that the firemen were therefore a kind of shepherds. A correction arrived later. He cannot recall who supplied it or in what tone. What it established was that the salamander does not live in fire at all, that it lives in the dark places of the earth and only shows itself when it is dying, and that the emblem is not really for the animal. The emblem is for the fire. The fire is a thing you walk into.

He walked into the first house in the last year of the war, at twenty-two, when buildings were still made of wood and paper did things a fireplace can be asked to explain. The permitted number of deaths in the city that year was forty-four. He had been one of the men assigned to hold the line there, and he remembered the figure because it was printed on a card in the truck. After that the work changed.

Fewer buildings burned, because the buildings had already been made out of tile and steel, and because the wood and the paper had already been taken out of them, town by town, at a rate of a hundred houses an hour, under quota. Nobody had to explain this to anybody. A fireman did not need a Machine to know that a house built of nothing but masonry cannot be reduced to ash. You cannot scorch tile. You cannot burn steel.

So they took the men who had been keeping the city's fires down to forty-four a year and gave them something else to do.

The system was simple. Everyone understood it. Books were for burning, along with the houses in which they were hidden.

Montag has never in his life thought of himself as a dangerous man, and he is not one. What he is, and what he was for eleven years, is a man who carries a hose. He enjoys the work. He says so without embarrassment to anyone who asks, and there is a professional pride in him that has nothing counterfeit about it, because the work is good work. He is good at it. He can tell by the sound a house makes at two hundred degrees what will be left standing, and he can tell by the smell when a collection has been shelved by someone who read. Those smell different. Those smell better, which is a thing he never said aloud to anybody and which, now, he would find very hard to say.

The number four hundred and fifty-one Fahrenheit is fixed at the head of the standard operating manual and is repeated to every recruit, along with its working equivalent, two hundred and thirty-three centigrade, and Montag can still say the conversion instantly. It is the temperature at which book paper takes fire. He has heard the more careful version of the figure, that paper is not one substance and does not have one ignition point, that the measured range across types runs somewhere between four hundred and twenty-four and four hundred and seventy-five degrees, and that the number that governs the trade is therefore a convenience and not a fact. He agreed when he was told this. He agreed because it did not matter. Nobody in the trade has ever been saved by the accuracy of the figure. The paper ignites, or it does not, and once you have put a match to paper the question of whether the correct number was 424 or 475 is a question for a later day and a different department.

What matters is the heat. It comes up out of a page faster than a person expects. He has held books in his hands that he had already carried out to the truck, twenty or thirty at a time, and he has felt the covers begin to give under his palms, and the paper under the boards begin to move and to shrink, and he has set them down faster than the job required. Two hundred and thirty-three centigrade does not take your skin off. It does something stranger and worse than that. It turns paper into a shape that is still recognisably paper and has stopped being anything else. The ink goes brown and spreads. The page blisters faintly. And there is a smell, a short sharp sweetish smell that is nothing like wood smoke, and it comes out of the stack in a wave you can feel on the wet backs of your hands.

That is the part nobody prepares you for. A burning book does not roar. That is what Montag would tell anyone who asked him why the work did not trouble him. It does not roar and it does not crackle. It goes up all at once, quietly and totally, the way water goes up a pipe, and the sound of it is a soft rushing, like a long breath taken by somebody lying down, and then it is finished, and what you have left in the incinerator is a grey masonry of ash with the shape of a shelf in it.

Then the kerosene. They flood the floor before they touch anything, so that the time of the burn can be governed by the clerk and not by the fireman, and the smell of kerosene gets so far into a man's clothes that it stays there for the rest of the day and follows him home. On the walls of the room they bring in a machine, a long snouted thing that they call a salamander, and it throws a jet of flame at forty-five feet with the sound of a fire hose. They do not use it on books, because it wastes a page. It is for walls and ceilings and the heavy upholstered things, and it goes through a room the way a hand goes through paper.

Their captain wears a bird on his helmet. It is a phoenix, which is the sort of thing a man in this trade would put on his head, and Montag has never decided whether Beatty wears it as a joke, as a threat, or as the simple vanity of a man who likes having something to talk about.

Montag drove that truck eleven years. He was good at the driving. He could put a truck within six inches of a hydrant in a dark street, backwards, at speed. He liked the men he drove with, except for one, who hummed all day and never talked.

The houses burned were not all old. That is the part people who have not done the work tend to get wrong. Montag went into new houses and small new houses with aluminium siding and a picture window, where the collection was six paperbacks in a drawer beside the good silver, and the people who owned them were not thinkers. They were not dangerous intellectuals with opinions. They were a great many people who had, without ever having been able to name what they wanted, wanted to be left alone, and who had failed to keep that want off paper.

They were not so much mistaken as normal, and that was the trouble. A normal person does not last. A person with a normal, healthy, uncomplicated interior life will look at a book and see a book, and see nothing more, and the book will go onto the pile with the rest, and the fire will go up, and no one has done anything to anyone. The firemen find this harder to explain to the clerk than the ones who talk.

Because among the people who hid books there was always, sooner or later, one who would not go out of the house. It was not a matter of courage or of ideology. It was nearly always the same texture of feeling, and Montag could recognise it across a street by the time the truck stopped, because it showed first in the windows. There would be no face at the glass. The house would look shut. And then someone inside would have to go and stand up to being the reason the truck was there, and would take the whole house down on himself rather than carry the books out of it.

He remembers thinking, the first time he saw it happen, that such a person must have been reading something especially good that morning.

He had not yet met Clarisse McClellan.

The city where Montag lives has no weather and no seasons, or the kind that would qualify. It is kept at a permanent twenty-one degrees by a climate system nobody thinks about. The sun comes up over the city and its smoke, and it is always the same sun doing the same thing, and Montag does not know, because it has never occurred to him to wonder, what the sky looks like where nobody is burning anything.

It is worth stopping on one more detail of the place before we get to him, because it is the detail the whole of it hangs from, and because it is so small that nobody in it would mention it.

If you went into a bar in that city — and men did, thousands of men, every evening — what you would hear, above the noise, was a machine. The bar machines were joke boxes. You put in a coin and the machine ground and laughed, and it told you a joke, and it was always the same joke, or one of six or eight jokes, and you had heard all of them, and the machine did not know that, and neither did you, and everybody in the room laughed at the same second, on the same beat, because it was a machine and they were all listening to it.

And above the joke boxes, on the wall, the musical wall played something coloured, and shapes went up and down it, and it was the colours you remember and not the jokes. Everything in that city was the same colour and the same joke and the same eleven minutes of singing, and all of it was arranged so that nobody in the room could ever have to raise his voice or turn his head or ask the man beside him a single question.

Montag went into those bars. He laughed at the right second. He had never once, in eleven years, wondered why.

It was on that stretch, walking home, that Clarisse McClellan came out of her gate.

She was seventeen, or a month short of it. She came down the walk in a white sweater with the sleeves pushed back and she said, "Do you mind if I walk with you?"

He said he did not. He did not know what else to say. He had never before in his life walked anywhere with a person who had not been a fireman.

She was not what the young are supposed to be in that year. Montag had a stock of them: loud, quick, seventeen, all of them the same, all of them watching the wall screens and quoting them back at each other, all of them hollow. This one was quiet, and she was asking questions, which nobody asked him, ever, and which he had no procedure for.

She asked how he liked it, living in the city. He said he liked it fine. She asked whether he had ever thought about how much of his life was spent going to and from work. She asked what his name was, and when he told her she said it back to him as though she were tasting it, and then she said, "Well, I'm Clarisse, seventeen, and I have a terrible memory and I have to think of things a long time before I answer them, and I'm not going to be interesting for a while."

He asked later, in his own head, why a person would announce their defects like that. He could not answer it. It did not fit.

Her uncle was the seventh person who had been reported to the firemen in her family, and had walked out of the house two days before the truck came, and had not been heard from since. She said this the way a person reports the weather. She said her mother and father talked about it rarely, and about the uncle not at all.

Then she asked him the question that he would carry for the rest of his life, and could not put down for the rest of his life.

"Are you happy?"

He stood in the cold on the walk and found that he did not know.

