4–1984/George Orwell
I despise this book. Reading this, this co-founder of the dystopian genre that the young adult fiction fanatics of our time so love, made clear to me how uninspired the dystopian genre is, and how sad our fascination with it. Not to mention the chauvinism. The chauvinism is the worst part. That or the fact that apparently in 1981 Richard Burton and John Hurt starred in the movie version (UGH) and this copy contains images from the film in the middle of the book. And descriptions. This book literally spoils itself halfway through. In that way, the 80’s were a darker time than even Orwell could have foreseen.
Dystopianism is really a form of unambitious, self-fulfilling nihilism. These stories that fascinate us, about our societies slipping all the way down the proverbial slope into meticulously organized slavery of the masses, are a sort of modern boogey monster. In dystopian’s effort to (as the author of the Afterward suggests)“express the mood and issue a warning”, they merely serve to cripple us with fear and doubt that the progress of our technology will inevitably lead to the death of our culture, that our brains will outpace our morals. So rather than boldly going, we internalize these stories, become paralyzed by fear, and hope that if we can only freeze ourselves into this very moment, one of not yet utter corruption, we’ll be okay. Freezing time, stopping progress, that is true dystopia. Orwell does try to make that point, but it tends to get lost in the overt talk of the Party and Big Brother, wreaking of a post-WWII fear of communism.
Despite the subtle boredom I battled over the last 267 pages, I was terrified by one idea.
When finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will. We do not destroy the heretic because he resists us; so long as he resists us we never destroy him. We convert him, we capture his inner mind, we reshape him.
I’ve always been captured by the metaphor of the relationship between man and dog. Once I had a Hinduism professor who said, “There are two ways to kill our enemy, we can kill him, or we can kill the enemy in him.” At the dawn of man, the wolf was our enemy. It stalked us, it hunted us, it stole sleep with glittering eyes waiting beyond fire circles to such a degree that scientists think we might have fear of wolves in our very DNA (hence why children often have nightmares about wolves, snakes, etc.).
Our response? We killed the enemy in him. We captured wolves and through a combination of feeding, breeding, and beating, we killed the enemy within them. (As a testament to our success, I present, the labradoodle.) I like to think of this as a great accomplishments for both species, we came to moment a history where we could have exterminated our enemy, and instead we chose to befriend them. And in terms of continuation of the species, for both man and dog, it has been a stupendous partnership (the wolves are the definitive losers). But this book, this idea, make me wonder, was the domestication of the dog a moment of supreme goodness, a triumph of humanity over nasty and brutish state of nature, or simply another step we stumbled down in our fall from being part of the natural world to dominating and eventually annihilating it in our naivety? Does domestication mean “befriending” or “torturing into submission”?
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
WAR IS PEACE
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.
Another idea, doublespeak, struck me. There is a famous F. Scott Fitzgerald quote, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” That’s basically what doublespeak is in 1984, except not in an intellectual way, in a paradoxical realities way. I’ve always had the feeling that the existence of a paradox might be the universal marker for truth, the x that marks the spot. But if that’s true, what is the nature of reality. 2+2=5?
The theme of rewriting the past in this story spoke to me as well, I have recently been very conscious of how flawed a system our memory is. Whether we like it or not, we are constantly rewriting the past, our memories are nothing more then memories of the last time we remember them, and are thus, in that sense, bound to be somewhat false. What does that mean for our identity.
This was a fun quote that made me think of global climate change and the fate of our generation;
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 the future may be, there is no knowing.
Also learned a new word- Febrile: having or showing symptoms of a fever.
5 — The Solace of Open Spaces/Gretel Ehrlich
