Leave a comment and share your thoughts: https://open.firstory.me/user/cln9oxg7r007d01xyhd0fadj5/comments
Welcome to CAB - Costa's Audio Book 歡迎收聽《讀你聽2.1》
Presenting George Orwell's critically acclaimed novel
"Nineteen Eighty-Four"
英國作家喬治·歐威爾所創作的一部反烏托邦小說 被譽爲同類三部代表作之一 出版於1949年
重點探討黨和政府權力過分伸張 極權主義 壓抑性統治的惡果
故事發生時間設於1984年 為當時作者對未來的虛構想像
構想中 世界大部分地區都陷入永久戰爭 政府監控無處不在
資料記錄中滿是歷史否定主義和政治宣傳 主角如何絕處尋求精神出路？
Part Two Chapter 8
Winston Julia 來到 O'Brien 的豪華公寓 他令人吃驚地關閉了電幕 並坦言現實存在一個地下反抗組織 滿懷希望 二人宣誓效忠於兄弟會 不惜一切代價 反抗執政黨 只是宣誓辭當中牽涉到的細節 不禁令人毛骨悚然 革命同時意味著犧牲
Characters:
Winston Smith, O'Brien, Big Brother, Emmanuel Goldstein, Julia, Mrs. Parson, Tom Parson, Tillotson, Ampleforth, Katherine, Charrington, Old man (Syme, Winston's family)
Costa's Wordlist
Catechism N
Venereal ADJ
Persiflage N
Up coming: Maigret, Jane Eyre
Collection: The Metamorphosis, Dracula, Don Quixote, The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Diary of a Young Girl, Lord of the Flies, Liar's Poker, Sherlock Holmes, Agatha Christie, Dickens
Costa + AI host with musical score
CAB is as simple as it gets《讀你聽》就係咁簡單
Like, comment, share, subscribe, our channel needs your support!
Podcast:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/讀你聽2-0/id1710124458
https://open.spotify.com/show/6lbMbFmyi7LqsMr21R97wQ
https://podcast.kkbox.com/channel/CrMJS0W4ABny8idIGB
https://pca.st/mnyfllah
Powered by
Firstory Hosting [Music] They had done it. They had done it at last. The room they were standing in was long-shaped and softly lit. The telescreen was dimmed to a low murder. The richness of the dark blue carpet gave one the impression of shredding on velvet. At the far end of the room, O'Brien was sitting at a table under a green-shaded lamp with a mask of papers on either side of him. He had not bothered to look up when the servant showed Julia and Winston in. Winston's heart was stomping so hard that he doubted whether he would be able to speak. They had done it. They had done it at last, was all he could think. It had been a rash act to come here at all and share folly to arrive together. Though it was true that they had come by different routes and only met on O'Brien's doorstep, but merely to walk into such a place needed an effort of the net. It was only on very rare occasions that one saw inside the dwelling places of the inner party or even penetrated into the portal of the town where they lived. The whole atmosphere of the huge block of flats, the richness and spaciousness of everything, the unfamiliar smells of good food and good tobacco, silent and incredibly rapid lips sliding up and down, the white jacketed servants harrying to and from. Everything was intimidating. Although he had a good pretext for coming here, he was haunted at every step by the fear that a black uniformed guard would suddenly appear from round the corner, demand his papers and order him to get out. O'Brien's servants, however, had omitted the two of them without demand. He was a small dark-haired man in a white jacket, with a diamond-shaped completely expressionist face which might have been that of a Chinese. The passage down which he let them was softly carpeted with cream-papered walls and whiteware-scotting, all exquisitely clean. That too was intimidating. Winston could not remember ever to have seen a passageway whose walls were not rhyming from the contact of human bodies. O'Brien had a slip of paper between his fingers and seemed to be studying it intently. His heavy vase bent down so that one could see the line of the nose, looked both formidable and intelligent. For perhaps twenty seconds he sat without stirring. Then he pulled the speak-right towards him and wrapped up a message in the hybrid jargon of the ministries. Items 1,5,7 approved full-wise. Stop suggestion contained item 6 double-plus ridiculous. Virgin crime think cancels stop and proceed construction-wise, and getting plus-full estimates machinery overhead stop and message. He rose deliberately from his chair and came to watch them across the soundless carpet. A little of the official atmospheres seemed to have fallen away from him with the new speak-words, but his expression was skrimmer than usual, as though he were not pleased at being disturbed. The terror that Winston already felt was suddenly shot through by a streak of ordinary embarrassment. It seemed to him quite possible that he had simply made a stupid mistake. For what evidence had he in reality that O'Brien was any kind of political conspirator, nothing but a flash of the eyes in a single equivocal remark. Beyond that, only his own secret imaginings