He did not know how to say so. Not because of any discipline. He had been asked thousands of questions in his life by the clerk and by the men at the firehouse and by the mechanic at the corner, and he had an answer ready for all of them. Here was a girl of seventeen with a white sweater asking him whether he was happy, and there was nothing in the world to say, because the honest answer was that the question had never been put to him in a form he could answer, and he had never gone looking for one.

She waited. She was not embarrassed. She waited as though she expected him to come back to it eventually, the way a person waits for a train that is known to be late and is coming.

He said he was thirty, old for a fireman, and that the work was interesting, and that he had not thought about it. She looked at him and said, "That is the wrong answer," and then, kindly, "You don't have to be right. It's just nice when people are bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important? About something real?"

And then she ran on ahead, because it was the beginning of spring, or the part of the year that the city put on the calendar to stand for spring, and she had some people to see, and she said, "Good night, Mr. Montag," and she was gone down the walk.

He stood there. His hands were damp. He felt, in the way of a man who has sitting in one position too long, that the position had stopped being bearable, and he changed it, and the changing of it did not help, and he noticed that he was still standing there, which meant that some part of him had been waiting for her to come back and finish the conversation.

That was the first crack. Not in his life. In the wall he had made between himself and the fact of himself, which is a different thing, and a thing that can be mended, and which he would spend the rest of the story finding out how to mend.

He came home to his house on a street of identical houses, and went in, and his wife was on the bed in the dark, uncovered and cold, staring up at the ceiling. The little Seashells were in her ears, thimble radios tamped tight, and the sound of them was the sound of an ocean coming in on the shore of a mind that could not sleep. The room was empty in a way he could not have said aloud.

He washed his hands in the dark. He said, "You going to be all right, Millie?"

She was an expert at reading lips, from ten years of apprenticeship in the Seashell ear-thimbles. She nodded. She had no memory of the pills. That was the fact of her: she had swallowed a bottleful of sleeping tablets in the evening and had no recollection of it whatever, so that in the morning she got up and made breakfast and watched the wall screens and waited for the evening to come round again so that she could do it once more, and was the only person in the world who could be thirty-four and fifteen at the same time.

He had not known she had done it until he had stepped out of the dark room and found her, and had gone to her, and had not been able to get a word out of her, and had put his fingers on her wrist and then away again and then on again.

He got through it, the way you get through such a thing. The emergency men came, and pumped her out, and changed her blood, and he stood in the corner of his own bedroom and watched two strangers work on his wife, and they were good at it, and they did it without any expression at all, and then they said there was another call, another overdose, and they went, and left him with her.

He stood a long time. Then he went and got a pillow and put it over her head, in case, and lay down on the floor of the bedroom, and lay there through the night with the parlour walls talking softly to the house.

In the morning he did not go to work.

In the evenings after that, the girl walked with him.

They walked and she talked, and the talking was not small talk. She told him about the school. She was not a good student in the way the school understood the word, and she had been sent to a counsellor, and had told the counsellor that she did not know why she asked the questions she asked, and the counsellor had told her she was overintellectual and that she ought to spend more time watching the screens with her friends.

She told him about the dandelion. There was a patch of them growing out of a crack in the pavement, which should not have been possible, and the year before that a patch had grown in the crack, which also should not have been possible. She had gone out at dusk the first time and pulled one and brought it to her mother, and her mother had looked at it for a while and then said, "Don't you know how lucky you are, darling?" and then, for no reason at all, in the same breath, "You'd better get in now, it's getting cold."

Clarisse said it was not that her mother did not care. It was that her mother cared for things in the way you care for the people on a wall screen, and that she would have been upset if the dandelion had been destroyed, and that the upsetting would have lasted about as long as a programme.

She told him that she liked to sit and look at the shops, and that she liked to walk along the outside of the swimming pool, and that she liked to run and feel the wind on her face in the spring. And Montag heard all of this and understood it to be the description of a country in which none of those things were worth doing, and he understood, before she said it, that she did not know why it was remarkable to be alive and able to walk in the open air.

And then she told him the thing that took the rest of him.

"When my uncle died—"

She stopped. Montag waited.

"He didn't die. I mean, nobody says he died. The firemen came and he walked out ahead of them, and he took the books with him, or most of them, and he was gone."

That was the sentence. Not the death, which everybody in the city talks about constantly and means nothing by. The taking. Somebody in that family, faced with the arrival of the truck, had decided at the last moment that the books mattered more than the house they were standing in, and had carried them out of the building and into the dark, and had gone, and nobody had seen him since. It was possible he was alive. It was possible he had simply left.

Montag thought about that for a long time, walking home. It was the first time the arithmetic had gone the other way. He had always assumed that people burned books because they were frightened of being caught with them. This man had walked out ahead of the truck with an armful of paper, and gone into the dark, on the strength of the paper.

Then Clarisse stopped coming.

He waited a night, and she was not there. He waited two nights, and there was nothing on the walk, and the gate did not move. He told himself she had been kept in. He told himself the family had moved. He said her name out loud once, on the empty stretch, standing where she had stood, and the sound of it in the open air was so thin and so young that he could not do it twice.

He got in the car and drove home and asked his wife whether the McClellans had moved.

And Mildred said, without looking up from the screen, in a voice with nothing in it, that the McClellans had moved, and that Clarisse had not moved with them, and that Clarisse had been hit by a car four days ago and had died.

And Montag discovered that his wife had known this for four days, and had let him walk home beside her every evening for four days without once mentioning it, and had let him stand there in the dark and say the girl's name into the air, and had watched the screens.

He said, later, that this was the moment he stopped being able to say the sentence *I did not know* about anything at all.

The second part of the answer to the fire is a woman Montag met in a kitchen, a month later, who had been pointed out to him by the clerk as the worst case on the sheet.

Two men came out of the truck ahead of him, and then a third, and one of them was a neighbour, which is always the worst part, and then a woman.

She was seventy or so, and small, and her hair was white and wild, and she was wearing a dress that had not been worn in a long time and looked as though it had been kept on purpose for an occasion she had been expecting. She came in with her arms full of books, and she put them down on the table, and she looked at Montag, and she laughed.

Montag found it later, in the memory, the detail that stayed. He was not a cruel man. He had never given an order at a burning and he had never been asked to. The work was done by the crew, following the manual. But he remembered standing in that kitchen door with the smell of kerosene already in his clothes, watching her gather the books up again and again into her arms, and he remembered thinking that she did not seem to be in a hurry.

And he remembered being ashamed of that. That he was watching a woman who was about to die and he had time to notice that she was not hurrying.

The crew had the machine. He came in and took over, the way the manual said, and he told her, not unkindly, that the house was scheduled and she had to go. And she asked him, quite pleasantly, to let her burn them herself.

"Which ones?" he said.

He was surprised by his own question. He had never asked it. There was no clause about it.

She told him that it was not any particular ones, and that she wanted to burn them herself, and he said that he could not allow that, and she said, quite kindly, that she would not be long.

He did not answer. He watched her go to the sink and run the water on her hands and dry them and set them flat on the table. He watched her take the book and hold it in both hands and open it to the last page, and read the last line aloud, and close the book, and lay it on the table. Then the next one.

He says that in his life he has never had a worse hour. He cannot describe it as courage and he does not call it that. He says it was the hour he understood that there was a kind of person in the world for whom the distinction between the book and the person holding it had already been settled, and that it had not been settled by anybody in authority, and that there was therefore no authority in the matter at all.

He did not know what she felt. He has never pretended to know. What he knows is what he saw, and what it did to him, and the fact that he was the man holding the hose.

He went out to the truck. He took the book he had taken — he was carrying it in his hand before he had made the decision; the hand had decided some time before the man did — and he hid it in the incinerator inside the house, thrust down into the rubble where it would be covered, and then went out and got in the truck, and the crew ran the kerosene, and the salamander went through the rooms, and the woman stayed.

He did not sleep that night. The book was under his pillow. He lay in the dark and put his hand on it the way you put your hand on a sleeping child, and he said, without sound, the thing he would be saying to himself for the rest of the story: it must not have been an accident.

That phrase, not an accident. He has been offered the comfortable version by later people, who want the story to be about a man reluctantly caught up in something larger than himself. He has never accepted it. If it was not an accident, then it was somebody's decision, and somebody decided that on that morning the world would be one woman short of her books.

