The year of one of my sister's birth. A year after my own. A year in which the Cold war was still a brewing although about to become stagnate. A time when Reagan was busy stretching the O ring of the middle class and the charts were in love with Phil Collins. But Im talking about the Orwellian world of 1984 here. If you feel overly pressured by the world's vice grip around you then you should perhaps gander at 1984 by George Orwell. I am no biblical LIbertarian but this book does have some very ethereal qualities that will make you shake in your reading slippers. It has some of the clearest and cleanest prose I have ever enjoyed. The symbolism and considerations formed within its own well constructed master narrative is phenomenal. What a mind it would take to swallow such a world of ideas passing it into such a clear and all encompassing story. This is not just another Stalin era dystopian tale for me. There is something going on in this book that screams to the ever present problem of power and the fallible spirit of man. Power and its arms of oppression are a malleable force. The shapes that we ourselves are molded into fit into a patchwork of souls to create a warming blanket for acute power interests. Our conscience attacked from within and without constantly, sought out for the greatest crime of all that of not being "Sane" in an insane world.
"Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty and then we shall fill you with ourselves." Orwell - 1984
