Created at: 2025-03-21
I read this book for the first time when I was a teenager. It was probably the first "serious" fiction I have ever read. Differently from most people, I didn't read it because school mandated it. The suggestion to read it came from a colleague at school, who was also happy to lend me the book.
The remarkable thing is how little I remembered about the book now on my second read.
I didn't even remember, for example, if "Big Brother" was a feature of 1984 or Brave New World (another dystopian book I read around that time).
I am not sure if my complete lack of memory is due to the many years that have passed since, or if I was a teenager reading the book with little attention or not-enough knowledge of life to engage with the book. In any case, it is scary how much memory fades away.
Coming to the book now a second time, it was such a great read the prose is direct, but also beautiful. Pretty much in every page of the book there is something quotable. I surely will have taken more out of this book by reading it as an adult who has already worked in the world and had reason to dislike political systems, than as a teenager still trying to find his own feet.
The book has a very "unsatisfactory" conclusion, but it does invite a lot of reflection at the end. The forbidden romance between Julia and Winston comes to a ruined end (which obviously sucks, as the reader wants them to succeed and live a happy life), and the end of the book itself is not joyful, but a testament of how should crushing the Party of 1984 can be.
As usual, the face of Emmanuel Goldstein, the Enemy of the People, had flashed onto the screen. There were hisses here and there among the audience. The little sandy-haired woman gave a squeak of mingled fear and disgust. Goldstein was the renegade and backslider who once, long ago (how long ago, nobody quite remembered), had been one of the leading figures of the Party, almost on a level with Big Brother himself, and then had engaged in counter-revolutionary activities, had been condemned to death, and had mysteriously escaped and disappeared. The program of the Two Minutes Hate varied from day to day, but there was none in which Goldstein was not the principal figure.
But in the same moment, drawing a deep sigh of relief from everybody, the hostile figure melted into the face of Big Brother, black-haired, black mustachio’d, full of power and mysterious calm.
Winston’s greatest pleasure in life was in his work. Most of it was a tedious routine, but included in it there were also jobs so difficult and intricate that you could lose yourself in them as in the depths of a mathematical problem
He did not dislike it. It was merely one symptom of her revolt against the Party and all its ways, and somehow it seemed natural and healthy, like the sneeze of a horse that smells bad hay.
He did not suppose, from what he could remember of her, that she had been an unusual woman, still less an intelligent one; and yet she had possessed a kind of nobility, a kind of purity, simply because the standards that she obeyed were private ones. Her feelings were her own, and could not be altered from outside. It would not have occurred to her that an action which is ineffectual thereby becomes meaningless. If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love.
Moreover, no fighting ever occurs except in the disputed areas round the Equator and the Pole: no invasion of enemy territory is ever undertaken. This explains the fact that in some places the frontiers between the superstates are arbitrary.
The war, therefore, if we judge it by the standards of previous wars, is merely an imposture. It is like the battles between certain ruminant animals whose horns are set at such an angle that they are incapable of hurting one another.
Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution.