my notes
596 words · ~3 min read“You are the Dead.”
Chills. Actual physical chills. I need to find the movie before this line stops living in my head. This feels like a hybrid of The Truman Show x Star Wars.
Spoilers ahead
Just when you thought Winston Smith actually found an ally within the inner party that might just make the plot for the better — to overthrow the Party of Big Brother, only to reveal a twist that O’BRIEN IS THE THOUGHT POLICE. And sweet harmless old Mr Charrington was in on it too. The trinket shop, the "unwatched" room, the guy singing laundry downstairs — all of it staged. Oh, man. The whole trap was wonderfully orchestrated by the Party. God damn. At first it felt too good to be true — but the longer it dragged on, the more my guard dropped, until I wasn't suspicious of any of it. Which amplified the impact of that line even more.
Jorjor well really did time it perfectly. Kudos.
I didn't expect a romance subplot and it ended up being one of the best parts of the book. To seek solace in a like minded individual, and feel like you’re not alone. “Sanity is not statistical”. But it definitely helps, when there is someone you can talk to about how you feel and how you see the world and the situation, especially in a world where you feel like you’re alone.
Being in a minority, even a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad
On Winston feeling like he’s completely different from everyone, and how he remembers the bare facts that the Party is blatantly re-writing the Past in order to stay “omniscient” and capable of predicting the future, even though they’re almost always wrong. His actual job at the Ministry of Truth (minitrue) is rewriting old newspaper articles so history always matches whatever the Party is currently saying, then shoving the outdated version down a memory hole to be burned. No draft history, no version control, no way to check what the article said yesterday. So when he worries later that nobody can prove the past happened the way he remembers it — that's not paranoia. That's literally his day job. He's the guy deleting the commit history, and it still terrifies him that someone else might be doing it to him.
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.
This actually feels a little disgusting, and might be ongoing in the world right now… with some subtleties. Unless every fact in the world sits somewhere in git history with timestamps, how would we actually know if this was already happening to us? Food for thought. Deeply uncomfortable food.
I really admire Winston Smith, that even throughout the torture, he was still steadfast to being true to himself. To not subscribe to the notion of doublethink, even at wits end. Though, in the end, Big Brother prevails. Then Room 101. The rats. Orwell doesn't even bother describing them actually reaching him — just the cage strapped to his face, and Winston already knows exactly what's coming. And that's enough. He breaks.
The reunion scene wrecked me more than the torture did. Two people who loved each other, sitting there hollowed out, both quietly relieved the other one broke first. Big Brother doesn't just make you suffer. It makes you selfish, and calls it survival.
“He loved Big Brother.”