1984 - Planet eBook

cat-o’-nine tails, the Lord Mayor’s Banquet, and the practiceof kissing the Pope’s toe. There was also somethingcalled the JUS PRIMAE NOCTIS, which would probablynot be mentioned in a textbook for children. It was the lawby which every capitalist had the right to sleep with anywoman working in one of his factories.How could you tell how much of it was lies? It MIGHTbe true that the average human being was better off nowthan he had been before the Revolution. The only evidenceto the contrary was the mute protest in your own bones, theinstinctive feeling that the conditions you lived in were intolerableand that at some other time they must have beendifferent. It struck him that the truly characteristic thingabout modern life was not its cruelty and insecurity, butsimply its bareness, its dinginess, its listlessness. Life, if youlooked about you, bore no resemblance not only to the liesthat streamed out of the telescreens, but even to the idealsthat the Party was trying to achieve. Great areas of it, evenfor a Party member, were neutral and non-political, a matterof slogging through dreary jobs, fighting for a place onthe Tube, darning a worn-out sock, cadging a saccharinetablet, saving a cigarette end. The ideal set up by the Partywas something huge, terrible, and glittering—a world ofsteel and concrete, of monstrous machines and terrifyingweapons—a nation of warriors and fanatics, marching forwardin perfect unity, all thinking the same thoughts andshouting the same slogans, perpetually working, fighting,triumphing, persecuting—three hundred million people allwith the same face. The reality was decaying, dingy cities