"The only evidence to the contrary was the mute protest in your own bones, the instinctive feeling that the conditions you lived in were intolerable and that at some other time they must have been different. It struck him that the truly characteristic thing about modern life was not it's cruelty and insanity, but simply its bareness, its dinginess, its listlessness."
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This is by far one of the greatest speculative fiction books of all time. It's important to place this in the historical context - written in 1949 as a warning of the potential future. It's interesting that so much of it has come to pass- but we voluntarily carry our trackers (smartphones and wearable IT).

I found Orwell's use of spectacles ingenious and yet understated. When worn, they signaled a kind of masking, an inauthenticity of the subject. When removed, we were seeing a character's true soul and they were laid bare. This was particularly excellent with O'Brien's character.

I love that Orwell was so good at his world-building that I found myself mistrusting every interaction Winston had with any other character, for any length of time. It created a true sense of immersion in the world of surveillance and suspicion.

His "book" was meant to be darkly prophetic, but also an exaggeration and yet it was painfully close to the world today. The theory that our ability to love and keep our minds our own is unique and essential for humanity was central to this text. The idea that discontent in the population was turned ever-outward so as to prevent any change or revolution from taking place was magic. So too was the use, or removal, of language and words to reduce the emotional and mental landscape of citizens.