Pierced Butterflies: Aokigahara: Japan’s Haunted Forest of Death

Tuesday, January 15, 2013

Aokigahara: Japan’s Haunted Forest of Death

Located at the base of Mt. Fuji, Aokigahara is perhaps the most infamous forest in all of Japan. Also known as the Sea of Trees, Suicide Forest, and Japan’s Demon Forest, Aokigahara has been home to over 500 confirmed suicides since the 1950s. Called “the perfect place to die,” Aokigahara is the world’s second most popular place for suicide (the Golden Gate Bridge being the first).

A Horrifying Legend is Born

Legend says that this all started after Seicho Matsumoto published a novel by the name of Kuroi Kaiju (Black Sea of Trees) in 1960. The story ends with two lovers committing suicide in the forest, so many people believe that’s what started it all. However, the history of suicide in Aokigahara predates the novel, and the place has long been associated with death. Hundreds upon hundreds of Japanese people have hanged themselves from the trees of Aokigahara forest.
Wataru Tsurumui’s controversial 1993 bestseller, The Complete Suicide Manual, is a book that describes various modes of suicide and even recommends Aokigahara as the perfect place to die. Apparently this book is also a common find in the forest, usually not too far away from a suicide victim and their belongings. Undoubtedly, the most common method of suicide in the forest is hanging.
Japan’s suicide rate is already bad enough as it is, and having this forest and suicide manual on top of it all is pretty terrible. It’s really sad. Despite many efforts to prevent suicide and provide help to those considering it, Japan’s suicide rate continues to rise.
Legend has it that in ancient times families would abandon people in the forest during periods of famine when there was not enough food to go around. By sacrificing family members to the forest, there would be less mouths to feed and therefore enough food for the rest of the family. Those abandoned in the forest would die long, horrible, drawn out deaths due to starvation. Because of that, Aokigahara is also said to be haunted by the souls of these abandoned people.

In addition, there are many other ghost and demon stories associated with the forest. It is said that these ghastly spirits glide between the trees with their white, shifting forms being occasionally spotted by unsuspecting visitors out of the corners of their eyes.
Japanese spiritualists believe that the suicides committed in the forest have permeated Aokigahara’s soil and trees, generating paranormal activity and preventing many who enter from escaping the gnarled depths of the forest. Aokigahara is not the kind of place you’d want to honeymoon at, that’s for sure.

Terrifying Topography

The vast forest covers a 3,500 hectare wide area and the tree coverage in Aokigahara is so thick that even at high noon it’s entirely possible to find places shrouded in complete darkness. It’s also mostly devoid of animals and is eerily quiet. Hearing a bird chirping in the forest is incredibly rare. The area is rocky, cold, and littered with over 200 caves for you to accidentally fall into.
The discomforting forest is known for the thickness of its trees, its twisting network of woody vines, and the dangerous unevenness of the forest floor. All of this together gives the place a very unwelcoming feeling.
Personally, I love hiking and I think the forest actually looks really pretty during the daytime. However, I think the place would turn absolutely horrifying come nightfall. Who knows when you’ll trip over some snarled root or jagged rock, fall down a hill and land on top of a pile of bones or a rotting corpse. No nighttime hiking in Aokigahara for me, thanks.
Further compounding the creepiness factor is the common occurrence of compasses, cell phones, and GPS systems being rendered useless by the rich deposits of magnetic iron in the area’s volcanic soil. I’m sure this fact has helped propagate the legend of the forest’s demonic habit of trapping visitors within it.

Besides bodies and homemade nooses, also scattered around the forest are signs put up by the police with messages like “Your life is a precious gift from your parents,” and “Please consult with the police before you decide to die,” in an attempt to discourage would be committers of suicide. Judging from the increasing number of suicides, these signs probably aren’t all that effective.

An Unfortunate Suicide Hotspot

By the 1970s the suicides had become so infamous that the Japanese government started to do annual sweeps of the forest to search for and clear out the bodies. In 2002, 78 bodies were found within the forest, exceeding the previous record of 74 in 1998. By 2003, the rate had climbed to 100.
In recent years, the local government has stopped publicizing the numbers in an attempt to downplay Aokigahara’s association with suicide. In 2004, 108 people killed themselves in the forest and in 2010, 247 people attempted suicide, 54 of whom succeeded. But that’s just the number they found and reported. Who knows how many more there are that just go undiscovered?
I’m actually pretty surprised that I hadn’t heard about Aokigahara until just recently. You’d think that something like this, being the number two hotspot for suicides in the world, and located right at the base of Mt. Fuji, would be more well known. Maybe it’s just me.

