1984 - George Orwell - Part 1

1984 - George Orwell

2017 Reading Challenge - Day 7

 January 7, 2017 

Book 2 - Nineteen Eighty Four (1984)
by George Orwell (1948)

 Part 1 - Pages 1-81

Reading Time -70 minutes

Wow. Well, this is quite a change from the Freedom Writers Diary. George Orwell wrote this book in 1948, shortly after the Second World War. He envisions a socialist society, a dictatorship run by the Party, which venerates Big Brother. Our hero is Winston Smith, a minor cog in Ministry of Truth.

In the first few pages, Winston takes out a creamy-paged diary that he found in a second-hand shop, and begins to write in it. An act, that while not illegal, would likely be punished either by death or by 25 years imprisonment. Big Brother is the only one who does any writing, rewriting the history books, the newspapers, the magazines. Truth is a figment of one's imagination, changing moment by moment. The past is always being altered to better fit the present.

In Winston's world, orthodoxy means not needing to think. Those who think, those who remember the events of yesterday, or last week or last year are dangerous, liable to being erased by the Thought Police.

1984 Quote
Who controls the past, controls the future,
who controls the present, controls the past.

A terrifying vision of the future and yet... we have the telescreens in our homes today - Smart TVs and webcams that can record our lives, with our knowledge at this point but... in the future, without our knowledge. Winston is in his late 30s it seems and can't really remember what life was like before the Party took power. He has a vague sense of dissatisfaction that life should not be the way that it is but... he can't really say what it should be like.

So much of our society is built upon the foundation of the past. There's a saying that those who are ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it. Our collective memory resides in books, manuscripts, museums, archives and, more tenuously, in our memories. I saw a movie a few months back called Embers in which a virus had affected humanity's ability to remember as well as to form new memories. In a world with no memory, civilization falls apart. In a world with no memory, relationships fall apart. We become individuals who have no connection with each other. If we have no memory, there is no need to think.

Orwell's book is definitely a gripping read and I am glad that I chose it as one of my early reads. I have vague glimpses of familiarity with some scenes, but on the whole it is a new read for me. Clearly, it did not make much of an impression on me in high school, and wasn't retained all that well in my memory! Luckily... it exists in book format.