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tell; people are such hypocrites.
She began to enlarge upon the subject. With Julia, everything came back to her own sexuality. As soon
as this was touched upon in any way she was capable of great acuteness. Unlike Winston, she had grasped
the inner meaning of the Party s sexual puritanism. It was not merely that the sex instinct created a world of
its own which was outside the Party s control and which therefore had to be destroyed if possible. What was
more important was that sexual privation induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could be
transformed into war-fever and leader-worship. The way she put it was:
When you make love you re using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy and don t give a damn for
anything. They can t bear you to feel like that. They want you to be bursting with energy all the time. All
this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour. If you re happy inside
yourself, why should you get excited about Big Brother and the Three-Year Plans and the Two Minutes Hate
and all the rest of their bloody rot?
That was very true, he thought. There was a direct intimate connexion between chastity and political
orthodoxy. For how could the fear, the hatred, and the lunatic credulity which the Party needed in its
members be kept at the right pitch, except by bottling down some powerful instinct and using it as a driving
force? The sex impulse was dangerous to the Party, and the Party had turned it to account. They had played
a similar trick with the instinct of parenthood. The family could not actually be abolished, and, indeed,
people were encouraged to be fond of their children, in almost the old-fashioned way. The children, on the
other hand, were systematically turned against their parents and taught to spy on them and report their
deviations. The family had become in effect an extension of the Thought Police. It was a device by means
of which everyone could be surrounded night and day by informers who knew him intimately.
Abruptly his mind went back to Katharine. Katharine would unquestionably have denounced him to the
Thought Police if she had not happened to be too stupid to detect the unorthodoxy of his opinions. But what
really recalled her to him at this moment was the stifling heat of the afternoon, which had brought the sweat
out on his forehead. He began telling Julia of something that had happened, or rather had failed to happen,
on another sweltering summer afternoon, eleven years ago.
It was three or four months after they were married. They had lost their way on a community hike
somewhere in Kent. They had only lagged behind the others for a couple of minutes, but they took a wrong
turning, and presently found themselves pulled up short by the edge of an old chalk quarry. It was a sheer
drop of ten or twenty metres, with boulders at the bottom. There was nobody of whom they could ask the
way. As soon as she realized that they were lost Katharine became very uneasy. To be away from the noisy
mob of hikers even for a moment gave her a feeling of wrong-doing. She wanted to hurry back by the way
they had come and start searching in the other direction. But at this moment Winston noticed some tufts of
loosestrife growing in the cracks of the cliff beneath them. One tuft was of two colours, magenta and brick-
red, apparently growing on the same root. He had never seen anything of the kind before, and he called to
Katharine to come and look at it.
Look, Katharine! Look at those flowers. That clump down near the bottom. Do you see they re two
different colours?
She had already turned to go, but she did rather fretfully come back for a moment. She even leaned out
over the cliff face to see where he was pointing. He was standing a little behind her, and he put his hand on
her waist to steady her. At this moment it suddenly occurred to him how completely alone they were. There
was not a human creature anywhere, not a leaf stirring, not even a bird awake. In a place like this the danger
that there would be a hidden microphone was very small, and even if there was a microphone it would only
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