Its Effect on the Locals

Nearly as unfortunate as the suicides themselves is the impact the suicides have on the locals and forest workers. One local man says, “It bugs the hell out of me that the area’s famous for being a suicide spot.” A local police officer said, “I’ve seen plenty of bodies that have been really badly decomposed, or been picked at by wild animals. There’s nothing beautiful about dying in there.” It’s really a shame that such a unique and interesting forest has become sullied by so many suicides.
The forest workers have it even worse than the police who comb and investigate the forest. The workers are tasked with the job of carrying the bodies down from the forest to the local station, where the bodies are put in a special room used specifically to house suicide corpses. The forest workers then play janken to see who has to sleep in the room with the corpse. Talk about terrible.
The reason for these strange sleeping arrangements is that it is believed if the corpse is left alone, it’s very bad luck for the ghost of the suicide victim. Their spirits are said to scream throughout the night if left alone, and their bodies will get up and shuffle around, searching for company.
I don’t know about you, but this sounds like one of the absolute worst ways to spend a night. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if the body is just like a pile of bones, but I can’t imagine how creepy it would be to sleep in a dinky little room with a fresh corpse as a roommate.
To make matters worse, a few years back people started to scavenge the forest for valuables. And by this I mean that people would search the forest for dead bodies and then loot their corpses. Talk about disrespectful, not to mention creepy.

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Books

1984
A Series of Unfortunate Events
Aleph
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Angels and Demons
Beautiful Malice
Clarity (The Full Trilogy)
Fade-Gone
Frostbite
Inferno
Logicomix
Miss Peregrine's House for Peculiar Children
Missing, Believed Crazy
Notre Dame de Paris
Percy Jackson and the Olympians Series
Pride and Prejudice
Shiver-Linger-Forever
Still Missing
The Book of Tomorrow
The Chronicles of Vladimir Todd
The DaVinci Code
The Divine Comedy
The Dork Diaries
The Heroes of Olympus Series
The Hunger Games
The Perks of Being a Wallflower
The Prophecy of the Sisters Series
The Secret Circle Book 1
The Shining
The Song of Ice and Fire Series
The Tin Princess
The Trylle Trilogy
The name of a Star
Thirteen Reasons Why
Uglies-Pretties-Specials
We Need to Talk About Kevin
Wuthering Heights

Oscar Wilde-The Nightingale and the Rose

"She promised she'd dance with me if I brought her a red rose," cried a young heart-broken student. "But there's not one in this whole garden."

From her nest in the oak tree, the Nightingale heard him, and she looked out through the leaves, and wondered.

"Not a single red rose anywhere!" he cried, and his eyes filled with tears. "It's amazing how happiness depends on such little things. I've read all that the wise men have written, and all the secrets of philosophy, but my life is wretched because of a red rose."

"Here at last is a true romantic," said the Nightingale. "Night after night I have sung of him, though I didn't realize it. Night after night I have told his story to the stars, and now I see him."

"The Prince gives a ball tomorrow night," murmured the young student, "and my love will be there. If I bring her a red rose, she'll dance with me till dawn. If I bring her a red rose, I'll get to hold her in my arms, and she'll lean her head on my shoulder, and her hand will be clasped in mine. But there's no red rose in the garden, and so instead, I'll sit by myself while she passes me by. She'll pay no attention to me, and my heart will break."

"Here indeed is a true romantic," said the Nightingale. "Surely love is a wonderful thing. It's more precious than emeralds and diamonds and gold."
"The musicians will play their instruments," said the student. "And my love will dance to the sound of the violin. But she won't dance with me, because I have no red rose to give her." And he flung himself down on the grass, buried his face in his hands, and wept.

"Why is he weeping?" asked a butterfly, who was fluttering about after a sunbeam.

"He's weeping for a red rose," said the Nightingale.

"For a red rose?" cried the butterfly. "How ridiculous!"

But the Nightingale understood the secret of the student's sorrow, and she sat silently in the oak tree, and thought about the mystery of love. Suddenly, she spread her brown wings and soared into the air. She passed through the grove like a shadow, and sailed across the garden. In the center of the grass stood a beautiful rose tree, and when she saw it, she flew over and landed on a branch.
"Give me a red rose," she cried, "and I'll sing you my sweetest song."