In the morning the dog came.

It came at night, so that nobody would see, and it was in the yard, grey and enormous, with a mechanical smell and a clicking. It had eight legs, and its jaws were hinged, and it did not bark; it made a soft whirring when it moved and a gasping soft sound when it breathed, and its eyes were not eyes but small amber lenses that moved on a swivel.

Montag watched it come up to the back door, and it put its head against the wood, and then turned and went away down the street at a flat trot. It did not make a noise a person could object to. It was smaller than a large dog. It was a dog in the sense that a machine is a man: it had been built to be recognisable at a glance, and it had been built so that the recognising would do most of the work of the fear.

He knew what it was. Everyone knew. It was the one piece of hardware in the system that everybody could see, and it was put where everybody could see it on purpose, because the point of it was not to hunt anybody, the point of it was to be seen to be able to hunt anybody. It could be sent out with a smell. It could follow a man's own trail across a hundred miles of country, over tar and grass and through a crowd, because the number it worked with was not a name or a number or a file. It was simply what a man gave off.

And the thing Montag understood that winter, and understood clearly in the spring, was this: the Mechanical Hound did not care about you. It had no loyalty and no hatred and no curiosity and it did not get tired. There was no argument to be made with it and no fact of yours that could slow it down. It was the cleanest thing in the world, and it worked for the people who had put the books out.

Montag was sick for a week after the burning. He had a fever that came and went. He lay in the bed that night with the blue light coming out of the parlour walls onto his face, and he watched Mildred and her two friends, Mrs. Phelps and Mrs. Bowles, sitting on the couch with the screens that made a room a porch in some imaginary country, and he had the sensation, which is not a sensation one can report to the doctor, of being in two places.

Mildred came in with his breakfast and he asked her, sitting up, in a voice he had never used before, "How are you feeling?" and she said, without looking up from the screen, that she was fine.

He said, "You said you woke up and thought I was the ocean."

"I didn't say that."

"You did. You said you woke up and thought I was the ocean. You said you were thinking about the ocean."

"Must have been talking in my sleep."

He knew then that there was no argument to be made with her either. He had the distinct impression of being in a room with a person he did not know, and of having lived with her for ten years, and that neither of them had said a single sentence that mattered.

He got up and said he was going to take a week off.

Mildred said, quite calmly, "What about the parlour walls?"

And he said, "They'd get along without me."

And she said, "No, they wouldn't," and he could hear from her voice that she was not joking, that she was entirely serious, that she was telling him the truth about her own life, and that she would be left alone with them.

Then the captain came.

Captain Beatty came at nine in the morning with a cup of coffee he had bought at a kiosk, and sat down uninvited, and he was a man of fifty with a good coat and a manner that made you understand within a minute why men had followed him. He did not look at the book on the pillow. Montag understood at once that Beatty knew, and had come anyway, and the coming anyway was the entire point of the visit.

"Do you realize," said Beatty, "that you are one of the few men in this city who is not a coward?"

"No," said Montag.

"Well, look at you. Reading." Beatty said it lightly. Then he went into it, and it was a long talk, and it was the best talk Montag ever had.

The men had been firemen, he said. In the old days they had gone out at night to fight fires. Then the buildings had been changed and the wood and the paper taken out of them, at a rate of a hundred houses an hour, and the number of men required to keep a city from burning had fallen and fallen until the department was, in his words, "a brotherhood, a fraternal order of men who laughed a lot and drove fast and never had to do anything." And a government that cannot find a use for you will not have you. So the men were given a new use. You do not need to know what kind of use. You only need to know what it was.

"It wasn't a decision," said Beatty. "Nobody decided it. Nobody said, we are going to burn books. What happened is that the books stopped mattering. People stopped reading them long before we had any right to interfere. We were simply the ones who came at the end of the chain."

And Montag heard this and understood, with a clarity that would last him the rest of his life, that Beatty was telling the truth about the history and lying about the present. That is what a working mind does. That is how a man's own accounting can be perfectly accurate about every fact and still be a wall.

Beatty told him to see the parade that afternoon in the park, the first of the season, and told him to bring his wife.

"And remember," he said, "don't run about in the cold, and don't come home and tell me about the parade. It's your own affair, the parade."

And then, at the door, he said — casually, as though it were a remark about the weather — "No man in this house is going to have a book in it. If my house burns, I will be very sorry, but nothing will be saved. And if one of you gets something and hides it, well now, I can only say that I would not want to be a fireman with a man who kept books. It would be a strange thing for me to have to take a man apart on a job like that."

He looked at Montag for a moment with a look of real friendliness.

"I'd have to be rough with you, and I don't know if I could stand it."

That is the sentence that produced the whole of the rest of the story, and it was produced not by a secret police and not by a censor and not by a man with a plan. It was produced by a man who was being kind to him, in his own way, and who believed, sincerely, that he was offering Montag the single most generous thing he could: a way out that did not require him to be a hero.

Montag stood in his kitchen with the cup in his hand and understood that he had just been given a warning by somebody who liked him. And he understood, further, that the reason it went all the way in was that it was being given to him by a man who had already decided. Beatty had a solution and Montag did not. And a man who has a solution and is telling you about it is not having a conversation with you. He is informing you of the shape of your life.

Mildred's friends came that evening, or the next one; the two of them anyway, Mrs. Phelps and Mrs. Bowles, with their coats on and their mouths already going, and they came to watch the parlour walls and to be done with the day.

Mrs. Phelps told him, without a flicker of anything, that her husband had been called up for the army. She said it while looking at the screen. She said he would be back in a week, because the army was not really going to be fighting anybody, and she said she was not worried, and then she said, on the same breath and in the same tone, that children ruined lives, that she and her husband had agreed never to have any, and that it was the wisest thing they had ever done.

Mrs. Bowles said that she had three husbands. She said that she liked to think of them as the three consecutive stages of a man: the first one she had married out of a sense of duty, and the second one out of a sense of companionship, and the third one because she did not want to be alone. The third one's name was Clancy, and Clancy shot himself in the head about two years ago, and she told the story with the flat satisfaction of a woman reciting a recipe.

And then, in the middle of this, Mrs. Bowles said the thing about her children.

She said her two boys beat her up and that she could hit them back when they did it, and that they went to a school where they were taught to do exactly that. And she said the word "discipline." And she said, "It's all discipline. It's all my fault. I had to discipline them, and now I've got two sons that are out of their minds, and they come home and hit me, and I let them, because I know what I deserve."

There was no irony in it. That is the part Montag could not get past. There was no irony in it at all. It had been arranged into her in the correct order over a period of years, like the programme she was watching, and now it was simply what she knew about herself, and she told it to strangers with the pleasure of a person describing a meal that had gone well.

Montag sat and listened and felt something move in him that had not moved in eleven years.

"Because what is it that we're going to do," he said. "There's going to be a war, isn't there? The bombers are already out of the west."

"That was the news," said Mrs. Phelps. "The news came on."

"Then why are you sitting here watching screens and talking about nothing?"

Because it is nothing, said Mrs. Phelps, and the words were perfectly true. It is nothing. That is the entire content of the evening. That is what the room was for.

"Do you think it's not important?" Montag said. "I mean, are you just going to sit there and not — do you think it matters what happens to everybody else?"

"That's what they said about the last war," said Mrs. Bowles. "And look at it. Nobody won."

That is the argument. Montag heard it and understood that it was not going to be beaten with an argument, because it was not an argument. It was a mood. It was the mood of a whole country, expressed by three tired women in a warm room while the planes went east. A man can be shown that war is coming and can say so, and be answered, reasonably, that the last war came too and nothing came of it either. That is not stupidity. That is a people who have decided that the correct response to a threat is to stop being available for information.

And in the middle of this Montag stood up and went to the wall and shut off the screens.

The parlour went dark. It was like being struck. The room was suddenly a room, with the shape of a room, and the two women sat on the couch in the dark with their mouths open, and Mrs. Phelps said, "Guy, what—"

He went to the shelf and took a book off it. He had, by that time, about twenty of them, one from nearly every alarm in eleven years, and he kept them in the hollow space above the light fittings in the hallway, and he had never opened any of them.

