Saturday, 1 December 2012

Afterthoughts


The last part of the book, mostly happening in The Ministry of Love, is gut-wrenching horrific to read. I felt almost physically ill reading as I was so immersed into the book. It really hit me hard.


I really did like the book, it was even better than I remembered, partly because my English has gotten a bit better and generally my view of things have had a drastic change in the last year.

The plot and the world where it played out are magnificent. The book has a very rich usage of words I've never seen or heard before, so I learned something new, but I don't know if I'll forget them when they simply aren't words that are used nowadays that often. New-speak and the concepts of doublethink, crimestop, unperson etc, are things one won't forget easily.

All in all I loved the book, and I might check out more of Orwell's work.

Friday, 30 November 2012

Creative writing story


On a late evening with a scarlet sky an old farmer, despised by the other farmers for his aloofness, woke from his beauty sleep to the sound of a pack of thrush having a feast on his lingonberries in his backyard. With superfluous movements he jumped out of bed to defend his venerated lingonberries. With febrile and perilous moves he tried to chase them off, being ineffectual, for the thrush saw this as an iniquity and demurred.

A group of young proletarians that were having a scrimmage of football nearby, had gathered at the farmers fence to look at the tacit folly.

With an over-derisive tone one of the proletarians gave out an acrid shout:

”Look, the old man is getting told!”

This prompted the old man to give up, and enunciated:

”I'm too old for this shit.”

He went back inside to have some anodyne drinks from his pannikin, while the thrush happily continued engorging his lingonberries. And from this day on, the old man would be known as The Told Man.

Letter to the author



Hi,

first off I would like to thank you, your magnificent book ”Nineteen Eighty-Four” has been one of many influences that made me take a close look into politics. And I think I've come to a place ideologically where I will stay, with a clear conscious, but with a bit pessimistic outlook for the future. That philosophy is voluntarism.


Your book, Nineteen Eighty-Four, is something I've enjoyed quite a lot. Some might see it as a bit of a silly book, but to me it feels the more you know about how the human mind adapts to the environment and how childhood shapes us, the more it has an impact. Concepts like doublethink and new-speak are amazing, such things can be seen often in the world, and I don't think many humans are really above them, consciously or unconsciously.

The plot wasn't the main drive of this book to me. To me it was the explanations and reflections of Winston about the world he was living in. His initial struggle to write in the diary what truly was on his mind, his sudden epiphanies of things, his reading of the book of Goldstein, the dialogues he had and his true thoughts about the matters. All of these things, and more, were amazing to me. It's a bit of a shame the ending is as tragic as it is.


I have this image of you, from only reading Nineteen Eighty-Four, and it is probably a whole lot different from what you really were like. But this one quote in the book:

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows”

It makes me think that my image of you has some truth in it. And I wonder what you would think about the world if you saw it today.


-From the future.

Part five.


Winston had talked with Julia about the connection he felt to O'Brien earlier. And now they both were standing in O'Brien's home.

””Shall I say it, or will you?” he said.
I will say it,” said Winston promptly. ”That thing is really turned off?”
Yes, everything is turned off. We are alone.”
We have come here because--”

He paused, realizing for the first time the vagueness of his own motives. Since he did not in fact know what kind of help he expected from O'Brien, it was not easy to say why he had come here. He went on, conscious that what he was saying must sound both feeble and pretentious:

We believe that there is some kind of conspiracy, some kind of secret organization working against the Party, and that you are involved in it: We want to join it and work for it. We are enemies of the party. We disbelieve in the principles of Ingsoc. We are thought-criminals. We are also adulterers. I tell you this because we want to put ourselves at your mercy. If you want us to incriminate ourselves in any other way, we are ready.””


O'Brien asked them some questions about how far they were willing to go in effort to fight the Party. He also had it arranged that Winston would get his hands on Goldstein's book.


