enlit

• It was the middle of the morning, and Winston had left the cubicle to go to the lavatory.
• A solitary figure was coming towards him from the other end of the long, brightly-lit corridor. It was the girl with dark hair
• Four days had gone past since the evening when he had run into her outside the junk-shop
• As she came nearer he saw that her right arm was in a sling, not noticeable at a distance because it was of the same colour as her overalls
• Probably she had crushed her hand while swing - ing round one of the big kaleidoscopes on which the plots of novels were ‘roughed in’. It was a common accident in the Fiction Department.
• The whole incident could not have taken as much as half a minute. Not to let one’s feelings appear in one’s face was a habit that had acquired the status of an instinct, and in any case they had been standing straight in front of a telescreen when the thing happened
• Nevertheless it had been very difficult not to betray a momentary surprise, for in the two or three seconds while he was helping her up the girl had slipped something into his hand
• As he passed through the lavatory door he transferred it to his pocket and felt it with the tips of his fingers. It was a scrap of paper folded into a square
• He went back to his cubicle, sat down, threw the fragment of paper casually among the other papers on the desk, put on his spectacles and hitched the speakwrite towards him. ‘Five minutes,’ he told himself, ‘five minutes at the very least!’ His heart bumped in his breast with frightening loudness
• Fortunately the piece of work he was engaged on was mere routine, the rectification of a long list of figures, not needing close attention
• So far as he could see there were two possibilities. One, much the more likely, was that the girl was an agent of the 4ought Police, just as he had feared.
• So far as he could see there were two possibilities. One, much the more likely, was that the girl was an agent of the Thought Police, just as he had feared... But there was another, wilder possibility that kept raising its head, though he tried vainly to suppress it. This was, that the message did not come from the Thought Police at all, but from some kind of underground organization. Perhaps the Brotherhood existed after all! Perhaps the girl was part of it!
• He rolled up the completed bundle of work and slid it into the pneumatic tube... On it was written, in a large unformed handwriting: I LOVE YOU
• He had hoped to be alone for a little while during the lunch hour, but as bad luck would have it the imbecile Parsons flopped down beside him, the tang of his sweat almost defeating the tinny smell of stew, and kept up a stream of talk about the preparations for Hate Week
• He was particularly enthusiastic about a papier-mache model of Big Brother’s head, two metres wide, which was being made for the occasion by his daughter’s troop of Spies
• encounters after "I LOVE YOU"

  • Just once he caught a glimpse of the girl, at a table with two other girls at the far end of the room
  • passed each other without a glance
  • canteen usual time with 3 other girls
• encounters after "I LOVE YOU"

  • Just once he caught a glimpse of the girl, at a table with two other girls at the far end of the room
  • passed each other without a glance
  • canteen usual time with 3 other girls
  • didn't appear for 3 days after
  • reappeared with a band of sticking-plaster round her wrist
• Tonight was one of his nights at the Community Centre. He wolfed another tasteless meal in the canteen, hurried off to the Centre, took part in the solemn foolery of a ‘discussion group’, played two games of table tennis, swallowed several glasses of gin, and sat for half an hour through a lecture entitled ‘Ingsoc in relation to chess'
• It was not till twenty-three hours, when he was home and in bed—in the darkness, where you were safe even from the telescreen so long as you kept silent—that he was able to think continuously
• It was a physical problem that had to be solved: how to get in touch with the girl and arrange a meeting.
• He knew that it was not so, because of her unmistakable agitation when she handed him the note. Obviously she had been frightened out of her wits, as well she might be
• Only five nights ago he had contemplated smashing her skull in with a cobblestone, but that was of no importance. He thought of her naked, youthful body, as he had seen it in his dream. He had imagined her a fool like all the rest of them, her head stuffed with lies and hatred, her belly full of ice. A kind of fever seized him at the thought that he might lose her, the white youthful body might slip away from him!
• Actually, all the possible ways of communicating with her had occurred to him within 3ve minutes of reading the note; but now, with time to think, he went over them one by one...

  • If she had worked in the Records Department it might have been comparatively simple
  • try to follow her home was not safe, because it would mean loitering about outside the Ministry
  • As for sending a letter through the mails, it was out of the question. By a routine that was not even secret, all letters were opened in transit.
  • Finally he decided that the safest place was the canteen
• She might have been vaporized, she might have committed suicide, she might have been transferred to the other end of Oceania: worst and likeliest of all, she might simply have changed her mind and decided to avoid him.
• A blond-headed, silly-faced young man named Wilsher, whom he barely knew, was inviting him with a smile to a vacant place at his table.
• He might have flinched altogether from speaking if at this moment he had not seen Ampleforth, the hairy-eared poet, wandering limply round the room with a tray, looking for a place to sit down.
• The stuff they were eating was a thin stew, actually a soup, of haricot beans
• ‘What time do you leave work?’

  ‘Eighteen-thirty.’

  ‘Where can we meet?’

  ‘Victory Square, near the monument.’

  ‘It’s full of telescreens.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter if there’s a crowd.’

  ‘Any signal?’

  ‘No. Don’t come up to me until you see me among a lot of people. And don’t look at me. Just keep somewhere near me.’

  ‘What time?’

  ‘Nineteen hours.’
• He wandered round the base of the enormous fluted column, at the top of which Big Brother’s statue gazed southward towards the skies where he had vanquished the Eurasian aeroplanes (the Eastasian aeroplanes, it had been, a few years ago) in the Battle of Airstrip One. In the street in front of it there was a statue of a man on horseback which was supposed to represent Oliver Cromwell
• He walked slowly up to the north side of the square and got a sort of pale-coloured pleasure from identifying St Martin’s Church, whose bells, when it had bells, had chimed ‘You owe me three farthings.’
• Then he saw the girl standing at the base of the monument, reading or pretending to read a poster which ran spirally up the column.
• Winston followed. As he ran, he gathered from some shouted remarks that a convoy of Eurasian prisoners was passing
• They were shoulder to shoulder, both staring fixedly in front of them. A long line of trucks, with wooden-faced guards armed with sub-machine guns standing upright in each corner, was passing slowly down the street.
• In the trucks little yellow men in shabby greenish uniforms were squatting, jammed close together. Their sad, Mongolian faces gazed out over the sides of the trucks utterly incurious. Occasionally when a truck jolted there was a clank-clank of metal: all the prisoners were wearing leg-irons.
• ‘Can you hear me?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Can you get Sunday afternoon off?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Then listen carefully. You’ll have to remember this. Go to Paddington Station——’
• ‘You turn left, then right, then left again. And the gate’s got no top bar.’ ‘Yes. What time?’ ‘About fifteen. You may have to wait. I’ll get there by another way. Are you sure you remember everything?’
• The prevailing emotion was simply curiosity. Foreigners, whether from Eurasia or from Eastasia, were a kind of strange animal. One literally never saw them except in the guise of prisoners, and even as prisoners one never got more than a momentary glimpse of them.
• Nor did one know what became of them, apart from the few who were hanged as war-criminals: the others simply vanished, presumably into forced-labour camps. The round Mogol faces had given way to faces of a more European type, dirty, bearded and exhausted.
• In the last truck he could see an aged man, his face a mass of grizzled hair, standing upright with wrists crossed in front of him, as though he were used to having them bound together.
• To turn his head and look at her would have been inconceivable folly