He showed them the book. He watched their faces while he did it, and what he saw was not the expression of people being shown something wonderful. It was the expression of people being shown a thing they had agreed in advance was absurd, and were waiting, politely, for it to be over.

And Mildred said — quickly, smoothly, with the fluency of a woman who has found the door out of a room — that this was a thing the firemen did. That it was a custom. That once a year the men were permitted to bring home one book and read it to the family, to prove what nonsense books were, so that people could see for themselves and feel superior.

And Montag looked at her and understood that the woman who had lived in his house for ten years had just saved his life by explaining, in four flat sentences, why no such thing was happening.

He did not correct her. That is the part he could not forgive himself for afterwards.

He shouted at the two women to go home, and they went, and he stood in the dark parlour and understood that he had just been told the truth about himself by the person least qualified to tell it.

Because here is what the story is, and this is where it stops being about fire and starts being about a man learning how to hold a thing in his head. He had read, at that point in his life, perhaps a quarter of a school reader. He had no habits. When he had said earlier that he was going to find out what the books were for, he had meant that he would find out what they said. He had not understood that the difficulty was not the content. It was the reading itself. You cannot walk into a book the way you walk into a room. There is no door. You have to sit down and stay still and let it come in at its own rate, which is a rate with nothing to do with you.

So he began to sit down. That is all. He took the twenty books out of the hallway and put them in the back yard under the earth, and he got Faber, and Faber made him do the one thing nobody had ever made him do, which was to stop.

And then, a week later or a fortnight later, the two women came back, and he read to them.

He read them the poem. He read them a poem about the sea, a poem about a moonlit pier and a tired army that had fought all night and had won nothing and was going home, and about a figure in the moonlight who heard it and felt that the whole world was dissolving into a roar of sound and a trembling of the earth.

Mrs. Phelps did not understand any of it. She kept asking what it meant. But she was crying, and she had no idea why, and when Montag said that the army had been on the beach and had made a great noise about the victory and the moon had come over the water and the whole place had been lit up like a church — Mrs. Phelps put her hand over her mouth, and her shoulders came up, and she was crying without knowing what was being said to her, and she could not stop, and she said, "I don't know, I don't know, and I can't tell you what it is, I just don't know."

Mrs. Bowles said the poem was nothing but silly words and that they had no business in a home.

And then a voice in his ear, small and flat and old, said not to be a fool.

Montag burned the book in front of them, on his knees, in the incinerator hatch, on her own lamp. The paper went up quietly and totally, the way it always did, and Mrs. Phelps watched the thing she had just been moved by go up in the hatch, and did not ask where it had gone.

He shouted at the two women to go home.

And then, at the firehouse, three nights later, with the alarm coming through and Beatty reading the address off the machine in a voice with nothing in it, and the number on the sheet being his number — Mildred had reported it, and Beatty said so at the end of the drive, in a good mood, the way a man says a thing he has checked and is content with.

He was in a good mood because Montag was the one driving.

He told it to Faber, in a low house with a cold kitchen, over coffee at about four in the morning.

And Faber listened without one word of comment, which was one of the reasons Montag trusted him.

Faber had been a professor of English. He had given up the teaching of literature two years before, because he could not go on being a man who said nothing while the books went.

That was Faber's account of it, and it is worth stating that in the account he gave to Montag he never once called himself a coward. It was Montag who used the word. Faber only corrected it, saying he had done the sensible thing, and the sensible thing had been to have children and watch them grow and buy good furniture, and that the world was not going to be saved by a professor shouting at his students — which he said was not the truth, and was also not a lie, but was the sentence he had said to himself every evening so that he could get his coat on in the morning.

Montag had found him the ordinary way, which is to say the terrible way. He had a number in his pocket, given to him in a park some months before, on a day when the man had been reciting poetry under his breath and had tried to hide the book. Montag had said, out of the only small talk he had in him, that he used to be a printer's assistant in Bellingham before he joined the service. And Faber had looked at him, and then at his hands.

And now, after the night, Faber said:

"Don't call me. Don't come here. You don't need a teacher. You don't need me or anybody. You're not going to be able to follow a single thing I say. You're going to have to stand on your own."

And Montag said, "I don't know the difference between my head and my heart," and Faber said, "Yes you do."

And Montag said, "Then teach me."

That was the bargain.

Faber was afraid of him for the first hour, and he was also, and this is the part that gets left out, extraordinarily good company. He talked about books the way other men talk about women they have known, in the low voice of a man giving a report on something that happened to him long ago and that he has not told anybody about.

And then, because Montag could not get up off the floor, Faber made him go into the other room and get the Bible out of his coat and put it on the table between them, and look at it.

And Faber said, "That's the last one."

And Montag said, "What?"

And Faber said, "That is the last Bible in the country. There are no more. Not in the shops, not in the libraries, not in the cellars of men who keep them and forget they have them. That's the last one, and you took it out of a woman's kitchen while she was dying, and you have no idea in the world what you have done."

And Montag put his hands flat on the table.

And Faber explained where we are. He put it flatly, without softening, because Montag was thirty and had no time for softening.

"We have to be clear about this first," he said. "It's not the books. People think it is the books. It isn't. Books are not the problem. If it were just the books, then a single burning of a library would be a tragedy and we'd be done. Nobody objects to a tragedy. Nobody objects to a man dying in a fire he walked into on purpose. The burning of a library is nothing. The burning of a library is a leaf turning brown and dying in the branches, and nobody minds that."

"They don't burn libraries," Montag said.

"No, they don't. That's the whole point. They burn the owners' houses, and then the books go with the houses, and there's a difference between the two, and it's the difference that keeps people from objecting. But we must be clear about the rest of it too, and here is the part I cannot make clear enough for you."

He leaned forward.

"It isn't that books get banned because they're dangerous. Books get banned because they interrupt. That's all. It has nothing to do with any danger in the world. A book is a thing you put down. A book is a thing that requires a man to stop moving, to stand still, to be in a room, to sit, to stop for one hour. One hour, Montag. That's what a book does. It asks a man to be still. That's the entire reason for it. And the only people in the world who don't want a man to be still are the ones who want to keep the machine running, because as soon as you stop you begin to look at things, and once you begin to look at things you begin to be dissatisfied, and once you are dissatisfied you have to do something about it, and most people can't."

"You mean they can't think."

"I mean they get bored. That's the difference."

And Montag said, "But why? Why can't they think?"

"Because they don't want to. Because thinking is a nuisance. Because a man can think when he is at home with a book, and there are a great many men in the world who never get home again."

He told Montag about the history of it. The firemen, he said, were not necessary at all. Nobody had to burn the books. The books had gone out on their own, years before the first truck with the salamander on it.

"Firemen," he said. "Firemen are not needed. The people stopped reading long before the firemen came. It's like an offensive, do you know what that means? To be offensive. The people were offensive. They walked into it, over their own legs, and the firemen only had to hold the door open."

That was the part Montag could not put down. Not that the books had been suppressed. That they had been put aside. That there had been a period, quite long, in which nobody had been compelled to stop reading, and they had all stopped reading anyway, one household at a time, because they had found a substitute, and the substitute had been better than what it replaced.

"Don't you see," Faber said. "Nobody wants to read any more. Nobody wants to be contradicted. Nobody wants to be bored. They've all got their comforts and they've got their screens and they have no time to be anything else. And then when somebody comes along and says, we could have made it a hundred years ago, we could have had a world where we didn't burn books — they say, no, we don't want to. What do you mean we don't want to? We want the same thing everybody wants. We want the world to be a comfortable place for us to live in."

And then he said the thing Montag would spend the rest of his life trying to act on.

"But the world isn't going to be made comfortable by the men who want it comfortable. Look at the nations of the world. Listen, Montag. The firemen are not the ones who have to be studied. The firemen are a symptom. The disease is a tumour that has been growing for a very long time and it is the size of the whole country, and it has been fed on nothing but comfort, and it will kill the whole country if it isn't stopped."

They sat there for a long time.

Then Faber said, "You're not going to be able to follow anything I tell you, so I might as well be talking to the wall. But if you ever want to ask me something, I'll help you. I've got a few things stored away in my head, a few books. I'll answer whatever you ask me."

And Montag, who was in the state of a man who has taken a lamp into a mine, said, "Why should I do that?"