But the tree shook its head. "My roses are white," it said. "But go to my brother who grows near the fountain, and perhaps he'll give you what you want."
So the Nightingale flew over to the rose tree by the fountain.

"Give me a red rose," she cried, "and I will sing you my sweetest song."
But the tree shook its head. "My roses are yellow," it answered. "But go to my brother who grows beneath the student's window, and perhaps he'll give you what you want."

So the Nightingale flew over to the rose tree that was growing beneath the student's window and repeated her request for the rose. But this tree also shook its head.

"My roses are red," it answered. "But the winter has chilled my veins and the frost has nipped my buds, and the storm has broken my branches, and I'll have no roses at all this year."

"One red rose is all I want," cried the Nightingale. "Is there no way I can get it?"

"There is a way," answered the tree. "But it's so terrible, I can't tell you."

"Tell me," said the Nightingale, "I'm not afraid."

"If you want a red rose," said the tree, "you must build it out of music by moonlight, and make it red with your own heart's blood. You must sing to me with your breast against a thorn, and your blood must flow into my veins, and become mine."

"Death is a great price to pay for a red rose," cried the Nightingale. "Yet love is better than life, and what is the heart of the bird compared to the heart of a man?"

So she spread her brown wings and soared into the air. She swept over the garden like a shadow, and like a shadow she sailed through the grove. The young student was lying on the grass where she had left him, and the tears were not yet dry in his eyes.

"Be happy," cried the Nightingale. "You shall have your red rose. I'll build it out of music by moonlight and stain it with my own heart's blood. All that I ask of you in return is that you will be a true romantic, for love is wiser than philosophy."

The student looked up from the grass and listened, but he could not understand what the Nightingale was saying, for he only knew the things that are written in books. But the oak tree understood, and felt sad, for he was very fond of the little Nightingale who had built her nest in his branches.
"Sing me one last song," he whispered. "I'll be lonely when you're gone."
So the Nightingale sang to the oak tree, and her voice was like water bubbling from a silver jar.

When she had finished her song the student got up, and went to his room and began to think of his love. After a time, he fell asleep. And when the moon shone in the heavens, the Nightingale flew to the rose tree and set her breast against a thorn. All night long, she sang against the thorn, and the cold moon leaned down and listened.

She sang of the birth of love in the heart of a boy and a girl. And on the top branch of the rose tree, there blossomed a marvelous rose, petal after petal, as song followed song. It was pale at first, but grew darker as the bird sang louder, and a delicate flush of pink came over the leaves. But the thorn had not yet reached her heart, and so the rose's heart remained white, for only a Nightingale's blood can make the heart of a rose red.

Her song grew wilder as she sang of love, and the marvelous rose became crimson, like an eastern sky. But the Nightingale's voice grew fainter, and her little wings began to beat fast. Then she gave one last burst of music. The white moon heard it, and she forgot the dawn, and lingered on in the sky. The red rose heard it, and it trembled all over with ecstasy, and opened its petals to the cold morning air.

"Look!" cried the tree. "The rose is finished now." But the Nightingale made no answer, for she was lying dead in the long grass, with the thorn in her heart.
And at noon, the student opened his window and looked out. "Why, what a wonderful piece of luck," he cried. "Here is a red rose! I've never seen a rose like this in all my life. It's so beautiful!" And he leaned down and plucked it.
Then he put on his hat, and ran up to his professor's house with the rose in his hand. The daughter of the professor was sitting in the doorway, and her little dog was lying at her feet.

"You said that you would dance with me if I brought you a red rose," cried the student. "Here's the reddest rose in all the world. You'll wear it tonight next to your heart, and as we dance together, it will tell you how much I love you."
But the girl frowned. "I'm afraid it won't go with my dress," she answered. "And the prince's nephew has sent me some jewels, which cost far more than flowers."

"How ungrateful," said the student angrily, and he threw the rose into the street, where it fell into the gutter.

"What a silly thing love is," he thought, as he walked away. "It's not half as useful as logic, and in fact, is quite unpractical. I shall go back to philosophy." And so he returned to his room and pulled out a dusty book, and began to read.

Edgar Allan Poe-Morella

WITH a feeling of deep yet most singular affection I regarded my friend Morella. Thrown by accident into her society many years ago, my soul from our first meeting, burned with fires it had never before known; but the fires were not of Eros, and bitter and tormenting to my spirit was the gradual conviction that I could in no manner define their unusual meaning or regulate their vague intensity. Yet we met; and fate bound us together at the altar, and I never spoke of passion nor thought of love. She, however, shunned society, and, attaching herself to me alone rendered me happy. It is a happiness to wonder; it is a happiness to dream.