The Brotherhood cannot be wiped out because it is not an organization in the ordinary sense. Nothing holds it together except an idea which is indestructible. You will never have anything to sustain you, except the idea. You will get no comradeship and no encouragement. When finally you are caught, you will get no help. We never help our members. At most, when it is absolutely necessary that someone should be silenced, we are occasionally able to smuggle a razor blade into a prisoner's cell. You will have to get used to living without results and without hope. You will work for a while, you will be caught, you will confess, and then you will die. Those are the only results that you will ever see. There is no possibility that any perceptible change will happen within our own lifetime. We are the dead. Our only true life is in the future. We shall take part in it as handfuls of dust and splinters of bone. But how far away that future may be, there is no knowing. It might be a thousand years. At present nothing is possible except to extend the area of sanity little by little. We cannot act collectively. We can only spread our knowledge outwards from individual to individual, generation after generation. In the face of the Thought Police there is no other way.

“”We shall meet again-- if we do meet again--”
Winston looked up on him “In the place where there is no darkness?” he said hesitantly.
O'Brien nodded without appearance of surprise. “in the place where there is no darkness,” he said, as though he had recognized the allusion.”




All of the workers in The Ministry of truth had busy week of altering all written records to say that Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia and an ally with Eurasia, after a flip-flop from the party. Winston had worked 18-hours a day for the past week and did not have a chance to read Goldstein's book until now. He had arrived to the rented room, Julia was yet to be present, so he began reading the book.

The book fascinated him, or more exactly it reassured him. In a sense it told him nothing that was new, but that was part of the attraction. It said what he would have said, if it had been possible for him to set his scattered thoughts in order. It was the product of a mind similar to his own, but enormously more powerful, more systematic, less fear-ridden. The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already.


In the first chapters of the book, it explains the party's slogan:

WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGHT

It explains the doublethink and true meaning behind it all.
Bit later on Julia arrives to the room, they lied down on the bed and Winston started to read the book aloud from the start. A good bit into the first chapter he noticed Julia had fallen asleep, so he put the book down and did the same, mumbling the words “sanity is not statistical” as he fell asleep.


Winston had awakened and was dozing for a while until he started hearing the same old prole woman, that he had at many other times hear, start singing. The song woke up Julia. They stood at the window looking at her and listening to her singing.

The birds sang, the proles sang, the Party did not sing. All round the world – everywhere stood the same solid unconquerable figure, made monstrous by work and childbearing, toiling from birth to death and still singing. Out of those mighty loins a race of conscious beings must one day come. You were the dead; theirs was the future. But you could share in that future if you kept alive the mind as they kept alive the body, and passed on the secret doctrine that two plus two make four.”

We are the dead” he said.
We are the dead,” echoed Julia dutifully.
You are the dead,” said an iron voice behind them.


It was the end of the line, Winston and Julia both knew it, they did not resist or even move when the black uniformed men stormed into the room. Mr Charrington, the old man whose room they had rented, was a member of the thought-police. Julia was taken out of the room first, and that was the last Winston would see of her.



He did not know where he was. Presumably he was in the Ministry of Love; but there was no way of making certain. He was in a high-ceilinged windowless cell with walls of glittering white porcelain. Concealed lamps flooded it with cold light, and there was a low, steady humming sound which he supposed had something to do with the air supply. A bench, or shelf, just wide enough to sin on ran round the wall, broken only by the door and, at the end opposite the door, a lavatory pan with no wooden seat. There were four telescreens, one in each wall.”


For a while Winston sat in the room while other prisoners came and went, some to the mysterious “room 101”, which seemed like a fate worse than death by the reactions of the other prisoners. After being alone in the cell room for a while, but then the door opened and O'Brien stepped in.

The shock of the sight had driven all caution out of him. For the first time in many years he forgot the presence of the telescreen.

They've got you too!” he cried.
They got me a long time ago,” said O'Brien with a mild, almost regretful irony. He stepped aside. From behind him there emerged a broad-chested guard with a long black truncheon in his hand.

