1984 Reading Notes

If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened - that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death.

Or perhaps - what was likeliest of all - the thing had simply happened because purges and vaporizations were a necessary part of the mechanics of government.

In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking - not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.

his spectacles caught the light and presented to Winston two blank discs instead of eyes. 

As he watched the eyeless face with jaw moving rapidly up and down, Winston had a curious feeling that this was not a real human being but some kind of dummy. It was not the man's brain that was speaking; it was his larynx. The stuff that was coming out of him consisted of words, but it was not speech in the true sense: it was a noise uttered in unconsciousness, like the quacking of a duck.

The eyeless creature at the other table swallowed it fanatically, passionately, with a furious desire to track down, denounce, and vaporize anyone who should suggest that last week the ration had been thirty grams.

Within two years those children would be denouncing her to the Thought Police.

One was "making a baby", and the other was "our duty to the Party"... But luckily no child appeared, and in the end she agreed to give up trying, and soon afterwards they parted. 

The paint was plastered so thick on her face that it looked as though it might crack like a cardboard mask.

They needed only to rise up and shake themselves like a horse shaking off flies.

Left to themselves, like cattle turned loose upon the plains of Argentina, they had reverted to a style of life that appeared to be natural to them, a sort of ancestral pattern. (describing the proles)

All that was required of them was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working hours or shorter rations.

As the Party slogan put it:"Proles and animals are free."

He had the feeling that he could get inside it, and that in fact he was inside it, along with  the mahogany bed and the gate leg table and the clock and the steel engraving and the paperweight itself. The paperweight was the room he was in, and the coral was Julia's life and his own, fixed in a sort of eternity at the heart of the crystal.

The room was a world, a pocket of the past where extinct animals could walk. Mr. Charrington, thought Winston, was another extinct animal.

The rocket bombs which fell daily on London were probably fired by the Government of Oceania it self, "just to keep people frightened."

The aim of the High is to remain where they are. The aim of the Middle is to change places with the High. The aim of the Low, when they have an aim - for it is an abiding characteristic of the Low that they are too much crushed by drudgery to be more than intermittently conscious of anything outside their daily lives - is to abolish all distinctions and create a society in which all men shall be equal.

Inequality was the unalterable law of human life.

In the past the Middle had made revolutions under the banner of equality, and then had established a fresh tyranny as soon as the old one was overthrown.

It had never before occurred to him that the body of a woman of fifty, blown up to monstrous dimensions by childbearing, then hardened, roughened by work till it was coarse in the grain like an overripe turnip, could be beautiful. But it was so, and after all, he thought, why not? The solid, contour less body, bore the same relation to the body of a girl as the rose-hip to the rose. Why should the fruit be held inferior to the flower?

She had had her momentary flowering, a year, perhaps, of wildrose beauty, and then she had suddenly  swollen like a fertilized fruit and grown hard and red and coarse, and then her life had been laundering, scrubbing, darning, cooking, sweeping, polishing, mending, scrubbing, laundering, first for children, then for grandchildren, over thirty unbroken years. At the end of it she was still singing.

The eyes of the chinless man kept flitting toward the skull-faced man, then turning guiltily away, then being dragged back by an irresistible attraction. Presently he began to fidget on his seat. At last he stood up, waddled clumsily across the cell, dug down into the pocket of his overalls, and, with an bashed air, held out a grimy piece of bread to the skull-faced man. 

Thoughts
Does this dystopia really only exists in socialism? Or is George Orwell simply criticizing socialist countries like the Soviet Union? The truth is, it happens everywhere, maybe to a different degree, but is a hypocritical freedom really better than an aboveboard control?

Recently, Hong Kong became one of the most dangerous places in the world. Rioters are constantly disrupting the public order, setting fire, blocking the road and airport, and beating policemen to the ground. Worse still, the local economy staggers: no visitors, no customers, and no profitable businesses.

There was a video, in which a group of Hong Kong protesters united in Germany, who were in support of independency of Hong Kong. A girl from Shenzhen was arguing with them in the video using three languages. While she was using logic and asking them questions, those protestors, on the contrary, could only shout back to her some slogans, since after all, they could not argue back. What irritates me is when one guy asked the girl: "Did you read international news?" and when he was expressing the opinion that there's no freedom in China sarcastically. But he is not alone, I've kept seeing people joking about this, and meanwhile taking pride in their countries where the so-called "liberty" and "freedom of speech" exist. There's even a map in a museum in the U.S., coloring different countries around the world based on the level of freedom, and one of my friends, who's interested in politics, shared this picture on her Instagram.

But if there is really free-speech in the U.S., then there wouldn't be all those false news that are only showing the video of Hong Kong police shooting rioters, without mentioning what the rioters were doing at that moment, there wouldn't be deletion of videos that spoke the truth of what is happening in Hong Kong on Youtube, and there wouldn't be people like my friend who like politics but all politics she learned is not truth and all news she believed are false. Ironically enough, people are feeling proud of and boasting about being in this world that has "freedom", a freedom that has such a gorgeous cover that everyone believes and even some are looking down upon people living in places without this cover.

By contrast, China is controlling a lot of things over its citizens, but we never say we are a country that has complete "freedom" and in particular "freedom of speech". We know we are under control, and we know sometimes the government is blocking and hiding some truth behind us. But we also know that there is a reason behind it, not simply because the communist party wants to hold all the power. Even if that's the case, I would say that every party in any country wants to do so and probably had done something similar like spying on its citizens.

But what can we do? What can I do? I am not stupid enough to argue with my "brainwashed" friends. All I can do is to note down something, and it doesn't have to be seen by anyone. No one can fix this, because this is the nature of human. Sometimes life is unfair but we have to accept it. If we really want to make a change, then there's only one thing we could do, that is, make ourselves stronger.