Orwell's Roses

by Rebecca Solnit

As the book opens, Smith begins a diary in the beautiful old book with creamy paper and marbled covers he had bought in a junk shop in a proletarian district of what was once London. It’s a relic of the past, both in its lush materials and its invitation to private thought and private record keeping, because hope, introspection, and memory are also imperiled in the regime.

The regime seeks to eradicate hope and memory and history and human relations, to create an unchanging present in which it wields absolute control, not only of external events but internal life. Love is subversive. Memory is subversive. Hope is subversive. Even perception is subversive.

Winston’s reduction through brainwashing and torture into a defeated, obedient wraith isn’t a prophecy of doom. The book doesn’t rest its case on his fate; it bets on the washerwoman and what she represents, as vitality and generosity and fecundity. Or so it seemed to me.

As the novelist and speculator on utopias and dystopias Octavia Butler put it, “The very act of trying to look ahead to discern possibilities and offer warnings is in itself an act of hope.”

he saw the willingness to suffer and accept suffering and one’s own flaws and others as part of being human and the price paid for the joys also included.