Wednesday, April 10, 2013

1984 Exploration

"At the sight of the words I love you the desire to stay alive had welled up in him, and the taking of minor risks suddenly seemed stupid."

Talk about a powerful line in the book. Winston had pretty much accepted the fact that he was eventually going to die at the hand of the Party. But this note with those three words finally made his life worth living. Now taking any risks seem stupid because he now had something to hold on to. This passage is important because I believe that it is the first concrete evidence that we have of hope in Winston's life. When I read this passage I said to myself "He has a chance now". Ultimately we know that it is not true, but the feeling you get from this short passage is probably one of the most powerful ones in the book. There is no power greater than love.

"If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love."

This comes from page 164 when Winston is reflecting on thoughts of his mother after telling Julia the story of what had happened to her. This is an important passage because we really see now that Winston understands love, a concept that was foreign to him. As we read this many of us probably take for granted that we know what that feeling of love is. But if you read this through the perspective of Winston, this short passage is overwhelmingly powerful since he has never had the feeling of love before. Love will always be there even when material things are not.

I would take this book as a warning. So many of the things in this book are happening today. Our youth are becoming less educated when it comes to vocabulary. Plus the technology that we have in order to check all phone calls and emails is a little scary. We learn form this book how much power government has over the people. We should be fortunate for the freedoms we have but yet leary of the technology that the government has.

I think that the loss of knowledge for history can apply to the book and our world today. In the book history could be, and was, rewritten often. People never had a real sense of knowing what truly occurred in the past. The problem that I find in our country today is that there is overall a lack of interest in history. People are not as enthusiastic about learning what had happened in our past. There are very few institutions outside of high schools that require a history class to graduate. We learn from history. History repeats itself and to avoid bad things from happening we may learn from history what could be done differently to prevent them. It is not that there is a lack of records for us like there was in the book (false records), but the lack of people wanting to use those records for the betterment of our country.

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