founded on a dream. He could not even fall back on the pretense that he had come to borrow the dictionary, because in that case, Julia's presence was impossible to explain. As O'Brien passed the telescreen, the thought seemed to strike him. He stopped, turned aside and pressed the switch on the wall. There was a sharp snack. The voice had stopped. Julia uttered a tiny sound, a sort of squeak of surprise. Even in the midst of his panic, Winston was too much taken aback to be able to hold his tongue. "You can turn it off," he said. "Yes," said O'Brien. "We can turn it off. We have that privilege." He was opposite them now. His solid form towered over the pair of them, and the expression on his face was still indecipherable. He was waiting, somewhat sternly, for Winston to speak. But about what? Even now, it was quite conceivable that he was simply a busy man wondering irritably why he had been interrupted. Nobody spoke. After the stopping of the telescreen, the room seemed deadly sighted. The seconds marched past in norms. With difficulty, Winston continued to keep his eyes fixed on O'Brien's. Then suddenly the grim face broke down into what might have been the beginnings of a smile. With his characteristic gesture, O'Brien resettled his spectacles on his nose. "Should I say it, O'Brien?" he said. "I will say it," said Winston promptly. "The thing is really turned off." "Yes, everything is turned off. We're alone. We have come here because," he paused, realizing for the first time the fakeness of his own motives. Since it did not, in fact, know what kind of help he expected from O'Brien, it was not easy to say why he had come here. He went on, conscious that what he was saying must sound both feeble and pretentious. We believe that there is some kind of conspiracy, some kind of secret organization working against the party and that you are involved in it. We want to join it and work for it. We are enemies of the party. We disbelieve in the principles of insult. We are thought criminals. We are also adopters. I tell you this because we want to put ourselves at your mercy. If you want us to incriminate ourselves in any other way, we are ready. He stopped and glanced over his shoulder with the feeling that the door had opened. Sure enough, the little yellow-faced servant had come in without knocking. Winston saw that he was carrying a tray with a decanter and glasses. "Martin is one of us," said O'Brien, passively. "Bring the drinks over here, Martin. Put them on the round table. Every enough chairs, then we may as well sit down and talk in comfort. Bring a chair for yourself, Martin. This is business. You can stop being a servant for the next 10 minutes. The little man sat down, quite at his ease, and yet still with a servant like air, the air of valet enjoying a privilege. Winston regarded him out of the corner of his eye. It struck him that the man's whole life was playing a part and that he felt it to be dangerous to drop his assumed personality even for a moment. O'Brien talked the decanter by the neck and filled up the glasses with a dark red liquid. It aroused in Winston dim memories of something seen long ago on a wall or a hoarding, a fast bottle composed of electric lights which seemed to move up and down and pour his contents into a glass. Seen from the top the stuff looked almost black, but in the decanter it gleamed like a ruby. It had a sour sweet smell. He saw Julia pick up her glass and sniff at it with frank curiosity. "It is cold wine," said O'Brien with faint smile. "You will have read about it in books, no doubt. Not much of it gets to the outer party, I'm afraid. His face grew solemn again, and he raised his glass. I think it is fitting that we should begin by drinking to health, to our leader, to Emmanuel Goldstein." Winston took up his glass for certain eagerness. Wine was the thing he had read and dreamed about. Like the glass, paperweights, or Mr. Tarrington's half-remembered rhymes, it belonged to the finished, romantic past, the olden time as he liked to call it in his secret thoughts. For some reason he had always thought of wine as having an intensely sweet taste like that of black berry jam and an immediate intoxicating effect. Actually, when he came to swallow it, the stuff was distinctly disappointing. The truth was that after years of gin drinking he could barely taste it. He set down the empty glass. "Then there is such a person as Goldstein," he said. "Yes, there is such a person, and he's alive. Where? I do not know." In the conspiracy, the organization, is it real? It is not simply