Nineteen Eighty-Four

In the entry on ‘Down and Out in Paris and London,’ The Empathy Library celebrates George Orwell as an empath and social chronicler. Here, we celebrate him as a writer of fiction who inspired generations. In the enduring classic Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell gives us Winston Smith, a thirty-nine-year-old everyman who lives in one of the most terrifying renditions of a dystopian future. A world of constant war and surveillance, rampant nationalism and economic stagnation, under the all-seeing eye of Big Brother- the Party leader who inspires devotion and hysteria from his subjects, but may not exist. At the start of the book, Winston's sense of empathy has atrophied to the extent that he kicks the severed hand of a bomb victim into the gutter. However, Winston's last remaining fragments of hope are stubborn; he is curious about the past, determined to preserve the fragments of it that he can find, and aware, through a haze of numbing telecasts and Victory Gin, that something is missing. When he meets Julia, who seems at first like a Party puritan, but has hidden anarchic depths, Winston is opened up to the world again. Nineteen Eighty-Four is about how love itself can be a transgressive, political act, and one that needs privacy and shelter to flourish. The grim conclusion stresses the consuming power of self-interest and self-preservation at the expense of those we love. However, what Nineteen Eighty-Four does is to remind us of the importance of diversity- of human passions, quirks and keepsakes; of everything that Big Brother, falsified histories, and sanitised propaganda, are not.