1984 - Planet eBook

even that can’t make the slightest difference.’‘If you mean confessing,’ she said, ‘we shall do that, rightenough. Everybody always confesses. You can’t help it. Theytorture you.’‘I don’t mean confessing. Confession is not betrayal.What you say or do doesn’t matter: only feelings matter. Ifthey could make me stop loving you—that would be thereal betrayal.’She thought it over. ‘They can’t do that,’ she said finally.‘It’s the one thing they can’t do. They can make you sayanything—ANYTHING—but they can’t make you believeit. They can’t get inside you.’‘No,’ he said a little more hopefully, ‘no; that’s quite true.They can’t get inside you. If you can FEEL that staying humanis worth while, even when it can’t have any resultwhatever, you’ve beaten them.’He thought of the telescreen with its never-sleeping ear.They could spy upon you night and day, but if you kept yourhead you could still outwit them. With all their clevernessthey had never mastered the secret of finding out what anotherhuman being was thinking. Perhaps that was less truewhen you were actually in their hands. One did not knowwhat happened inside the Ministry of Love, but it was possibleto guess: tortures, drugs, delicate instruments thatregistered your nervous reactions, gradual wearing-downby sleeplessness and solitude and persistent questioning.Facts, at any rate, could not be kept hidden. They could betracked down by enquiry, they could be squeezed out of youby torture. But if the object was not to stay alive but to stay