an invention of the thought police. "No, it is real. The Brotherhood, we call it. You will never learn much more about the Brotherhood than that that exists and that you belong to it. I will come back to that presently." He looked at his wristwatch. It is unwise even for members of the inner party to turn off the telescreen for more than half an hour. You ought not to have come here together, and you will have to leave separately. You, comrade, he bowed his head to Judea. We'll leave first. We have about 20 minutes at our disposal. You will understand that I must start by asking you certain questions. In general terms, what are you prepared to do? "Anything that we are capable of," said Winston. O'Brien had turned himself a little in his chair so that he was facing Winston. He almost ignored Judea, seeming to take it for granted that Winston could speak for her. For a moment, the lids flitted down over his eyes. He began asking his questions in the low expressionist voice as though this were a routine, instead of catechism, most of whose answers were known to him already. "You are prepared to give your lives." "Yes." "You are prepared to commit murder." "Yes." "To commit acts of sabotage which may cause the death of hundreds of innocent people." "Yes." "To betray your country to foreign powers." "Yes." "You are prepared to cheat to forge to blackmail, to corrupt the minds of children, to distribute habit-forming drugs, to encourage prostitution, to disseminate venereal diseases, to do anything which is likely to cause demoralization and weaken the power of the party." "Yes." "If, for example, it would somehow serve our interests, to throw a sulfuric exit in a child's face, are you prepared to do that?" "Yes." "You are prepared to lose your identity and live out the rest of your life as a waiter or a dog-worker." "Yes." "You are prepared to commit suicide, if and when we order you to do so." "Yes." "You are prepared, the two of you, to separate and never see one another again." "No!" broke in Julia. It appeared to Winston that long time passed before he answered. For a moment, he seemed even to have been deprived of the power of speech. His tongue worked soundlessly, forming the opening syllables first of one word, then of the other, over and over again. Until he had said it, he did not know which word he was going to say. "No," he said finally. "He did well to tell me," said O'Brien. "It is necessary for us to know everything. He turned himself toward Julia and added in a voice with somewhat more expression in it. Do you understand that even that he survives, it may be as a different person. We may be obliged to give him a new identity, his face, his movements, the shape of his hands, the color of his hand. Even his voice would be different. And you yourself might become a different person. Our surgeons can alter people beyond recognition. Sometimes it is necessary. Sometimes we even amputate the limb. Winston could not help snatching another sight-long glance at Martin's Mongolian face. There were no scars that he could see. Julia had turned a shape paler so that her freckles were showing. But she faced O'Brien boldly. She murmured something that seemed to be absent. Good, then that is settled. There was a silver box of cigarettes on the table. With a rather absent-minded air, O'Brien pushed him towards the others, took one himself, then stood up and began to pay slowly to and fro, as though he could think better standing. They were very good cigarettes, very thick and well packed, with an unfamiliar silkiness in the paper. O'Brien looked at his wristwatch again. "You had better go back to your pantry, Martin," he said. "I shall switch on in a quarter of an hour. Take a good look at these comrades' faces before you go. You will be seeing them again. I may not." Exactly as they had done at the front door, the little man stuck eyes flicked over their faces. There was not a trace of friendliness in his mouth. He was memorizing their appearance, but he felt no interest in them, or appeared to feel none. It occurred to Winston that a synthetic face was perhaps incapable of changing its expression. Without speaking or giving any kind of seditation, Martin went out, closing the door silently behind him. O'Brien was strolling up and down, one hand in the pocket of his black overalls, the other holding a cigarette. "You understand," he said, "that you will be fighting in the dark. You will always be in the dark. You will receive orders, and you will obey them, without knowing why. Later I shall send you a book from which