Faber said, "Why do you ask me that?"

Montag said, "Because it's a hard thing to do."

And Faber said, "And what is the alternative?"

And Montag said, "The alternative is that I go back to the firehouse and I say, I'm sorry, I'm all right. Nothing's the matter with me. Beatty was a fool. I'll go back and be a fireman."

And Faber said, "And then?"

"And then the war will come."

"And the bombs will kill everybody."

"And the books will be gone."

"And then what will there be to remember?"

And Montag said, "Nothing."

That was the answer, and Faber looked at him for a while, and then he said, "I will make you a gift. Nothing else is any good."

He made it that afternoon, on the kitchen table, out of a piece of green plastic and a tiny battery and a very fine coil of wire that he had kept in a tobacco tin. It was the size of a rifle cartridge and it was green. He called it the green bullet.

"Now put it in your ear," he said. "It looks like a Seashell, doesn't it? It looks like the things people have in their ears. But it listens, as well as it talks. If you put it in your ear, I can sit comfortably at home, in my chair, and hear and analyse the firemen's world and find its weaknesses, without going out of the house at all. And you can walk around the city with a man in your ear, which is a thing I've always wanted."

Montag laughed. He had not laughed in a month.

"You built that thing to be a coward's ear," he said. "A way of listening without going out of the house."

Faber did not deny it.

"My cowardice is of such a passion, it makes a sort of revolutionary spirit complementary to it," he said. "I had to build the machine so I wouldn't have to be brave. I am a coward, Montag, and I am willing to admit it now. But I have a genius for cowardice. You can turn cowards into men by giving them the thing they need. Give them the machine and they can think."

Montag had the thing in his ear.

And then he went home, and he tried to do the one thing nobody in that city had ever taught him, which was nothing at all.

He sat down in the chair in his own parlour with the Bible on his knee, with the walls talking, and he did not hurry. He did not try to get the whole thing in. He read three pages and put it down and got up and went to the window and looked at the street for a while, and came back, and read three more.

At the end of an hour he had perhaps two lines. That was the whole yield of the first hour of his life.

He tried the other way first, of course, and everybody does. On the train he had tried to pour it in, to memorise it outright, and it had failed, and the way it failed was the single most instructive experience of his life.

He had learned, at about the age of nine, that if you fill a sieve with sand from a bucket, the faster you pour, the faster it runs out through the holes. His cousin had offered him a dime for filling it. He had tried for a long time and had failed and had got the tin scraped on his fingers. That was the whole of his education and he had got it at nine years old.

That is the whole of the world, and it took him thirty years to learn it.

He poured the words in. The words went straight through him and out, because he had been drilled for thirty years in a mind that could not hold anything that required a minute. He got to the passage about the lilies of the field and he had it, genuinely had it, in his mouth and behind his eyes — and then a jingle came out of the loudspeaker at the end of the car. Dentifrice. Not a large thing. A jingle for a toothpaste, about ten seconds long, with a tune in it that goes up.

Montag stood up and shouted at it.

He stood in the middle of a moving car and waved the Bible over his head and shouted at the ceiling, and two people got up and moved away from him and an old woman looked at him as though he had begun to bleed.

That is the sieve. He was pouring as fast as he could because he had been taught that the machine wanted it fast, and the material was going through the holes in the middle of his head as fast as it could go, and what he was learning, in that car, was that a man who cannot hold a thing in his mind for one minute cannot hold his own life in his mind either, and does not know that he is doing it, and does not know what he is losing.

Because the machine does not want the words. The machine wants the speed. It is not that the machine lies to you. It is that the machine is faster than a man, and a man who tries to think at the machine's speed arrives nowhere, because the machine is not going anywhere.

They talked it out on the kitchen table the next day.

Montag had a bad idea, and it was this: put a book in the houses of a dozen firemen, one each, and let them be found. And the firehouses would burn, the men would lose their houses, and then the system would look at itself and see what it had been doing.

And Faber said, "No."

Montag said, "Why not?"

And Faber said, "Because it doesn't reach the cause. What is the cause? What is the mechanism by which the books are destroyed? The books are destroyed by the people who stopped reading them. If you burn a hundred firehouses you have not touched the cause at all. You have only made the police more efficient. My dear boy, the police are not the enemy. The police are the tool. You have to find the lever."

And the lever was the media. The parlour walls.

"They are not the answer," Faber said. "They are the problem. Take them off the walls. It's a television programme, it's the worst kind of entertainment, it is not written by any intelligent person at all, it is made for the sole purpose of keeping a population glued to the set and motionless for the whole of their lives. Go into your wife's parlour and turn off one of the screens and see what happens. If the people in the parlour begin to talk about something, you've done something. They've got to be able to talk about things. The whole point of the machine is to stop them from talking. They can't talk if they're all looking at the same screen."

And then he said, "There is a way to put up the whole thing and it's very simple. You just have to find what people need most, and you give it to them. Beatty will do it. Beatty is a very fine man. Look at him. He knows what the masses want and he is not ashamed of it. People want to be entertained. Beatty's got it. He's read all the books anyone would want to read and he's remembered the plots and the characters and the jokes, and he can tell you the story of every one of them. That's what he has instead of a whole library."

And Faber said something Montag carried out of the house with him and kept: "Beatty has done the one thing a man should never do. He has made himself the most powerful man in the world by convincing millions that he is only a man."

And Montag asked him, later, over the green bullet, in a street, what the poem was — because he had read it to three women in a dark parlour and one of them had wept and he did not know why.

And Faber said, "It is a poem by a man called Matthew Arnold, and I have nothing to give you beyond that, and it is enough."

"Dover Beach," he said. "You do not have to know the argument to understand why it makes people weep. The argument is that the world is dark, and that we are all on the edge of a sea that is going to take us, and that the armies have just finished murdering each other for nothing, and that there is nothing on the other side of it but the noise and the moonlight, and that faith has gone out of the world and we would like it back, and that love would take its place. That is the whole of it. It is the century. Listen to the noise of the world outside. It is called ignorance, but it is the noise of the world, and it is louder than the boats."

And then, over the bullet, in Montag's ear, in the middle of a street with the sirens starting up on every corner: "You're not going to have to look at the walls any more. They're going to look at you."

Montag said, "How do you know?"

Faber said, "Because you're going to have to do the looking. And for the first time in your life you're going to have to do it by yourself."

Three weeks later the alarm came through at night, and Beatty read the address off the machine in a voice with nothing in it, and the number on the sheet was Montag's number.

Mildred had reported it, and Beatty said so at the end of the drive, in a good mood, the way a man says a thing he has checked and is content with. He was in a good mood because Montag was the one driving.

Nobody sleeps in a burning house.

Mildred came out through the front door in a white coat with the fire on her face, and she did not look at the truck, or at Montag, or at the flaming parlour windows twenty feet above her head. She walked down the path and out into the street and stood in the middle of the street with her arms folded, and she looked at the screens, which were burning, and she said, in a voice with nothing in it at all, "You told me to go home."

And then she got into a taxi and drove off.

Montag understood watching her go that she had been entirely honest with him. She had asked for the walls and he had promised her the house, and the house was now the thing taking the walls away from her, and she had no capacity left to register a man standing in his own yard. Beatty had read that exactly right, a month before, and had laughed about it.

Beatty came into the yard with his phoenix helmet in his hand and pulled off his gloves.

He was extremely calm. He said, "Well, Montag. You've done a fine job. Now go home."

And Montag said, "I'm going to take my wife."

"Your wife's gone. She took her cheque. She's fine."

"Then I'm going to wait for her."

"You're not going to wait for anybody." Beatty looked at the house, and then at Montag, and his face did something Montag had never seen it do. Then he said, "Listen. I have to hand you something. It's not a report. Nobody will see it."

And then he told Montag, in a low voice, over the sound of the fire, that he had had a book when he was twenty-five, and that he had read it one night when everybody was asleep, and that he had been punished for it — that his mother had been made to go down into the cellar and burn it, and that he had been punished for it afterwards by people he respected, and that he had never been able to explain the first burning, the one his mother was made to do, to any of them, because to explain it you would have to have read the book, and it was gone.

