KirinDave / git-testing

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his 
breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not 
quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him. 

The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. At one end of it a coloured poster, too large for indoor display, 
had been tacked to the wall. It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a man of about 
forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features. Winston made for the stairs. It was no use 
trying the lift. Even at the best of times it was seldom working, and at present the electric current was cut off during 
daylight hours. It was part of the economy drive in preparation for Hate Week. The flat was seven flights up, and 
Winston, who was thirty-nine and had a varicose ulcer above his right ankle, went slowly, resting several times on the 
way. On each landing, opposite the lift-shaft, the poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of 
those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the 
caption beneath it ran. 

Inside the flat a fruity voice was reading out a list of figures which had something to do with the production of 
pig-iron. The voice came from an oblong metal plaque like a dulled mirror which formed part of the surface of the 
right-hand wall. Winston turned a switch and the voice sank somewhat, though the words were still distinguishable. The 
instrument (the telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely. He moved 
over to the window: a smallish, frail figure, the meagreness of his body merely emphasized by the blue overalls which 
were the uniform of the party. His hair was very fair, his face naturally sanguine, his skin roughened by coarse soap 
and blunt razor blades and the cold of the winter that had just ended. 

Outside, even through the shut window-pane, the world looked cold. Down in the street little eddies of wind were 
whirling dust and torn paper into spirals, and though the sun was shining and the sky a harsh blue, there seemed to be 
no colour in anything, except the posters that were plastered everywhere. The blackmoustachio'd face gazed down from 
every commanding corner. There was one on the house-front immediately opposite. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption 
said, while the dark eyes looked deep into Winston's own. Down at streetlevel another poster, torn at one corner, 
flapped fitfully in the wind, alternately covering and uncovering the single word INGSOC. In the far distance a 
helicopter skimmed down between the roofs, hovered for an instant like a bluebottle, and darted away again with a 
curving flight. It was the police patrol, snooping into people's windows. The patrols did not matter, however. Only the 
Thought Police mattered. 

Behind Winston's back the voice from the telescreen was still babbling away about pig-iron and the overfulfilment of the 
Ninth Three-Year Plan. The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the 
level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which 
the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were 
being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire 
was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your 
wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live -- did live, from habit that became instinct -- in the assumption that 
every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized. 

Winston kept his back turned to the telescreen. It was safer, though, as he well knew, even a back can be revealing. A 
kilometre away the Ministry of Truth, his place of work, towered vast and white above the grimy landscape. This, he 
thought with a sort of vague distaste -- this was London, chief city of Airstrip One, itself the third most populous of 
the provinces of Oceania. He tried to squeeze out some childhood memory that should tell him whether London had always 
been quite like this. Were there always these vistas of rotting nineteenth-century houses, their sides shored up with 
baulks of timber, their windows patched with cardboard and their roofs with corrugated iron, their crazy garden walls 
sagging in all directions? And the bombed sites where the plaster dust swirled in the air and the willow-herb straggled 
over the heaps of rubble; and the places where the bombs had cleared a larger patch and there had sprung up sordid 
colonies of wooden dwellings like chicken-houses? But it was no use, he could not remember: nothing remained of his 
childhood except a series of bright-lit tableaux occurring against no background and mostly unintelligible. 

The Ministry of Truth -- Minitrue, in Newspeak -- was startlingly different from any other object in sight. It was an 
enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, 300 metres into the air. 
From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three 
slogans of the Party: 

WAR IS PEACE 

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY 

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH 

The Ministry of Truth contained, it was said, three thousand rooms above ground level, and corresponding ramifications 
below. Scattered about London there were just three other buildings of similar appearance and size. So completely did 
they dwarf the surrounding architecture that from the roof of Victory Mansions you could see all four of them 
simultaneously. They were the homes of the four Ministries between which the entire apparatus of government was divided. 
The Ministry of Truth, which concerned itself with news, entertainment, education, and the fine arts. The Ministry of 
Peace, which concerned itself with war. The Ministry of Love, which maintained law and order. And the Ministry of 
Plenty, which was responsible for economic affairs. Their names, in Newspeak: Minitrue, Minipax, Miniluv, and 
Miniplenty.

going to do some cool work here.