you will learn the true nature of the society we live in, and a strategy by which we shall destroy it. When you have read the book, you will be full members of the brotherhood. But between the general aims that we are fighting for and the immediate tasks of the moment, you will never know anything. I tell you that the brotherhood exists, but I cannot tell you whether it numbers 100 members or 10 million. From your personal knowledge, you will never be able to say that it numbers even as many as it doesn't. You will have three or four contacts, who will be renewed from time to time as they disappear. As this was your first contact, it will be preserved. When you receive orders, they will come from me. If we find it necessary to communicate with you, it will be through Martin. When you are finally caught, you will confess that is unavoidable. But you will have very little to confess, other than your own actions. You will not be able to betray more than a handful of unimportant people. Probably you will not even betray me. By that time I may be there, or I shall have become a different person with a different face. He continued to move to and fro over the soft carpet. In spite of the bulkiness of his body, there was a remarkable grace in his movements. It came out even in the gesture with which he thrust the hand into his pocket, or manipulated a cigarette. More even than of strength, he gave an impression of confidence and of an understanding tinged by irony. However much in earnest he might be, he had nothing but the single-mindedness that belongs to a fanatic. When he spoke of murder, suicide, veneerial disease, amputated limbs, and altered faces, he was with a faint air of persoplash. "This is unavoidable," his voice seemed to say. "This is what we have got to do, unflinchingly, but this is not what we shall be doing when life is worth living again. A wave of admiration, almost of worship, flowed out from instant towards O'Brien. For the moment he had forgotten the shadowy figure of Goldstein. When you looked at O'Brien's powerful shoulders and his blunt featured face so ugly and yet so civilized, it was impossible to believe that he could be defeated. There was no strategy that he was not equal to, no danger that he could not foresee. Even Julius seemed to be impressed. He had let his cigarette go out and was listening intently. O'Brien went on, "You will have heard rumors of the existence of the Brotherhood. No doubt you have formed your own picture of it. You have imagined, probably, a huge underworld of conspirators, meeting secretly in cellars, scribbling messages and walls, recognizing one another by cold words or by special movements of the hand. Nothing of the kind exists. The members of the Brotherhood have no way of recognizing one another, and it is impossible for any one member to be aware of the identity of more than a few others. Goldstein himself, if he fell into the hands of the Thought Police, could not give them a complete list of members or any information that would lead them to a complete list. No such list exists. The Brotherhood cannot be wiped out because it is not an organization in the ordinary sense. Nothing holds it together except an idea which is indestructible. You will never have anything to sustain you except the idea. You will get no comradeship and no encouragement. When finally you are caught, you will get no help. We never help our members. At most, when it is absolutely necessary that someone should be silenced, we are occasionally able to smuggle a razor blade into a prisoner's cell. You will have to get used to living without results and without hope. You will work for a while. You will be caught. You will confess and then you will die. Those are the only results that you will ever see them. There is no possibility that any perceptible change will happen within our own lifetime. We are the dead. Our only true life is in the future. We shall take part in it as handfuls of dust and splinters of bone. But how far away that future may be, there is no knowing. It might be a thousand years. At present nothing is possible except to extend the area of sanity little by little. We cannot act collectively. We can only spread our knowledge outwards from individual to individual generation after generation. In the face of the thought police, there is no other way. He halted and looked for the third time at his wristwatch. "It is almost time for you to leave from that," he said to Julia. "Wait, the decanter is still half full." He filled the glasses and raised his own glass by the