You knew this, Winston” said O'Brien
Don't deceive yourself.” You did know it – you have always known it.”

Yes, he saw now, he had always known it. But there was no time to think of that. All he had eyes for was the truncheon in the guard's hand. It might fall anywhere: on the crown, on the tip of the ear, on the upper arm, on the elbow –
The elbow! He had slumped to his knees, almost paralyzed, clasping the stricken elbow with his other hand. Everything had exploded into yellow light. Inconceivable, inconceivable that one blow could cause such pain!

The light cleared and he could see the other two looking down at him. The guard was laughing at his contortions.”



A process begun that started with beatings from the guards and then moves on to torture and confessions, and then to more torture to rewrite Winston to an orthodox party member. The last part is done by O'Brien.

Do not imagine that you will save yourself, Winston, however completely you surrender to us. No one who has once gone astray is ever spared. And even if we chose to let you live out the natural term of your life, still you would never escape from us. What happens to you here is for ever. Understand that in advance. We shall crush you down to the point from which there is no coming back. Things will happen to you from which you could not recover, if you lived a thousand years. Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty and then we shall fill you with ourselves.


““There are three stages in your reintegration,” said O'Brien. “There is learning, there is understanding, and there is acceptance. It is time for you to enter upon the second stage.”


O'Brien goes into explaining why the Party does what it does.

The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites.


Winston tries to argue for objective reality, only to be met with more torture and humiliation.

There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always — do not forget this, Winston — always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.

"Tell me," Winston said, "how soon will they shoot me?"
"It might be a long time," said O'Brien. "You are a difficult case. But don't give up hope. Everyone is cured sooner or later. In the end we shall shoot you."



The tortures had stopped and they were giving him food regularly and letting him take care of his hygiene. All he cared about right now was to sleep and feel his strength regaining. He was still after all the torture and reprogramming deep down rejecting the doublethink, and tried to do exercises to keep it from surfacing.

How easy it all was! Only surrender, and everything else followed. It was like swimming against a current that swept you backwards however hard you struggled, and then suddenly deciding to turn round and go with the current instead of opposing it. Nothing had changed except your own attitude: the predestined thing happened in any case. He hardly knew why he had ever rebelled.


He had a hallucination about Julia, strong enough to register on the telescreens, and he ponders how many years of servitude his moment of weakness added.

For the first time he perceived that if you want to keep a secret you must also hide it from yourself. You must know all the while that it is there, but until it is needed you must never let it emerge into your consciousness in any shape that could be given a name. From now onwards he must not only think right; he must feel right, dream right. And all the while he must keep his hatred locked up inside him like a ball of matter which was part of himself and yet unconnected with the rest of him, a kind of cyst.”


Winston constructed a plan that when he knew they were going to shoot him, he would take down all the mental barriers he had built up to discard the truth, at the last seconds so that he would die hating them.

To die hating them, that was freedom.”


You asked me once,” said O'Brien, “what was in Room 101. I told you that you knew the answer already. Everyone knows it. The think that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world.”

And the worst thing in the world for Winston, was rats. So they had a mask with rats inside, with a switch to release the rats on the person wearing the mask. O'Brien put the a mask on Winston.

The mask was closing on his face. The wire brushed his cheek. And then – no, it was not relief, only hope, a tiny fragment of hope. Too late, perhaps too late. But he had suddenly understood that in the whole world there was just one person tho whom he could transfer his punishment – one body that he could thrust between himself and the rats. And he was shouting frantically, over and over:

Do it to Julia!
Do it to Julia!
Not me! Julia!
I don't care what you do to her.
Tear her face off, strip her to the bones.
Not me! Julia!
Not me!”


He was falling backwards, into enormous depths, away from the rats. He was still strapped in the chair, but he had fallen through the floor, through the walls of the building, through the earth, through the oceans, through the atmosphere, into outer space, into the gulfs between the stars – always away, away, away from the rats. He was light-years distant, but O'Brien was still standing at his side. There was still the cold touch of a wire against his cheek. But through the darkness that enveloped him he heard another metallic click, and knew that the cage door had clocked shut and not open.”


