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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 5
隨著幽會次數增加 Winston 對 Julia 認識亦同時加深 令他震撼的是 Julia一方面有著比自己更堅定的批判意志 但另一方面 她顯然對黨的過去 所作所爲 乃至對現實的混肴 一知半解之餘 完全不感興趣 某程度是徹頭徹尾 活在快活無知之中
Characters:
Winston Smith, O'Brien, Big Brother, Emmanuel Goldstein, Julia, Mrs. Parson, Tom Parson, Tillotson, Ampleforth, Katherine, Charrington, Old man (Syme, Winston's family)
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Tues to Thurs: 1984, The Count of Monte Cristo
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
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Firstory Hosting [ Music ] >> 1984 by George Orwell, part 2, chapter 5. >> Sign had vanished. The morning came and he was missing from work. A few thoughtless people commented on his absence. On the next day, nobody mentioned him. On the third day, Winston went into the festival of the Records Department to look at the notice board. One of the notices carried a printed list of the members of the chess committee of whom sign had been won. It looked almost exactly as it had looked before. Nothing had been crossed out. But it was one name shorter. It was enough. Sign had ceased to exist. He had never existed. The weather was baking hot. In the labyrinthine ministry, the windowless air-conditioned rooms kept at the normal temperature. But outside the pavement scorched once feet and the stench of the tubes at the rush hours was a horror. The preparations for hate week were in full swing and the staffs of all the ministries were working overtime. Processions, meetings, military parades, lectures, waxworks, displays, film shows, telescreened programs all had to be organized. Stands had to be erected. Evergies built, slogans coined, songs written, rumors circulated, photographs faked. Julia's unit in fiction department had been taken off the production of novels and was rushing out a series of atrocity pamphlets. Winston, in addition to his regular work, spent long periods every day in going through back files of the times and altering and embellishing news items which were to be quoted in speeches. Late at night, when crowds of rowdy pros roamed the streets, the town had a curiously feebrow air. The rocket bombs crashed, oftener than ever. And sometimes, in a far distance, there were enormous explosions, which no one could explain in about which there were wild brews. The new tune, which was to be the theme song of hate week, had already been composed and was being endlessly plucked on the telescreens. It had a savage, barking rhythm, which could not exactly be called music, but resembled the beating of a drum. Rolled out by hundreds of voices to the tramp of marching feet, it was terrifying. The pros had taken a fancy to it. And in the midnight streets, it competed with the still popular, it was only a hopeless fancy. The Parsons children played it at all hours of the night and day, unbearably, on a comb and a piece of toilet paper. When since evenings were fuller than ever, squads of volunteers, organized by Parsons, were preparing the street for hate week, stitching banners, painting posters, erecting flagstuffs on the roofs, and perilously slinging wires across the street for the reception of streams. Parsons boasted the victory mansions alone would display 400 meters of bunting. He was in his native elements and as happy as a luck. The heat and the manual work had even given him a pretext for reverting to shorts and an open shirt in the evenings. He was everywhere at once, pushing, pulling, sewing, hammering, improvising, joining everyone along with comradely exaltations and giving up from every fold of his body what seemed an inexhaustible supply of accurate smelling strength. A new poster had suddenly appeared all over life. It had no caption and represented simply the monstrous figure of a duration soldier, three or four meters high, striding forward with expressionist Mongolian face and enormous boots, a submachine gun pointing from his hip. From whatever angle you looked at the poster, the muzzle of the gun, magnified by the full shot moon, seemed to be pointed straight at you. The thing had been blasted on every blank space on every wall, even outnumbering the portraits of big brother. The prompts, normally apathetic about the wall, were being latched into one of their periodic whole frenzies of patriotism. As though to harmonize with the general move, the rocket bombs had been killing larger numbers of people than usual. One fell on the crowded film theater in step, buried several hundred victims among the roots. The whole population of the neighborhood turned out for a long trailing funeral, which went on for hours and was in effect an indignation meeting. Another bomb fell on the piece of waste ground, which was used as a flavor, and several dozen children were blown to pieces. There were further angry demonstrations. Goldstein was spurned in effigy. Hundreds of copies of the poster of the Eurasian soldier were torn down and added to the flames. And a number of shots were looted in the turmoil. Then a rumor flew round that spies were directing the rocket bombs by means of wireless waves. At an old couple who were suspected of being of foreign extraction, they had their house set on fire and perished of suffocation. In the room over Mr. Charrington shot, when they could get there, Julia and Winston lay side by side on the strip bed under the open window, naked for the sake of coolness. The wreck had never come back, but the box had multiplied hideously in the heat. It did not seem to matter. Dirty or clean, the room was paradise. As soon as they arrived, they would sprinkle everything with pepper bought on the black market, tear off their clothes and make love with sweating bodies, then fall asleep and wait to find that the box had rallied and were massing for the counterattack. Four, five, six, seven times they met during the month of June. Winston had dropped his habit of drinking gin at all hours. He seemed to have lost the need for it. He had grown fatter. His varicose ulcer