stamp. "What shall it be this time?" he said, still with the same faint suggestion of irony, to the confusion of the thought police, to the death of big brother, to humanity, to the future, to the past, said Winston. "The past is more important," agreed O'Brien Great. They emptied their glasses, and a moment later, Julia stood up to go. O'Brien took a small box from the top of a cabinet and handed her flat white tablet, which he told her to place on her tongue. "It was important," he said, "not to go out smelling of wine." The lift attendants were very observant. As soon as the door had shut behind her, he appeared to forget her existence. He took another pace or two up and down, then stopped. "There are details to be settled," he said, "I assume that you have a hiding place of some kind." Winston explained about the room over Mr. charrington's shop. "That will do for the moment. Later, we will arrange something else for you. It is important to change one's hiding place frequently. Meanwhile, I shall send you a copy of the book." Even O'Brien, Winston noticed, seemed to pronounce the words as though they were in italics. "Golstein's book," you understand, "as soon as possible. It may be some days before I can get hold of one. There are not many in existence, as you can imagine. The thought police hunt them down and destroy them almost as fast as we can, reduce them. It makes very little difference. The book is indestructible. If the last copy were gone, we can reproduce it almost word for word. Do you carry a brief case to work with you?" he added. "As a rule, yes. What is it like? Black, very shabby, with two straps. Black, two straps, very shabby. Good. One day in the fairly near future, I cannot give a date. One of the messages among your morning's work will contain a misprinted word, and you will have to ask for a repeat. On the following day, you will go to work without your briefcase. At some time during the day in the street, a man would touch you on the arm and say, 'I think you have dropped your briefcase. The one he gives you will contain a copy of Goldstein's book. You will return it within 14 days. They were silent for a moment. There are a couple of minutes before you need go,' said O'Brien. 'We shall meet again. If we do meet again.' Winston looked up at him. 'In a place where there is no darkness,' he said hesitantly. O'Brien nodded without appearance of surprise. 'In the place where there is no darkness,' he said, as though he had recognized the illusion. And in the meantime, is there anything that you wish to say before you leave? Any message? Any question? Winston thought. There did not seem to be any further question that he wanted to ask. Still less did he feel any impulse to utter high sounding generalities, instead of anything directly connected with O'Brien or the Brotherhood. There came into his mind a sort of composite picture of the dark bedroom where his mother had spent her last days, and lit a room over Mr. Chianton's shop, and a glass paperweight, and a steel engraving in its rosewood frame. Almost at random he said, 'Did you ever happen to hear an old rhyme that begins 'Oringes and lemons?' say the bells of St. Clements.' Again O'Brien nodded with a sort of grave courtesy he completed the stanza. 'Oringes and lemons?' say the bells of St. Clements. 'You owe me three farlings,' say the bells of St. Martins. 'When will you pay me?' say the bells of Old Bailey. 'When I grow rich,' say the bells of Shortage. 'You knew the last line,' said Winston. 'Yes, I knew the last line, and now I'm afraid it is time for you to go. But wait, you had better let me give you one of these tablets.' As Winston stood up O'Brien held out the hand, his powerful grip crushed the bones of Winston's palm. At the door Winston looked back, but O'Brien seemed already to be in process of putting him out of mind. He was waiting with his hand on the switch that controlled the telescope. Beyond him, Winston could see the writing table with his green-shaded lamp and the speed rate, and the wire baskets deep laden the papers. The instant was closed. Within 30 seconds it occurred to him O'Brien would be back at his interrupted and important work on the half of the party. 'Catechism, catechism. Now, a summary of the principles of Christian religion in the form of Prussians and Ances used for religious instruction.' Vaneerio. Vaneerio. Edative. Relating to sexual desire or sexual intercourse. Perciflash. Perciflash. Now, light and slightly contemptuous mockery or bentel. Italyse. Italyse. Now, an italic tight phase or letter.