"They can't get inside you," she had said. But they could get inside you. "What happens to you here is forever," O'Brien had said. That was a true word. There were things, your own acts, from which you could never recover. Something was killed in your breast: burnt out, cauterized out.


But it was all right, everything was all right,
the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself.
He loved Big Brother.

Sunday, 11 November 2012

Part four


Winston had gotten the idea of renting a room from the old shopkeeper he had bought his diary and the glass paperweight from, and he ran the idea past Julia, whom had no objection to it. So he did so and they now had a place where they could meet, even if it was a bigger risk, they both saw it as a home, as a sanctuary from the outside world. A place where they could lay back and enjoy each others company, talk freely and feel safe while doing it.

Both of them knew — in a way, it was never out of their minds — that what was now happening could not last long. There were times when the fact of impending death seemed as palpable as the bed they lay on, and they would cling together with a sort of despairing sensuality, like a damned soul grasping at his last morsel of pleasure when the clock is within five minutes of striking. But there were also times when they had the illusion not only of safety but of permanence. So long as they were actually in this room, they both felt, no harm could come to them. Getting there was difficult and dangerous, but the room itself was sanctuary.


Winston tried to talk more deeply about the party and its doings with Julia, but she was rather uninterested in it all. She hated the party and everything it stood for, but had no real interest of a deeper philosophical understanding of its doings, and why it was wrong.

One knew it was all rubbish , so why let oneself be worried by it? She knew when to cheer and when to boo, and that was all that one needed. If he persisted in talking of such subjects, she had a disconcerting habit of falling asleep.”

““You're only a rebel from the waist downwards” he told her.
She thought this brilliantly witty and flung her arms around him in delight.”

In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.




One day at work Winston had a run in with O'Brien, a inner party member. O'Brien had initiated a conversation with Winston about some articles Winston had rewritten in new-speak in some old newspapers. He had taken a notice to the way Winston was rather good at such tasks and offered him to lend the newest edition of new-speak dictionary. The way O'Brien said things made Winston think that this was “it”. He thought that O'Brien was part of a underground resistance or some such, or that through him he would get in contact with it. O'Brien had put down his living address down to paper for Winston to swing by and borrow the dictionary.

Again Winston's heart stirred painfully. It was inconceivable that this was anything other than a reference to Syme. But Syme was not only dead, he was abolished, an unperson. Any identifiable reference to him would have been mortally dangerous. O'Brien's remark must obviously have been intended as a signal, a code word. By sharing a small act of thoughtcrime he had turned the two of them into accomplices.”



Waking up with eyes full of tears from a nap, Winston had a dream that lead him to think about the last time he remembers seeing his mother and sister. Things were bad when Winston was a child. The country torn by war and starvation. He remembers the way his mother was after his father had left and his selfish outbursts, and what transpired between him and his mother and sister before they disappeared. The way his mother was, cold and distant, but still naturally and instinctively caring for the children. He felt that the party had killed off that part of humanity, but he got an epiphany that the proles still had that.

The proles, it suddenly occurred to him, had remained in this condition. They were not loyal to a party or a country or an idea, they were loyal to one another. For the first time in his life he did not despise the proles or think of them merely as an inert force which would one day spring to life and regenerate the world. The proles had stayed human. They had not become hardened inside. They had held on to the primitive emotions which he himself had to relearn by conscious effort.”


Winston shared this with Julia and they talked about how even when they get taken by the thought-police, they can make you say anything through torture and make them confess and give up each other, but they can't remove or change their feelings towards each other.

Facts, at any rate, could not be kept hidden. They could be tracked down by inquiry, they could be squeezed out of you by torture. But if the object was not to stay alive but to stay human, what difference did it ultimately make? They could not alter your feelings: for that matter you could not alter them yourself, even if you wanted to. They could lay bare in the utmost detail everything that you had done or said or thought; but the inner heart, whose workings were mysterious even to yourself, remained impregnable.”




