Re: Returning After A Few Years

freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that
is granted, all else follows.



VIII

From somewhere at the bottom of a passage the smell of roasting coffee
-- real coffee, not Victory Coffee -- came floating out into the street.
Winston paused involuntarily. For perhaps two seconds he was back in the
half-forgotten world of his childhood. Then a door banged, seeming to cut
off the smell as abruptly as though it had been a sound.
He had walked several kilometres over pavements, and his varicose
ulcer was throbbing. This was the second time in three weeks that he had
missed an evening at the Community Centre: a rash act, since you could be
certain that the number of your attendances at the Centre was carefully
checked. In principle a Party member had no spare time, and was never alone
except in bed. It was assumed that when he was not working, eating, or
sleeping he would be taking part in some kind of communal recreation: to do
anything that suggested a taste for solitude, even to go for a walk by
yourself, was always slightly dangerous. There was a word for it in
Newspeak: ownlife, it was called, meaning individualism and eccentricity.
But this evening as he came out of the Ministry the balminess of the April
air had tempted him. The sky was a warmer blue than he had seen it that
year, and suddenly the long, noisy evening at the Centre, the boring,
exhausting games, the lectures, the creaking camaraderie oiled by gin, had
seemed intolerable. On impulse he had turned away from the bus-stop and
wandered off into the labyrinth of London, first south, then east, then
north again, losing himself among un