Morella's erudition was profound. As I hope to live, her talents were of no common order-her powers of mind were gigantic. I felt this, and, in many matters, became her pupil. I soon, however, found that, perhaps on account of her Presburg education, she placed before me a number of those mystical writings which are usually considered the mere dross of the early German literature. These, for what reason I could not imagine, were her favourite and constant study-and that in process of time they became my own, should be attributed to the simple but effectual influence of habit and example.

In all this, if I err not, my reason had little to do. My convictions, or I forget myself, were in no manner acted upon by the ideal, nor was any tincture of the mysticism which I read to be discovered, unless I am greatly mistaken, either in my deeds or in my thoughts. Persuaded of this, I abandoned myself implicitly to the guidance of my wife, and entered with an unflinching heart into the intricacies of her studies. And then-then, when poring over forbidden pages, I felt a forbidden spirit enkindling within me- would Morella place her cold hand upon my own, and rake up from the ashes of a dead philosophy some low, singular words, whose strange meaning burned themselves in upon my memory. And then, hour after hour, would I linger by her side, and dwell upon the music of her voice, until at length its melody was tainted with terror, and there fell a shadow upon my soul, and I grew pale, and shuddered inwardly at those too unearthly tones. And thus, joy suddenly faded into horror, and the most beautiful became the most hideous, as Hinnon became Ge-Henna.

It is unnecessary to state the exact character of those disquisitions which, growing out of the volumes I have mentioned, formed, for so long a time, almost the sole conversation of Morella and myself. By the learned in what might be termed theological morality they will be readily conceived, and by the unlearned they would, at all events, be little understood. The wild Pantheism of Fichte; the modified Paliggenedia of the Pythagoreans; and, above all, the doctrines of Identity as urged by Schelling, were generally the points of discussion presenting the most of beauty to the imaginative Morella. That identity which is termed personal, Mr. Locke, I think, truly defines to consist in the saneness of rational being. And since by person we understand an intelligent essence having reason, and since there is a consciousness which always accompanies thinking, it is this which makes us all to be that which we call ourselves, thereby distinguishing us from other beings that think, and giving us our personal identity. But the principium indivduationis, the notion of that identity which at death is or is not lost for ever, was to me, at all times, a consideration of intense interest; not more from the perplexing and exciting nature of its consequences, than from the marked and agitated manner in which Morella mentioned them.

But, indeed, the time had now arrived when the mystery of my wife's manner oppressed me as a spell. I could no longer bear the touch of her wan fingers, nor the low tone of her musical language, nor the lustre of her melancholy eyes. And she knew all this, but did not upbraid; she seemed conscious of my weakness or my folly, and, smiling, called it fate. She seemed also conscious of a cause, to me unknown, for the gradual alienation of my regard; but she gave me no hint or token of its nature. Yet was she woman, and pined away daily. In time the crimson spot settled steadily upon the cheek, and the blue veins upon the pale forehead became prominent; and one instant my nature melted into pity, but in, next I met the glance of her meaning eyes, and then my soul sickened and became giddy with the giddiness of one who gazes downward into some dreary and unfathomable abyss.

Shall I then say that I longed with an earnest and consuming desire for the moment of Morella's decease? I did; but the fragile spirit clung to its tenement of clay for many days, for many weeks and irksome months, until my tortured nerves obtained the mastery over my mind, and I grew furious through delay, and, with the heart of a fiend, cursed the days and the hours and the bitter moments, which seemed to lengthen and lengthen as her gentle life declined, like shadows in the dying of the day.

But one autumnal evening, when the winds lay still in heaven, Morella called me to her bedside. There was a dim mist over all the earth, and a warm glow upon the waters, and amid the rich October leaves of the forest, a rainbow from the firmament had surely fAllan.

"It is a day of days," she said, as I approached; "a day of all days either to live or die. It is a fair day for the sons of earth and life-ah, more fair for the daughters of heaven and death!"

I kissed her forehead, and she continued:

"I am dying, yet shall I live."

"Morella!"

"The days have never been when thou couldst love me-but her whom in life thou didst abhor, in death thou shalt adore."

"Morella!"

