He presented himself with propositions--'the Party says the earth is flat', 'the party says that ice is heavier than water'--and trained himself in not seeing or not understanding the arguments that contradicted them.
It was not easy.
It needed great powers of reasoning and improvisation.
The arithmetical problems raised, for instance, by such a statement as 'two and two make five' were beyond his intellectual grasp.
It needed also a sort of athleticism of mind, an ability at one moment to make the most delicate use of logic and at the next to be unconscious of the crudest logical errors.
Stupidity was as necessary as intelligence, and as difficult to attain.
All the while, with one part of his mind, he wondered how soon they would shoot him.
'Everything depends on yourself,' O'Brien had said; but he knew that there was no conscious act by which he could bring it nearer.
It might be ten minutes hence, or ten years.
They might keep him for years in solitary confinement, they might send him to a labour-camp, they might release him for a while, as they sometimes did.
It was perfectly possible that before he was shot the whole drama of his arrest and interrogation would be enacted all over again.
The one certain thing was that death never came at an expected moment.
The tradition--the unspoken tradition: somehow you knew it, though you never heard it said--was that they shot you from behind; always in the back of the head, without warning, as you walked down a corridor from cell to cell.
One day--but 'one day' was not the right expression; just as probably it was in the middle of the night: once--he fell into a strange, blissful reverie.
He was walking down the corridor, waiting for the bullet.
He knew that it was coming in another moment.
Everything was settled, smoothed out, reconciled.
There were no more doubts, no more arguments, no more pain, no more fear. His body was healthy and strong.
He walked easily, with a joy of movement and with a feeling of walking in sunlight.
He was not any longer in the narrow white corridors in the Ministry of Love, he was in the enormous sunlit passage, a kilometre wide, down which he had seemed to walk in the delirium induced by drugs.
He was in the Golden Country, following the foot-track across the old rabbit-cropped pasture.
He could feel the short springy turf under his feet and the gentle sunshine on his face.
At the edge of the field were the elm trees, faintly stirring, and somewhere beyond that was the stream where the dace lay in the green pools under the willows.
Suddenly he started up with a shock of horror.
The sweat broke out on his backbone.
He had heard himself cry aloud:
'Julia!
Julia!
Julia, my love!
Julia!'
For a moment he had had an overwhelming hallucination of her presence. She had seemed to be not merely with him, but inside him.
It was as though she had got into the texture of his skin.
In that moment he had loved her far more than he had ever done when they were together and free.
Also he knew that somewhere or other she was still alive and needed his help.
He lay back on the bed and tried to compose himself.
What had he done?
How many years had he added to his servitude by that moment of weakness?
In another moment he would hear the tramp of boots outside.
They could not let such an outburst go unpunished.
They would know now, if they had not known before, that he was breaking the agreement he had made with them.
He obeyed the Party, but he still hated the Party.
In the old days he had hidden a heretical mind beneath an appearance of conformity.
Now he had retreated a step further: in the mind he had surrendered, but he had hoped to keep the inner heart inviolate.
He knew that he was in the wrong, but he preferred to be in the wrong.
They would understand that--O'Brien would understand it.
It was all confessed in that single foolish cry.
He would have to start all over again.
It might take years.
He ran a hand over his face, trying to familiarize himself with the new shape.
There were deep furrows in the cheeks, the cheekbones felt sharp, the nose flattened.