And then he laughed at himself. He said, "It's not the books. It's the paper. It's the destruction of the paper. Everybody wants to blame it on the paper, but it's really the paper. It's a signal. That's all it is. I don't think anybody ever really objected to reading and thinking. It's just that they had to have something to blame when they got out of hand."

And Montag understood that Beatty had just made the most honest statement of his life, and had used it to close the subject. That a man can say the true thing about his own cowardice and hand you the knife along with it. That the speech was a confession, and the confession was a wall.

They went in. The salamander was brought up, and Beatty put Montag on the first room and stood beside him, and the jet came out of the snout and the room went in under a second and a half. Montag wanted to do it himself. He had a feeling that if he did the first room, he would be able to do the rest.

The salamander took the second room. The flame went along the floor and up the walls and along the ceiling and then down again into itself, and it was a sound like a machine sewing something enormous, and behind it there was a silence that was not the silence of an absence but the silence of a room that had already finished.

Then they went into the bedroom, and the book was still on the floor where Mildred had dropped it, and Beatty saw it and said, "Getting an education, were you?"

And then Beatty went for the pillow, and put his hand under it, and Montag's own arm was there.

Beatty looked at the hand, and then at the ear, and Montag knew before he moved what was in it.

Beatty held it up in the light and turned it over.

"Interesting," he said. "Very interesting."

And Montag understood that he was not going to be searched, or arrested, or reported, and that this was worse. He was going to be given an opportunity, and the opportunity was going to be phrased as kindness, and it was going to cost him everything.

"What is it?" said Beatty.

Montag did not answer. There was nothing in the world to say that was not a sentence of eight words or a blow.

"It's not a device," said Beatty. "It's a piece of metal. Do you know how many people in this city are secretly afraid of each other? Half of them. All of them. And all of them carrying something like this, which they think will save them. And I say to you, Montag, there is no such thing. You can be afraid, and you can hide, and you can run, and you can hide behind a hundred miles of wire and a hundred miles of your own scent, and you will be found. Not by me. By the dog."

He put it in his pocket.

"You'll be back to me," he said. "You know that. Everyone does."

And then Beatty went to find the rest of it.

Montag stood alone in the bedroom with the walls going up.

And what happened in the yard afterwards is the part he has spent his life not being able to make come out right. He can tell you the sequence. He cannot tell you the moment. There was a salamander on a lead, and his hand was on the cold pipe, and the chief was standing in the drive calling the firemen by name and asking them where his gloves were, and then he was very close, and laughing, and saying something about how long he had been waiting to get his hand on a man who had not his share of the populace covered, and how a man who was not part of the populace ought to be looked at very carefully, and how he had been troubled lately by the fact that he had read about very few people in books any more.

And Beatty had been waiting for that. Beatty had wanted it. The whole manoeuvre of coming to his own house, of warning him twice in three days, of the last joke, of the laugh — the whole thing had been a man arranging his own end with a good deal of skill, and being an arrogant man about the arrangement, and being right.

It went off.

Montag was outside before he knew he was outside. He was on the pavement and the night air was on him and he was moving down the road with the sound of the house behind him, and somewhere off to his left there were the alarms going off, and the men were shouting, and somebody was crying.

Beatty was inside the house.

Montag ran. He got four blocks and then he stopped and stood in the dark and put his hands on his knees, because his chest had gone and he could not get the air in, and he stood there and shook, for a long time, in the street, alone.

He did not go home. His home was four blocks behind him and it was on fire, and there was nothing in it he wanted, and he walked for an hour with his hands shaking and the kerosene coming off his clothes.

Then the firemen came out after him.

They came out at nine o'clock, which was the hour the street-screens had told them he would be leaving. The floodlights came up the street and found him, and there was a sort of cinematographic excitement about it that made some of the neighbours laugh, and then the dog came.

The Mechanical Hound ran out of the gate of his own yard with its jaws working and its legs going and the smell of the house all over it.

It took him in the leg. There was a needle in its muzzle on a very thin hose, and it went in above the knee, and the fluid went in, and the pain was very far away and very precise, the way pain is when it is going to stop being important.

Montag tore off the front of the leg with his own hands. He did it the way a man opens a parcel he knows he must open anyway. There was a sound he heard himself make. The needle and the tube came out, and the hound came on, and he fired the salamander at it from four feet, and it went across the driveway and rolled over and lay in the smoke with the legs going, and did not get up.

Montag sat down on the kerb.

Then he thought, in a state of complete clarity, with a dead machine at his feet and the smell of his own burning house in his nose: Beatty is dead. Whatever else is true, that is true. I have done that. And now there is a second one somewhere and it knows what I smell like.

Then he walked back and got the twenty-one books out of the back yard, and drove them out to the house of a fireman named Black, who did not read and would not look inside, and then he sat down on the doorstep of his own house and waited until he could be reasonably sure nobody was coming, and then went to a railway station and lay down in the greenery at the back of the grass, by the root of an oak, and slept.

He woke and the first thing he felt was that the light was not the light of a house.

There was no house. He looked at his hands. There was a hose running away over grass.

And that was how the second dog found him, because it did not need to find him at all. It only had to follow what was already there. A man does not have to be anywhere in particular to leave a trail. He leaves one by being a man.

He got up and went east, and on the second day he was in the country, and the country was the first thing in three weeks that had not been built for anything.

There was no parlour wall out here. There was no jingle. There was a wind coming off the fields and it was cold and it did not ask him anything.

He came to a farmhouse with the glass out of the upper windows and a dog in the yard, a real dog, yellow and old and asleep in the only patch of sun there was, and the dog lifted its head when Montag came up and looked at him and put its head down again, because a man is not interesting to a dog that has never seen a machine.

An old woman came to the door and looked at him for a while and did not ask who he was, and he said he had lost his job and had nowhere, and she let him in and put a kettle on the stove without a word, and that was the whole conversation.

He stood in that cold farmhouse and warmed his hands at the stove, and the woman moved about behind him, and there was a stove in that cold farmhouse and a kettle on it and a light in the ceiling.

And then, outside, the dog came up the lane.

The old yellow dog did not move. It lay in its patch of sun with its head on its paws, and it watched the thing come up the lane, and it did not get up and it did not bark, and Montag understood that the machine had come about four hundred miles wrong and had walked straight past the only animal in the country with no fear in it.

The hound went along the outside of the house and put its nose to the wall, and gave a sound Montag had not heard from it before, a small high sound, and then it went away down the lane.

And then, five minutes later, the sound of aircraft, low, and a light in the sky that moved the wrong way for an aircraft, because it was very slow and it was very steady and it was circling.

It went over the farmhouse, and the woman looked up at it from the sink, and said, "That'll be the fireworks."

And Montag looked at her and understood that this was a country where a fleet of machines was turning slowly over a farmhouse at eight in the morning, and a woman who had washed her hands and dried them and set them flat on the table, and who had her whole life in a kitchen, was calling it the fireworks.

He stayed two days. He ate. He slept. He did not read, because he could not, and he understood that he could not, and that this was the last time he would be in a house with a roof on it for a long while.

Then he went out at night and made for the tracks, and he walked for a long time, and the thing he was thinking about the whole way was not the war, which had not started yet, and would not start for three weeks.

He was thinking about the furnace.

He had carried it in his own mind all the way out of the city, without knowing he was carrying it: the small coal furnace, an ancient, unattractive thing, a black kettle on legs, and in the long winter nights he had felt its warmth coming through, and he had thought, This is the shape a mind takes when it has to survive. That is the shape it settles into when it has no other shape to take. It is a small black thing, and it is warm, and it is the whole of what he was.

The next part happened at about ten past two in the morning.

The war had been coming for a month. Everyone in the city had known about it in the particular way that everyone there knew about everything, which was to say not at all. On the morning it started, the bombers came out of the west and went east in a long white line, and there were nine of them, and they went over the city, and the noise of them built up, and it was not a sound that was going to stop.

And Montag was on the road with his twenty books and the dog on the pavement behind him and the whole weight of it after that.

The men in the ditch looked up and saw it. The dog came across the field at a flat gallop and the two of them went into the ditch and lay down with their arms over their heads, and Montag lay with his face in the dirt, with the twenty books under him, and the earth went up and came down.