"I repeat I am dying. But within me is a pledge of that affection- ah, how little!-which thou didst feel for me, Morella. And when my spirit departs shall the child live-thy child and mine, Morella's. But thy days shall be days of sorrow-that sorrow which is the most lasting of impressions, as the cypress is the most enduring of trees. For the hours of thy happiness are over and joy is not gathered twice in a life, as the roses of Paestum twice in a year. Thou shalt no longer, then, play the Teian with time, but, being ignorant of the myrtle and the vine, thou shalt bear about with thee thy shroud on the earth, as do the Moslemin at Mecca."

"Morella!" I cried, "Morella! how knowest thou this?" but she turned away her face upon the pillow and a slight tremor coming over her limbs, she thus died, and I heard her voice no more.

Yet, as she had foretold, her child, to which in dying she had given birth, which breathed not until the mother breathed no more, her child, a daughter, lived. And she grew strangely in stature and intellect, and was the perfect resemblance of her who had departed, and I loved her with a love more fervent than I had believed it possible to feel for any denizen of earth.

But, ere long the heaven of this pure affection became darkened, and gloom, and horror, and grief swept over it in clouds. I said the child grew strangely in stature and intelligence. Strange, indeed, was her rapid increase in bodily size, but terrible, oh! terrible were the tumultuous thoughts which crowded upon me while watching the development of her mental being. Could it be otherwise, when I daily discovered in the conceptions of the child the adult powers and faculties of the woman? when the lessons of experience fell from the lips of infancy? and when the wisdom or the passions of maturity I found hourly gleaming from its full and speculative eye? When, I say, all this beeame evident to my appalled senses, when I could no longer hide it from my soul, nor throw it off from those perceptions which trembled to receive it, is it to be wondered at that suspicions, of a nature fearful and exciting, crept in upon my spirit, or that my thoughts fell back aghast upon the wild tales and thrilling theories of the entombed Morella? I snatched from the scrutiny of the world a being whom destiny compelled me to adore, and in the rigorous seclusion of my home, watched with an agonizing anxiety over all which concerned the beloved.

And as years rolled away, and I gazed day after day upon her holy, and mild, and eloquent face, and poured over her maturing form, day after day did I discover new points of resemblance in the child to her mother, the melancholy and the dead. And hourly grew darker these shadows of similitude, and more full, and more definite, and more perplexing, and more hideously terrible in their aspect. For that her smile was like her mother's I could bear; but then I shuddered at its too perfect identity, that her eyes were like Morella's I could endure; but then they, too, often looked down into the depths of my soul with Morella's own intense and bewildering meaning. And in the contour of the high forehead, and in the ringlets of the silken hair, and in the wan fingers which buried themselves therein, and in the sad musical tones of her speech, and above all-oh, above all, in the phrases and expressions of the dead on the lips of the loved and the living, I found food for consuming thought and horror, for a worm that would not die.

Thus passed away two lustra of her life, and as yet my daughter remained nameless upon the earth. "My child," and "my love," were the designations usually prompted by a father's affection, and the rigid seclusion of her days precluded all other intercourse. Morella's name died with her at her death. Of the mother I had never spoken to the daughter, it was impossible to speak. Indeed, during the brief period of her existence, the latter had received no impressions from the outward world, save such as might have been afforded by the narrow limits of her privacy. But at length the ceremony of baptism presented to my mind, in its unnerved and agitated condition, a present deliverance from the terrors of my destiny. And at the baptismal font I hesitated for a name. And many titles of the wise and beautiful, of old and modern times, of my own and foreign lands, came thronging to my lips, with many, many fair titles of the gentle, and the happy, and the good. What prompted me then to disturb the memory of the buried dead? What demon urged me to breathe that sound, which in its very recollection was wont to make ebb the purple blood in torrents from the temples to the heart? What fiend spoke from the recesses of my soul, when amid those dim aisles, and in the silence of the night, I whispered within the ears of the holy man the syllables-Morella? What more than fiend convulsed the features of my child, and overspread them with hues of death, as starting at that scarcely audible sound, she turned her glassy eyes from the earth to heaven, and falling prostrate on the black slabs of our ancestral vault, responded-"I am here!"

Distinct, coldly, calmly distinct, fell those few simple sounds within my ear, and thence like molten lead rolled hissingly into my brain. Years-years may pass away, but the memory of that epoch never. Nor was I indeed ignorant of the flowers and the vine-but the hemlock and the cypress overshadowed me night and day. And I kept no reckoning of time or place, and the stars of my fate faded from heaven, and therefore the earth grew dark, and its figures passed by me like flitting shadows, and among them all I beheld only-Morella. The winds of the firmament breathed but one sound within my ears, and the ripples upon the sea murmured evermore-Morella. But she died; and with my own hands I bore her to the tomb; and I laughed with a long and bitter laugh as I found no traces of the first in the channel where I laid the second.-Morella.