Assignment:



I remember seeing the movie the book she is reading is based on, thus commenting.


First victim of my pointless and “try-hard” humorous commenting.


Victim number two.




Muslin = [bomulls]lärft
Contralto = alt; altstämma, kontraalt; kontraaltstämma.
Driveling = dilla, dravla, prata smörja.
Frock = [lätt vardags]klänning.
Wainscot = panel[ning], boasering, brädfodring.
Prompt = snabb, snar, omgående.
Embellish = försköna, utsira, pryda.
Febrile = feber-; feberaktig.
Perilous = farlig, vådlig, riskabel.
Exhortation = maning, uppmaning, uppmuntran; pådrivande tal.
Acrid = bitter, skarp; kärv.
Indignation = indignation, harm, förtryelse.
Morsel = munsbit; bit, smula; stycke, läckerhet.
Acute = spetsig, skarp, genomträngande.
Impudent = oförskämd, fräck, oblyg.
Tended = välskött, välvårdad.
Superfluous = överflödig, onödig.
Simian = ap-; [människo]apliknande.
Statuesque = statylik, statuarisk; ståtlig.
Sordid = smutsig, eländig.

Sunday, 4 November 2012

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.

Sunday, 28 October 2012

Part two


Winston works in the department of records. His job is to correct and/or rewrite old written records of things to fit what the party goes by in the present, all contrary information is destroyed. He is one of many that do the same thing, and one of many that possibly are doing the same thing at the same time.

But actually, he thought as he re-adjusted the Ministry of Plenty's figures, it was not even forgery. It was merely the substitution of one piece of nonsense for another. Most of the material that you were dealing with had no connection with anything in the real world, not even the kind of connection that is contained in a direct lie. Statistics were just as much a fantasy in their original version as in their rectified version.



At lunch he has a talk with his ”comrade” about newspeak, and it goes into detail about that. In the end the purpose of newspeak is to make thought-crime impossible, by narrowing the language and thus narrowing thought, so how can you commit thought-crime if you can't think.

It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn't only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other word? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take "good", for instance. If you have a word like "good", what need is there for a word like "bad"? "Ungood" will do just as well — better, because it's an exact opposite, which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger version of "good", what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like "excellent" and "splendid" and all the rest of them? "Plusgood" covers the meaning, or "doubleplusgood" if you want something stronger still. Of course we use those forms already. but in the final version of Newspeak there'll be nothing else. In the end the whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words — in reality, only one word. Don't you see the beauty of that, Winston?

Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.


After work Winston is pondering over things and writing in his diary. In his thoughts he describes how the party wants to get rid of eroticism and enjoyment from sex. He used to have a wife, and Winston had nicknamed her in his own head as ”The human soundtrack” because she had nothing in her head but party slogans. He would've tolerated living with her if it wasn't for the sex. Sex was something she wanted them to have for the purpose of having a baby, as their ”duty” for the party. After some time of trying to get pregnant without success, they gave up and soon after separated. His wife was something he rarely thought of.

As soon as he touched her she seemed to wince and stiffen. To embrace her was like embracing a jointed wooden image. And what was strange was that even when she was clasping him against her he had the feeling that she was simultaneously pushing him away with all her strength. The rigidity of her muscles managed to convey that impression. She would lie there with shut eyes, neither resisting nor co-operating, but submitting.”

The sexual act, successfully performed, was rebellion. Desire was thoughtcrime.




Further on, still thinking and writing in his diary, Winston concludes that if there is hope, it lies in the proles. The proles are around 85% of the population, they are considered by the party to be useful only for working and breeding. The proles are not subject to as much policing and over-watch as the inner and outer party, but they still have undercover operatives among them spreading rumors and disinformation. The proletariat are kept in continuous poverty. Winston believes that if the proletarian masses become conscious they could destroy the party.

Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.



He keeps thinking about reality, truth and the party’s constant alteration of it. He remembers that a few years ago he came across a piece of newspaper article that was definitive proof of alteration of history by the party, but there was nothing he could do but to destroy it, in fear making himself a target.

How could you tell how much of it was lies? It might be true that the average human being was better off now than he had been before the Revolution. The only evidence to the contrary was the mute protest in your own bones, the instinctive feeling that the conditions you lived in were intolerable and that at some other time they must have been different.

The past not only changed, but changed continuously. What most afflicted him with the sense of nightmare was that he had never clearly understood why the huge imposture was undertaken. The immediate advantages of falsifying the past were obvious, but the ultimate motive was mysterious.



He also wondered like many times before he had, that maybe he was a lunatic. In the end he came to a conclusion that the solid world exists and that it's rational.

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.





One day, on an impulse, Winston goes for a walk around London. There's no laws against walking in areas where the proletarian live or talking to them, but having no official business there warrants attention from the powers that be if caught by a patrol. After witnessing a rocket-bomb striking rather close, Winston notices a old man going into a pub. Winston estimated that he looked to be around 80-years old, and he got a impulse to go into the pub after him to ask some questions and so he did. Winston tried asking the old man about times before the revolution, but got no straight answers for the old man's mind was not all there. Winston got out of the pub and continued walking aimlessly, and soon found himself at the shop where he had bought the diary he had been writing in. He goes in and is greeted by the shop owner, he ends up buying a old and beautiful glass paperweight for the reason that it was so different and reminiscent of the past. He made plans to return there someday, but not too soon to arouse suspicion. On the way home he runs into the black haired woman, whom he had been paranoid about and thought she possibly was out to expose him as a thought-criminal. They walk by each other and Winston's brain kicks into gear thinking of what it all entails. He gets the thought to run after her and murder her with the paperweight he bought, or going to the community center to get a partial alibi. But in the end he just went home. At home he couldn't get the thought of being exposed and taken by the thought police out of his head.

It would not matter if they killed you at once. To be killed was what you expected. But before death (nobody spoke of such things, yet everybody knew of them) there was the routine of confession that had to be gone through: the grovelling on the floor and screaming for mercy, the crack of broken bones, the smashed teeth, and bloody clots of hair. Why did you have to endure it, since the end was always the same? Why was it not possible to cut a few days or weeks out of your life? Nobody ever escaped detection, and nobody ever failed to confess. When once you had succumbed to thoughtcrime it was certain that by a given date you would be dead. Why then did that horror, which altered nothing, have to lie embedded in future time?






Assignment:


Reading went well this week, unlike last week I had a paper and pen to write down words I wasn't too sure of the moment I came across them. The book is mainly narrative, with some dialogue here and there. And the language used is rich, especially in description, and feel very “wide”. Reading is enjoyable, if not a bit heavy at times.




Gesticulate = göra åtbörder, gestikulera.
Ineffectual = utan effekt, ineffektiv.
Anthology = antologi.
Proletarian = proletär.
Incurred = ådra sig, utsätta sig.
Derisive = hånfull, gäckande, löjligt, futtig.
Protuberant = framskjutande, utskjutande, utstående.
Pannikin = kopp, mug.
Larynx = Struphuvud.
Aloofness = reserverad hållning, högdragenhet.
Venerate = ära, vörda.
Solemnity = högtidlighet, högtidlig ceremoni.
Edify = bygga upp, verka uppbyggande på.
Proliferate = föröka sig genom celldelning.
Tacitly = tyst, stillatigande, I sitt stilla sinne.
Varicose = uppsvullen.
Camaraderie = kamratskap, kamratanda.
Palpable = påtaglig, handgriplig, tydlig, uppenbar.
Anodyne = smärtstillande, dövande.
Steeple = [spetsigt] kyrktorn, tornspira