Part three

It had been a while since he ran into the black haired woman out on the streets, and nothing had yet to happen, untill one day he at work crossed paths with her. The black haired woman slipped a note into Winston's hand during an incident they had in a corridor.

”Whatever was written on the paper, it must have been some kind of political meaning. So far as he could see there were two possibilities. One, much the more likely, was hat the girl was an agent of the thought police, just as he had feared. He did mot know why the thought police should choose to deliver their messages in such a fashion, but perhaps they had their reasons. The thing that was written on the paper might be a threat, a summons, an order to commit suicide, a trap of some description. But there was another, wilder possibility that kept raising its head, though the tried vainly to suppress it. This was, that the message did not come from the thought police at all, but from some kind of underground organization. Perhaps the Brotherhood existed after all!”

After waiting a while for a safe time and place, Winston unfolded the message and read it...

”I love you.”

The message really got to Winston, and he had trouble working and holding up the daily act for a while. He had trouble getting a private enough place to speak to her, but after a while they managed to make contact. He got a set of instructions to a place in the countryside where they could meet safely.

”Only five nights ago he had contemplated smashing her skull in with a cobblestone; but that was of no importance. He thought of her naked, youthful body, as he had seen it in his dream. He had imagined her a fool like all the rest of them, her head stuffed with lies and hatred, her belly full of ice. A kind of fever seized him at the thought that he might lose her, the white youthful body might slip away from him! What he feared more than anything else was that she would simply change her mind if he did not get in touch with her quickly. But the physical difficulty of meeting was enormous.”

They met, talked, had sex and made future plans to do it again. Her name is Julia, she works in the fiction department as a mechanic. She tells Winston she has a talent to notice the unorthodox ones, and has been doing this for a while. Julia didn't know about any underground resistance or of any such like, she hated Big Brother and getting together with other not so orthodox outer party members was her way of defying it. She tells Winston that one of her earlier partners got made by the thought-police and committed suicide, thus she escaped detection through the interregation of him.

”His heart leapt. Scores of times she had done it: he wished it had been hundreds — thousands. Anything that hinted at corruption always filled him with a wild hope. Who knew, perhaps the Party was rotten under the surface, its cult of strenuousness and self-denial simply a sham concealing iniquity. If he could have infected the whole lot of them with leprosy or syphilis, how gladly he would have done so! Anything to rot, to weaken, to undermine! ”

“In a way she realized that she herself was doomed, that sooner or later the thought police would catch her and kill her, but with another part of her mind she believed that it was somehow possible to construct a secret world in which you could live as you chose. All you needed was luck and cunning and boldness. She did not understand that there was no such thing as happiness, that the only victory lay in the far future, long after you were dead, that from the moment of declaring war on the party it was better to think of yourself as a corpse.”

Assignment:

The most important turn of events is that the black haired woman turned out to be an ally, instead of an enemy.

I rather enjoy reading the book, but I dislike doing the reading log, I find it rather tedious and I feel like it doesn't enhance the experience at all, if not diminishing it.

I've started to write down and defining more words I've come across that I'm not familiar with.

Farthing = a)före 1961 1/4 penny då det gick 240 pence på ett pund. b)

dugg, dyft, skvatt.

Pediment = fronton.

Scrimmage = tumult, handgemäng, slagsmål.

Extricate = lösgöra, frigöra, lösa, befria.

Folly = dåraktighet, dårskap, tokeri.

Dapple = fläckig.

Boughs = grenar.

Etiolate = göra sjukligt blek.

Incredulity = klentrogenhet, skepsis, tvivel.

Procession = porcessionm kortegem [fest]tåg.

Obeisance = [vördnadsfull] hälsning (bugning, nigning), reverens hyllning, vördnad.

Thrush = trast.

Iniquity = orättfärdighet, orättvisa; ondska; syndfullhet.

Enunciate = uttala, formulera, utforma, uttrycka.

Parenthetical = innom parentes.

Credulity = lättrogenhet, godtrogenhet.

Prosaic = prosaisk; torr och saklig, nykter, enformig, vardaglig.

Sweltering = tryckande, kvävande, olidlig.

Ghastly = hemsk, ohygglig, fasanfull.

Doctrine = lära, tes, lärosats.