Today marks the day that Winston Smith began his diary in George Orwells 1984. The opening sentence of that book is (with that of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina) the most famous in literature: It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith’s diary was the first step to him becoming Winston Smith rather than Citizen 6079 Smith W. But his diary poses an intractable problem April 4, 1984 He sat back. A sense of complete helplessness descended on him. To begin with, he did not know with any certainty that this was 1984. It must be round about that date, since he was fairly sure his age was thirty-nine, and he believed he had been born in 1944 or 1945; but it was never possible nowadays to pin down any date within a year or two. Orwell understood that a world without dates produces that collective schizophrenia or melted reality on which totalitarianism depends. Nobody understood totalitarianism like Orwell.
Posted on: Thu, 03 Apr 2014 20:28:41 +0000