LEDO - Live Everyday Die Once

LEDO is a journal of the "everyday of everything" in my life that is worth remembering ...... to remind me that each new day is a chance to explore new things, to enjoy life, and to thank God! I always believe that we live everyday and we die once!

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View from the Side
My Third Book of 2016: 1984

Day 62 of 2016

Finally completed reading 1984 by George Orwell.  For review,   please click this link.  

***** Daily Barometer:  Feeling Accomplished!

View from the Side: Book Review (1984)

My Third Book of 2016

Genre

Fiction, Negative Utopian, Dystopian

Setting Place

 London, England or ‘Airstrip One’ in the novel’s alternate reality

Setting Time

 1984

Main Characters

Winston Smith (Good Guy), Big Brother and The Party (Bad Guy/s)

Point of View

 Winston Smith

Although I had already read the book when I was a high school student, I still read it again for the purpose of refreshing my mind of the details. I remember now that it was rather a bleak experience reading the book. It was so negative that I had to encourage myself repetitively to go on reading and finish the book. At one point, I almost decided not to finish the book. 

Don’t get me wrong! It’s not that book is bad… actually it is one of the great novels I admired so much. It has that effect that you imagine yourself into the situation of the characters (Winston/Julia and the oppressed people) and you start having that negative emotions. It was so depressing that made me thankful that I am living in a free world. That’s how powerful Orwell writing in this Book… the reader becomes attached to the story and stimulates one to react emotionally as well as intellectually.

It is interesting to note that this Book was written in 1948, and Orwell provided a grimy description of a dystopian society of the future i.e., 1984. But I think Orwell was trying to paint what would happen sometime in the future, not necessarily 1984. He portrayed a landscape for totalitarianism, for the psychological reprogramming, for the manipulation of public opinion, history and even the truth, and for the physical torture. It was suggested that the title was derived from reversing the date, 1948, though there's no documentary evidence for this.

Accordingly until  today, it’s the only Book that issued a warning against totalitarianism, censorship, dystopian, and communism. It tackles not only political issues but other issues as well. It rather made me rethink about some of the following concerns:

• The concept of society; generating some uncertainties on whether I am really living in a world that exists physically or just a product of my imagination!

• The nature of truth; repetitive lies may eventually become the truth! Winston works include altering of historical records to fit the Party’s need.

• The borderline between public safety and personal privacy; the use of technology for surveillance system for the good of the general population or for the invasion of individual’s privacy/freedom/rights!

• The torturing or punishment schemes; changing human perspectives as well as principles!

The ending is not what I wanted. It’s cynical and upsetting! But given the fact that Orwell was dying when he wrote the book, one can understand the end. 

Terms introduced in the book (I am still wondering how Orwell coined these terms!)

Big Brother the Party’s seemingly omniscient leader; perhaps the TV show of the same title was somewhat patterned after the Book.
Newspeak an invented language that eliminates words not favored by the Party. For example, to prevent rebellion against “Big Brother”, all words related to it are deleted and never to be seen again.
Thought Police the surveillance system that watches actions of the people as the possibility of thinking bad against the Party and Big Brother. The “thought crime” is considered as the worst of all crimes.
Doublethink the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in one’s mind at the same time. As the Party’s mind-control techniques break down an individual’s capacity for independent thought, it becomes possible for that individual to believe anything that the Party tells them, even while possessing information that runs counter to what they are being told.
Unperson the punishment of death, simultaneously erasing the existence of a person as if he/she didn’t exist at all. It is worst than dying.
Memory Hole a mechanism for the alteration or disappearance of inconvenient or embarrassing documents, photographs, transcript, or other records, particularly as part of attempt to give the impression that something never happened.

Some Memorable Quotations

WAR is PEACE
FREEDOM is SLAVERY
IGNORANCE is STRENGTH

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy.
And when memory failed and written records were falsified—when that happened, the claim of the Party to have improved the conditions of human life had got to be accepted, because there did not exist, and never again could exist, any standard against which it could be tested.

#KeepReading

LEDO - Live Everyday Die Once

LEDO is a journal of the "everyday of everything" in my life that is worth remembering ...... to remind me that each new day is a chance to explore new things, to enjoy life, and to thank God! I always believe that we live everyday and we die once!

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View from the Side: 
Big Brother is Watching You

Day 48 of 2016
As I mentioned in my previous blog that I started reading one of the books in My List, Nineteen Eighty-four (1984) by George Orwell, one of my friends emailed me an important information regarding the book.  

Please click me for more information.

***** Daily Barometer:  Feeling Beyond Orwellian!

View from the Side: Big Brother is Watching You

As I mentioned in my previous blog that I started reading one of the books in My List, Nineteen Eighty-four (1984) by George Orwell, one of my friends emailed me an important information regarding the book.  

Written by the then ailing Author, Eric Blair (popularly known as George Orwell), the book which was published in 1949 and his last novel, brought him lasting fame and continues to haunt readers of the  dystopian future he described in the book.  The year 1984 has come and gone, but Orwell’s prophecy of a frightening world is still timely and true to some extent (I’ll be writing a review of the book once I finish re-reading it, since I already read it when I was in high school).
As a complement to the novel, a visual interpretation entitled “Haunting Illustrations for Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Introduced by the Courageous Journalist Who Broke the Edward Snowden Story” was sourced from https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/12/19/folio-society-george-orwell-1984/:
In the introduction, Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger — who broke the Edward Snowden story in a masterwork of journalism and stood up to real-life Big Brother by refusing to hand over Snowden’s data to the government — explores the parallels, contrasts, and essential civic discourse springing from the difference between the two camps:

As the full impact of the Snowden revelations sank in, many people made the same connection, and Amazon announced a dramatic rise in sales of Nineteen Eighty-Four. To some, the young NSA analyst had revealed a world which was near-Orwellian; others thought that he had described a state of affairs that Orwell could barely have imagined. Just before Christmas 2013 a US District Judge, Richard Leon, pronounced the NSA’s surveillance capabilities to be “almost Orwellian.” Orwellian, beyond Orwellian, not-quite Orwellian. As the debate ricocheted around the world there soon developed the counter-school: not at all Orwellian. Or even, “Orwell got it wrong,” ignoring Thomas Pynchon’s caution about Nineteen Eighty-Four that “prophecy and prediction are not quite the same.” The not-Orwellians found it offensive that a book describing a totalitarian dystopia should be confused with the efforts of one of the most open, liberal democracies in the world to defend itself. And so the debate about the “Orwellian” nature of what the NSA was up to became a proxy for discussion of the issue itself.

But the book’s most important legacy, as Rusbridger suggests, lives in precisely that limbo between what Orwell got right and what he got wrong — a testament to “the unknowable question of what future purpose technology might be put to,” the darker answers to which we must at the very least acknowledge, even as we strive to offer ennobling ones.

#KeepReading

LEDO - Live Everyday Die Once

LEDO is a journal of the "everyday of everything" in my life that is worth remembering ...... to remind me that each new day is a chance to explore new things, to enjoy life, and to thank God! I always believe that we live everyday and we die once!

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Monday: Start of the Week

Day 18 of 2016
A Monday Prayer: Everyday is a renewal, every morning the daily miracle.  This joy you feel is life. --- Gertrude Stein

As I went through the day, I discovered that trusting a person unconditionally will eventually end up in a conditional trust! Forgiving a person is easy, but being able to trust that same person is a completely different matter.

Tonight, I started reading 1984, one of the books in 'My List", the third book in 2016.

***** Daily Barometer:  Feeling Trusting!