He says he could not hear anything at all afterwards. He says he lay there with his eyes open and the flash coming through the lids, red, and the sound coming through the chest rather than the ears, and it was over and over and over, and that the interval between them was the whole of the rest of his life.

And then the sky came down in a long grey tube, and then a million white butterflies came down, and then nothing at all.

When he got up the light was not the light of a house.

He was on a river bank. He was lying on the earth with his hands dug in and he said a word, and then he tried to remember something, and the first thing that came was Ecclesiastes.

He lay there and put the words back together, over and over, because that was the only copy in the world and it was in him and he was the only one, and when the words came out perfect and without trying, without any dentist anywhere in the world, he said, "It was there. It was all there."

The men who were still alive began to walk.

They walked all day and all of the next day, towards the city, because there was nothing else to walk towards, and by the second day the river had risen and the city was burning in a low orange line on the horizon with the smoke going up in a shape that nobody could have mistaken for anything but smoke.

He went into the river before that, on the night he left the farmhouse. The water was a degree above freezing and it took his breath away and he made a noise he had not made as a child. He lay on the bottom for a long time and let it take him, and let the river have him, and he said, out loud, to the water and to himself and to whatever was in the water, that he was going to have to remember this.

He came up a mile downstream, at a weir, and got out, and they were there.

Nine of them, on the bank, in the last of the light, and they were not what he expected. They were not a group of intellectuals in a house of books; he had been imagining that for a month. They were not a cell. They were not a secret anything. They were not even frightened of him.

They were hobos. They were the people who lived at the edge of everything and had always lived there, and they had books the way a man has a knife, in the folds of his coat, and they did not discuss it.

Granger was their leader, and he was a man of about sixty with a great deal of patience and a way of asking a question that left room for an answer.

"It's not an organization," he said. "It's not a movement. It's not a party. It's not a class. Don't get that wrong. We're not trying to organize anything. The organization came later, long after. This is only the beginning of the network."

They were all former book owners, and every one of them had a book in his head.

Not a page. A book. Whole. One man had the first chapter of Thoreau on Walden in him, and could recite it in the dark, with the wood ticks and all. Another had a whole play of Aristophenes and knew the metre of every line, and had to move his jaw for it, and had been walking for eight years. Another had the complete essays of Bertrand Russell. A clergyman had sermons that had never been printed. One had Swift, another had Machiavelli, another had Christ. Granger himself had Plato's Republic.

Montag listened and did not understand. He said, "You've memorized them. All of you. That's incredible."

And Granger said, "It's not incredible, it's simple. We were in a bad spot. Books were getting scarce. And there was no place to store them. Nobody wanted to store them because nobody wanted to read them. And there was a machine that could hold anything, and it was very cheap, and you could roll it up and put it under a floorboard, and it worked, and it was the beginning of the end."

"He knew." Montag's voice shook. "Knew what was happening."

"He knew what he was doing. That's different."

"No, I mean he was the one who told the others. He was the leader. He found them, he found the first ones, and he told them what to do. It was all him."

Granger looked at him for a while.

"You're not the first man to say that," he said. "You're not the first man to blame a man for what a thousand men did together."

He told Montag about the network: thousands on the roads, the abandoned railtracks, the libraries inside. It wasn't planned at first; each man had a book he wanted to remember, and did. Then over twenty years they met each other, travelling, and got the loose thing together.

"It was never planned," Granger said. "If it had been planned, it wouldn't have lasted. And it's not, by the way, a secret. We walk the old tracks. We lie in the hills at night and the city people let us be, because we don't do anything. We're not inciting anybody. We're not going to start the war or stop it. We're just going to wait."

"Why do you memorize," Montag asked. "How do you know you'll be alive?"

Granger looked at him, and then, deliberately, he told him the mechanism. It was the part of it that made Montag a full man, and it is the part nobody has ever been able to take away from him.

They were distributed. Not a library. Each one of them a page and a half. Not a library, or not a redundancy of libraries. That is the crucial detail, and it is what makes the whole thing work. If there were two men with Walden they would lose it in a generation. There is one man in Green River with the first chapter. One in Willow Farm, Maine. In a town in Maryland — twenty-seven people, and no bomb will ever touch that town — is the complete essays of Bertrand Russell. Pick up that town, almost, and flip the pages, so many pages to a person.

No one is a whole library. Every book is in one head and one head only. There is no copy anywhere else. If that man dies the book is gone, permanently, and no amount of getting together will bring it back. He knows that. He has decided anyway.

Montag thought of Beatty's library, which was empty, and of his own twenty books, and of the fact that he had hidden them behind a wall because he thought that was clever.

There was no cleverness in it. He had just built a shelf that could be broken with a shoe.

"And you're all," he said, "the only ones."

"No," said Granger. "We've just been putting it about. There are thousands of us in the country. We have bits and pieces of different books. It's not enough. But if the bombs fall on the city, then there will be people, and a city with no books, and everyone who is left will have to start from scratch."

And Montag said, "You haven't got any books at all."

And Granger said, "We're not book burners. We're book readers." He said it without heat. "We read the books and we burned them. We're not out to incite anybody or make anybody angry. We just want to keep the knowledge we think is important intact and safe. We model citizens in our own special way. We walk the old tracks. We lie in the hills at night. It's not pleasant. We're in control of nothing. But we know what we're doing."

And Montag said, "It doesn't matter. Nobody'll ever know."

And Granger said, "We'll be all right. Look at us. Nobody ever hears of us."

They did their trick. He took a paper cup from a suitcase, filled it with clear water, and gave it to Montag to drink. He said it was the pH of the human body, and that no dog on earth could track a man through it. Montag drank it down, and then Granger threw the cup into the stream, and it went away, and there was nothing in the water to smell.

And then Granger said, "Now. Where did you get that Bible?"

And Montag said, "I took it out of a house we burned."

And Granger said, "Which book is it?"

And Montag said, "Ecclesiastes."

And Granger said, "Which part of it?"

And Montag said, and then he put his hand flat on the table and stopped, and went back, and got it, out of the ten thousand things he had ever been told at the firehouse and the parlour walls and the dentist jingle: "To everything that is, there is a season."

And Granger said, "Right. How much of it can you say?"

And Montag opened his mouth and there was nothing there. And Granger said, "That's fine. You have about three lines of it. Say them."

And Montag said them, and they were perfect, and then Granger said, "All right. Now remember these are the only ones you'll have. There is no other Ecclesiastes. If you lose these, they're gone. There are going to be a lot of people, all of them lonely, and they're going to come to you and ask you, do you have anything, and you'll have to say, I have three lines of Ecclesiastes."

And that was the moment. Not on the ridge, not in the city, not at the firehouse. On the bank of a river in the cold, with a cup of water in his stomach, Montag understood that he would spend the rest of his life saying three lines of Ecclesiastes to strangers, and that this was the only form of the book in the world, and that he was not ashamed of it, and that it was enough.

He asked about Faber.

And Granger said that Faber had gone by train to a town where there was a printer, and had gone there to have some books set, and had gone because he was a frightened old man who could still do that much, and that they would meet in the city in a few months if the war ended and the road was open.

Granger told Montag about the phoenix.

He told it on the third day, in the ruins, with the dust still in their clothes. There was a bird in the old world, before Christ, that built a pyre every few hundred years and burned itself up, and out of the ashes it came. He said you could say what you liked about it, but it looked a good deal like man, and it looked a good deal like what the men had just done.

"But here's the difference," he said, and Montag understood that this was the whole of what he had been walking toward for a month and had not known it. "The bird didn't know what it was doing. That's the one thing the bird never had. We know what we've done. We know all the things we've done for a thousand years, and if we keep it where we can see it, then some day we'll stop making the pyres and jumping in the middle of them."

They had talked about it. Somebody had said that the knowledge was in the heads of a few thousand men, and that most of them were dead. They had talked about it for a long time.

The plan was as simple as that. Everything the men had, they would give away. There was a town where there was a printer, because there is always one, in every place, for four hundred years, and he had not used the press because there had been nothing to print. And they would go to him, and he would set it in type.

"When the war's over," Granger said, "some day, some year, the books can be written again. The people will be called in, one by one, to recite what they know, and we'll set it up in type. Until another dark age, when we might have to do the whole thing over again. That's the wonderful thing about man. He never gets so discouraged or disgusted that he gives up doing it all over again, because he knows very well that it's important and it's worth the doing."