had subsided, leaving only a brown stain on the skin about his ankle. His fits of coughing in the early morning had stopped. The process of life had ceased to be intolerable. He had no longer any impulse to make faces at the tatterscreen or shell curses at the top of his voice. Now that they had a secure hiding place, almost a home, it did not even seem a hardship that they could only meet infrequently and for a couple of hours at a time. What mattered was that the room over the junk shop should exist. To know that it was there, in violate, was almost the same as being in it. The room was the world, a pocket of the past, where extinct animals could walk. Mr. Charington thought Winston was another extinct animal. It usually stopped to talk with Mr. Charington for a few minutes on his way upstairs. The old man seemed seldom or never to go out of doors. And on the other hand, to have almost no customs, he let a ghost-like existence between the tiny dark shop and an even tinier back kitchen where he prepared his meals and which contained, among other things, an unbelievably ancient gramophone with an enormous horn. He seemed glad of the opportunity to talk, wondering about among his worthless stuff, with his long nose and thick spectacles and his spalled shoulders in the velvet jacket. He had always faked the air of being a collector, rather than a tradesman. With a sort of faded enthusiasm, he would finger this scrap of rubbish on that, a China bottle stopper, the painted lid of a broken snuff box, a pinched back locket containing his strength of some long dead baby's head, never asking that Winston should buy it, merely that he shouldn't admire it. To talk to him was like listening to the tinkling of a worn-out musical box. He had dragged out from the corners of his memory some more fragments of forgotten rhymes. There was one about four and 20 black birds and another about a cow with a crumpled horn and another about the death of poor cock robin. It just occurred to me you might be interested. He would say with a deprecating little laugh whenever he produced a new fragment, but he could never recall more than a few lines of any one run. Both of them knew, in a way, it was never out of their minds that what was now happening could not last long. There were times when the fact of impending death seemed as palpable as the bed they lay on, and they would cling together with the sort of despairing sensuality, like a damned soul grasping at his last muscle of pleasure when the clock is within five minutes of striking. But there were also times when they had the illusion not only of safety, but of permanence. So long as they were actually in this room, they both felt no harm could come to them. Getting there was typical and dangerous, but the room itself was sensually. It was as when Winston had gazed into the heart of the paper meet with the feeling that it would be possible to get inside that glassy world and that once inside it, time could be arrested. Often they gave themselves up to daydreams of escape. Their luck would hold indefinitely, and they would carry on their intrigue, just like this, for the remainder of their natural lives. Or Catherine would die, and by subtle maneuverings, Winston and Julia would succeed in getting married. Or they would commit suicide together. Or they would disappear, alter themselves out of recognition, learn to speak with proletarian accents, get jobs in a factory and live up their lives undetected in the back street. It was all nonsense as they both knew. In reality, there was no escape. Even the one plan that was practically suicide, they had no intention of carrying out. The hang on from day to day and from week to week, spinning out a present that had no future, seemed an incomparable instinct, just as one's lungs will always draw the next breath so long as there is air available. Sometimes too, they talked of engaging in active rebellion against the party, but with no notion of how to take the first step. Even if the fabulous brotherhood was a reality, there still remained the difficulty of finding one's way into it. He told her of the strange intimacy that existed, or seemed to exist, between himself and O'Brien, and of the impulse he sometimes felt, simply to walk into O'Brien's presence, announced that he was the enemy of the party, and demanded his help. Curiously enough, this did not strike her as an impossibly rash thing to do. She was used to judging people by their faces, and it seemed natural to her that Winston should believe O'Brien to be trustworthy on the strength of a single flash of the eyes. Moreover, she took it for granted that everyone, or nearly everyone, secretly hated the party and would break the rules if he thought it's safe to do so. But she refused to believe that widespread, organized opposition existed or could exist. The tales about Ghostine and his underground army, she said, were simply a lot of rubbish, which the party had invented for its own purposes, and which you had to pretend to believe in. Times beyond number. At party rallies and spontaneous demonstrations, she had shouted at the top of her voice for the execution of people whose name she had never heard, and in whose supposed crimes she had not the faintest belief. When public trials were happening, she had taken her place in the detachments from the youth league who surrounded the courts from morning to night, chanting at intervals, daff to the traitors. During the two minutes' hate, she always excelled all others in shouting insults at Ghostine. Yet she had only the dimest idea of who Ghostine was and what doctrines he was supposed to represent. She had grown up since the revolution and was too young to remember the ideological battles of the '50s and '60s. Such a thing as an independent political movement was outside her imagination. And in any case, the party was invincible. It would always exist and it would always be the same. You could only rebel against it by secret disobedience or at most by isolated acts of violence such as killing somebody or blowing something