94 1984
cat-o’-nine tails, the Lord Mayor’s Banquet, and the prac-
tice of kissing the Pope’s toe. There was also something
called the JUS PRIMAE NOCTIS, which would probably
not be mentioned in a textbook for children. It was the law
by which every capitalist had the right to sleep with any
woman working in one of his factories.
How could you tell how much of it was lies? It MIGHT
be true that the average human being was better off now
than he had been before the Revolution. The only evidence
to the contrary was the mute protest in your own bones, the
instinctive feeling that the conditions you lived in were in-
tolerable and that at some other time they must have been
different. It struck him that the truly characteristic thing
about modern life was not its cruelty and insecurity, but
simply its bareness, its dinginess, its listlessness. Life, if you
looked about you, bore no resemblance not only to the lies
that streamed out of the telescreens, but even to the ideals
that the Party was trying to achieve. Great areas of it, even
for a Party member, were neutral and non-political, a mat-
ter of slogging through dreary jobs, fighting for a place on
the Tube, darning a worn-out sock, cadging a saccharine
tablet, saving a cigarette end. The ideal set up by the Par-
ty was something huge, terrible, and glittering—a world of
steel and concrete, of monstrous machines and terrifying
weapons—a nation of warriors and fanatics, marching for-
ward in perfect unity, all thinking the same thoughts and
shouting the same slogans, perpetually working, fighting,
triumphing, persecuting—three hundred million people all
with the same face. The reality was decaying, dingy cities