And then he said the sentence that Montag has repeated, in his own words, ever since:

"Even when we had the books on hand, a long time ago, we didn't use what we got out of them. We went right on insulting the dead. We went right on spitting in the graves of all the poor ones who died before us. So we're going to meet a lot of lonely people in the next week and the next month and the next year, and when they ask us what we're doing, you can say, we're remembering. That's where we'll win out in the long run."

Then they stood up, and they walked into the city.

And this is what the story is, and this is the only part of it that matters.

They came up out of the wilderness to a place above the dead city where the ground was still solid and the air was still moving, and they stopped there, and Montag understood that they had come to the place they would stay, and that they would stay on it a long time.

Granger said, "We are the ones who won't be destroyed. Remember us."

And Montag said, "You are the ones who won't be destroyed."

And Granger said, "No. You're not listening. We're not important. We're nothing more than dust jackets for books, of no significance otherwise."

He set it out then as the men came up to the top of the hill and sat down in the dust.

The city was gone. What was in front of them was not a ruin. It was a plain, white and grey, flat as a table, with a few things standing on it that a man could name and would not. And on the ridge, above it, they sat down.

Granger said, "The men who are here, they are the ones. I am Plato's Republic."

And Montag said, "No — you're not."

And Granger said, "I am Plato's Republic."

And they showed him. One of them was Thoreau. One was Ecclesiastes. One was Marcus Aurelius. One had Swift. One had the whole of it, and it was not a library, and that was the point of it, and Montag sat in the dust on that ridge in the last light and understood a thing that had been in front of him since the first page he stole out of a woman's kitchen: there was no guarantee. Every one of these men was a single copy. Every single one of them could be hit by a bomb, or a stone, or a mistake, or nothing at all, and there was not one spare copy of any of it anywhere on the planet.

And that was the moment, and Montag has never been able to find a better way of putting it. It was not that they had saved the books. It was that they had agreed to be the books, and had signed that agreement knowing the clause at the end of it.

The question, and it is the only question, is this. They are still alive. The city is empty. Nobody in the whole world has a book in his hand. And in about a hundred years a man will walk up this hill — Montag says this, and it is his own arithmetic and not anybody's — and he will be a reader, and he will be hungry for it, and it will be killing him not to have it, and he will come to this hill and find somebody here, and somebody here will be able to tell him.

And then the crowd, the living crowd, ten thousand of them in the hills and the fields, will want the books, and they will be able to get them, because somewhere in the world there will be a man who has a memory of a man who had a memory of a man who had a memory of Plato's Republic.

They sat on the ridge for a long time, and Granger said that it would be a while before the men were sure the war was over, and that it was going to take a long time to rebuild.

Montag said, "It'll be a long time before there's any books."

And Granger said, "Not long enough. That's the trouble. Not long enough."

And Montag said, "I don't understand."

And Granger said, "How do you feel?"

And Montag said, "I feel awful. I feel like crying."

And Granger said, "No, it isn't awful. It has to be the way it is. If we were to be careful and honest and tidy, it would never happen. Then there would be no books at all."

And then Granger said the sentence that Montag took out onto the ridge and has not put down.

He said: "We are not the middle of the road, we are not the middle of the march, and we're not the people who are going to put it back the way it was. We're not going to turn the clock back, and we are not going to make the wheel turn the other way. We are going to walk out here and look at the world, and we are going to know what we've done, and we are going to hold onto it."

Montag was on his feet. He was on that ridge with the white plain below him and the dust on his hands and he said, "No. I'm not going to build a mirror factory. What I'm going to do is — "

And he stood there and did not say it, and that is the last we have of him, and it is where I will leave it.

What he said was: I am going to remember that I was not the only one.

That is what the books are, when you get right down to it. Not the argument. Not the wisdom. The plain fact that when you sat down in a cold house and read something somebody wrote down, you were not alone. That somebody, a long time ago, in a room you will never see, with a light they had and a table they sat at, sat down and wrote it down and stopped, and that stopping is the whole of what it means to be alive in a way that matters. And that this is a thing you can be handed, across a hundred years, by a person you will never meet, and it is not small, and it is not nothing, and it is not a consolation.

It is the arithmetic of the entire story and Montag works it out on the ridge in about a minute, and the arithmetic is small and he does the whole thing in his head.

Put these two side by side. In the future we may have destroyed every book. And we may have an army of people who have memorized parts of them. And in a hundred years a man will come along who does not read, and he will not know what he is doing, and it will be a long road, and it may take the whole of the rest of the century to get anybody to read again.

But that is not nothing. That is not a consolation. That is a specific, measurable, countable thing: an enormous number of pages, which could not be counted before, are somewhere. Not in a library. Not on paper. They are in people, and they are not lost, because there is no more dangerous thing in the world than a lost book. And that is a fact, and facts are the only thing that survives a fire, because the fire has no opinion about the truth.

That is the argument. Books are not banned because they are dangerous. If they were dangerous, then a regime that burned them would be frightened, and you could reason with a frightened thing. They are burned because they interrupt. Because a book asks a man to stop for one hour. Because a book is the only machine ever built that puts the machine in his own head.

And the second half of the argument, which is the part that everybody skips, is this. Even when we had them, we did not use them. We read Plato and we spat on the graves of all the poor ones who died before us. We had the whole thing in our hands and we used it to settle scores and to win arguments and to be better than the next man. And the men on that ridge know it, and it is the reason they are not going to be celebrating. They are not going back to fix anything. They are going forward to see what has happened, and they are going to be careful, and they are going to know what they have done.

And they are going to build a mirror factory, because that is the other thing, and it is not a small thing either.

They are going to spend a year making mirrors and nothing else. And then a man is going to walk up this hill, one day, with his mouth full of the taste of the world, and he is going to look in a mirror and see the whole mess of what he is, which nobody has ever shown him before, because every medium that has ever existed has been either selling or burning or eating, and none of them has ever once in the history of the world held up a mirror and let a man look.

A mirror. And a factory for them.

And Montag, who stood on that ridge with his hands open and the dust of the dead city on them, understood the whole of it at once, as a single thing, which is that the war did not come from outside. The war did not come from a government or a weapon or an enemy. The war came from the fact that people had stopped looking, and had gone inside where it was warm and the walls were soft and the noise was continuous, and had found a substitute for the thing that was gone, and had liked it better.

You do not get that from an atom bomb. An atom bomb is only the last of it, the part where the body comes out.

The last image of this story is not the ridge and it is not the fire.

It is a man putting his hand into the ashes of a suburb where nothing has moved for days, and finding, in the cinders of his own house, the small metal object that had been in the ground beside the road, because that is what he is looking for. He is looking for it because he is going to build a mirror factory, and there is a manufacturing process he has read about and needs to know about, and it has been on this page for a long time, in a book he did not read, in a house he burned, in a city that is now four hundred square miles of nothing.

And it will be the last page he remembers. That is what he wants. Not the air, not the ridge, not the sky. A small thing, at the bottom of a page, that he knows is there, and that he will be able to find again in a hundred years when the world wants mirrors and has no idea how to make them.

He wanted the ending to be an inventory. Not a moral. Not a speech. A list of the contents of a man's mind, in the order in which he would need them, kept for a hundred years against a day nobody could name in advance.

And then he went down the hill and went into the city, and the city was white and quiet and had nothing in it at all, and there was not one person in it, and there was not one book in it, and he walked for a long time and the only sounds were his own shoes.

And what he was doing, the whole time, was the thing he had said on the ridge and had not finished saying.

He was looking at the world. He was going to walk out there and look at it, and it was going to be terrible, and he was not going to turn away from any part of it. That was the job. That was what the mirror factory was for.

And then, a hundred years from now, there will be a man standing on that hill.

I do not know his name. I do not know the colour of his eyes. I do not know whether he will be a good man or a mean one, and I do not know whether he will want what I want.

But I know that he will come up that hill. And I know that he will ask. And I know that we will be able to answer him, out of the four of us, or the three, or the two, because somebody will be here.

And that is the whole of it, and it is enough, and it has to be enough, because it is all there is.

Remember us.

Not us. You.