up. In some ways, she was far more acute than Winston and far less susceptible to party propaganda. Once when he happened in some connection to mention the war against Eurasia, she startled him by saying casually that in her opinion, the war was not happening. The rocket bombs, which fell daily on London, were probably fired by the government of Oceania itself, just to keep people frightened. This was an idea that had literally never occurred to him. She also stirred a sort of envy in him by telling him that during the two minutes' hate, her great difficulty was to avoid bursting out laughing. But she only questioned the teachings of the party when they, in some way, touched upon her own life. Often she was ready to accept the official mythology, simply because the difference between truth and falsehood did not seem important to her. She believed, for instance, having learned it at school that the party had invented aeroplanes. And when he told her that aeroplanes had been in existence before he was born and long before the revolution, the fact struck her as totally uninteresting. After all, what didn't matter who had invented aeroplanes, it was rather more of a shock to him when he discovered from some chance remark that she did not remember that Oceania, four years ago, had been at war with East Asia and at peace with Eurasia. It was true that she regarded the whole war as a chef, but apparently she had not even noticed that the name of the enemy had changed. "I thought we'd always been at war with Eurasia," she said fakely. It frightened him a little. The invention of aeroplanes dated from long before her birth, but the split children in the war had happened only four years ago, well after she was grown up. He argued with her about it for perhaps a quarter of an hour. In the end, he succeeded in forcing her memory back until she did dimly recall that at one time, East Asia and North Eurasia had been the enemy. But the issue still struck her as unimportant. "Who cares?" she said impatiently. It's always one bloody war for another, and one knows the news is all lies anyway. Sometimes he talked to her of the records department and impudent forgeries that he committed there. Such things did not appear to horrify her. She did not feel the abbess opening beneath her feet at the thought of lies becoming troops. He told her the story of Jones, Aronson and Rutherford, and the momentous slip of paper which she had once held between his fingers. It did not make much impression on her. At first, indeed, she failed to grasp the point of the story. "Were they friends of yours?" she said. "No, I never knew them. They were inner party members. Besides, they were far older than I was. They belonged to the old days before the revolution. I barely knew them by sight." Then what was there to worry about? People are being killed off all the time, aren't they? He tried to make her understand. This was an exceptional case. It wasn't just a question of somebody being killed. Do you realize that the past, starting from yesterday, has been actually abolished? If it survives anywhere, it's in a few solid objects with no words attached to them like that lump of glass there. Already, we know almost literally nothing about the revolution in the years before the revolution. Every record has been destroyed or falsified. Every book has been rewritten. Every picture has been repainted. Every statue in the street and building has been renamed. Every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the party is always right. I know, of course, that the past is falsified. But it would never be possible for me to prove it. Even when I did the falsification myself. After the thing is done, no evidence ever remains. The only evidence is inside my own mind. And I don't know with any certainty that any other human being shares my memories. Just in that one instance in my whole life, I did possess actual concrete evidence after the event, years after it. And what good was that? It was no good because I threw it away a few minutes later. But if the same thing happened today, I should keep it. Well, I wouldn't, said Julian. I'm quite ready to take risks. But only for something worthwhile. Not for bits of old newspaper. What could you have done with it, even if you had kept it? Not much, perhaps. But it was evidence. It might have planted a few doubts here and there, supposing that I dare to show it to anybody. I don't imagine that we can alter anything in our own lifetime. But one can imagine little knots of resistance bringing up here and there, small groups of people banding themselves together and gradually growing and even leaving a few records behind so that the next generations can carry on where we leave off. I'm not interested in the next generation here. I'm interested in us. You're only a rebel from the waist downwards, he told him. She thought this brilliantly witty and flung her rounds around him in delight. In the ramifications of party doctrine, she had not the faintest interest. Whenever he began to talk of the principles of in-stock, double-think, the mutability of the past and the denial of object reality and to use new speak words, she became bored and confused and said that she never paid any attention to that kind of thing. One knew that it was all rubbish, so why let oneself be wary about it? She knew when to cheer and when to boo, and that was all one knew. If he persisted in talking of such subjects, she had a disconcerting habit of falling asleep. She was one of those people who can go to sleep at any hour and in any position, talking to them. He realized how easy it was to present an appearance or orthodoxy while having no grasp whatever of what orthodox he met. In a way, the wealth view of the party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding, they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass and digest it through the body of a bird. (upbeat music) - Phoebra. Phoebra. Adjective. Having a showing symptoms of a fever characterized by a great deal of nervous excitement or energy.