THE END

George Orwell-1984

Chapter 1

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 black-moustachio'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 street level 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 over-fulfilment 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 scrutinised.

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 willowherb 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 Newspeak¹ – was startlingly different from any other object in sight. It was an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, three hundred 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.

¹ Newspeak was the official language of Oceania. For an account of its structure and etymology see Appendix.

The Ministry of Love was the really frightening one. There were no windows in it at all. Winston had never been inside the Ministry of Love, nor within half a kilometre of it. It was a place impossible to enter except on official business, and then only by penetrating through a maze of barbed-wire entanglements, steel doors and hidden machine-gun nests. Even the streets leading up to its outer barriers were roamed by gorilla-faced guards in black uniforms, armed with jointed truncheons.

Winston turned round abruptly. He had set his features into the expression of quiet optimism which it was advisable to wear when facing the telescreen. He crossed the room into the tiny kitchen. By leaving the Ministry at this time of day he had sacrificed his lunch in the canteen, and he was aware that there was no food in the kitchen except a hunk of dark-coloured bread which had got to be saved for tomorrow's breakfast. He took down from the shelf a bottle of colourless liquid with a plain white label marked VICTORY GIN. It gave off a sickly, oily smell, as of Chinese rice-spirit. Winston poured out nearly a teacupful, nerved himself for a shock, and gulped it down like a dose of medicine.

Instantly his face turned scarlet and the water ran out of his eyes. The stuff was like nitric acid, and moreover, in swallowing it one had the sensation of being hit on the back of the head with a rubber club. The next moment, however, the burning in his belly died down and the world began to look more cheerful. He took a cigarette from a crumpled packet marked VICTORY CIGARETTESand incautiously held it upright, whereupon the tobacco fell out onto the floor. With the next he was more successful. He went back to the living room and sat down at a small table that stood to the left of the telescreen.

From the table drawer he took out a penholder, a bottle of ink and a thick, quarto-sized blank book with a red back and a marbled cover.

For some reason the telescreen in the living room was in an unusual position. Instead of being placed, as was normal, in the end wall, where it could command the whole room, it was in the longer wall, opposite the window. To one side of it there was a shallow alcove in which Winston was now sitting, and which, when the flats were built, had probably been intended to hold bookshelves. By sitting in the alcove, and keeping well back, Winston was able to remain outside the range of the telescreen, so far as sight went. He could be heard, of course, but so long as he stayed in his present position he could not be seen. It was partly the unusual geography of the room that had suggested to him the thing that he was now about to do.

But it had also been suggested by the book that he had just taken out of the drawer. It was a peculiarly beautiful book. Its smooth creamy paper, a little yellowed by age, was of a kind that had not been manufactured for at least forty years past. He could guess, however, that the book was much older than that. He had seen it lying in the window of a frowzy little junk-shop in a slummy quarter of the town (just what quarter he did not now remember) and had been stricken immediately by an overwhelming desire to possess it. Party members were supposed not to go into ordinary shops ('dealing on the free market', it was called), but the rule was not strictly kept, because there were various things such as shoelaces and razor blades which it was impossible to get hold of in any other way. He had given a quick glance up and down the street and then had slipped inside and bought the book for two dollars fifty. At the time he was not conscious of wanting it for any particular purpose. He had carried it guiltily home in his briefcase. Even with nothing written in it, it was a compromising possession.

The thing that he was about to do was to open a diary. This was not illegal (nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws), but if detected it was reasonably certain that it would be punished by death, or at least by twenty-five years in a forced-labour camp. Winston fitted a nib into the penholder and sucked it to get the grease off. The pen was an archaic instrument, seldom used even for signatures, and he had procured one, furtively and with some difficulty, simply because of a feeling that the beautiful creamy paper deserved to be written on with a real nib instead of being scratched with an ink-pencil. Actually he was not used to writing by hand. Apart from very short notes, it was usual to dictate everything into the speakwrite, which was of course impossible for his present purpose. He dipped the pen into the ink and then faltered for just a second. A tremor had gone through his bowels. To mark the paper was the decisive act. In small clumsy letters he wrote:

April 4th, 1984.

Pierced Butterflies

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