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Jonathan A. Shaw read Nineteen Eighty-Four
by George Orwell

The most significant book that I read as boy and that has meaning for me to this day is titled Nineteen Eighty-Four.

I first discovered the book and its author, George Orwell, in 1951. At that time I was fourteen and living in Boston halfway down the back side of Beacon Hill with my mother, for a couple of years earlier my father had died in a military plane crash. I had been sent by her to buy some groceries from the Jewish grocer nearby who had a corner store no larger than a small living room. In addition to groceries he had a rack of eight or ten paperbacks. I was attracted to one of these paperbacks for it had a lurid cover (lurid for 1951!) that showed a busty young woman wearing a pin that read Anti-Sex League. Being fourteen and hence interested in sex, I thought the book might have some possibilities. The book was George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, and I think it cost 35 cents. I bought it, and I read it. There was enough sex in it to make the cost worthwhile, however, there was also a lot else.

It’s about a nation-state in a future where almost everything is prohibited, where there’s one leader called Big Brother, where every word is turned upside down – the Ministry of Peace wages continuous war, the Ministry of Truth deals only in lies, in fact everything that’s important is distorted or warped in some way and large groups of people, whole societies, are doing terrible things to one another. The book is about an obscure man by the name of Winston Smith, a government employee in a giant state called Oceania, one of three super-states, where he’s assigned to falsifying records. He rebels, falls in love, and begins to question every aspect of the regime. Finally he is arrested and tortured, “re-educated,” and learns to love Big Brother. Although the book made an impression on me, I did not grasp its significance. I knew very little about history at the time. WW II was over when I was seven or eight and the twin expressions of totalitarianism – fascism and communism - I could not have defined when I was fourteen.

Later, in the same year that I first read Nineteen Eighty-Four, my English teacher, a man by the name of Mr. Test (an ominous name but actually a rigorous but decent guy), asked the class if any of us had read Nineteen Eighty-Four. I was the only one to raise my hand. I remember that he talked about the book at length, and I remember thinking, untruthfully of course, that I was pretty clever to have read an important book, a book that Mr. Test thought highly of and appreciated.

The year or so that I lived on Beacon Hill was significant for me in another way for books illuminate life and vice versa. One day I came back from school, the window of our apartment was open, and I heard a funny roaring coming from the direction of the Boston Common. The sound was coming in low bursts, one or two minutes apart. I had no idea what it was. I remember going up to roof of our apartment building and looking in the direction of the Boston Common since that was where the sound was coming from. It was much louder on the roof, but I couldn’t tell what it was and of course living on the back side of Beacon Hill I couldn’t see the Common. The next day, I read in the newspaper, what the sound was. There had been someone on a window ledge of the Hotel Touraine who was threatening to jump, a large crowd had gathered below, and the paper wrote that the crowd was shouting and screaming and sometimes roaring for him to jump.

That memory has never left me, and it added to my understanding of what Orwell had written about in Nineteen Eighty-Four: societies have within them people who can turn individually or collectively to evil.

I have read and reread Orwell over the years: Nineteen Eighty-Four; Animal Farm; and his extraordinary essays, “Politics and the English Language” and “Shooting An Elephant.” They created for me a web of meaning, and though I am optimistic by nature, a basis for seeking the truth beneath the surface of whatever I read.

Animal Farm is a fable about how the animals on an English farm, oppressed and mistreated by the drunken farmer, Mr. Jones, rebel against him and set up their own government. At first it is a true democracy and the animals establish commandments to govern the farm: No animal shall wear clothes; No animal shall sleep in a bed; No animal shall drink alcohol; No animal shall kill any other animal; All animals are equal. Yet as time goes on the pigs become more powerful under their leader, Comrade Napoleon, and they are seen to be wearing clothes, and sleeping in the house and drinking Mr. Jones’ store of whisky, and as they do this the commandments are at night secretly erased. One morning the animals awaken and read the last remaining commandment which seems to have changed during the night:

ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS

Orwell’s essays are brief, but focus on the same themes.

“Politics and the English Language” is about how words are used to conceal meaning, particularly in politics, and how this deception corrupts thinking.

“Shooting An Elephant” is about Orwell’s own experience as a District policeman in rural, British-controlled, Colonial Burma. How one day when a domesticated elephant “went must” and crushed to death a peasant, he was called upon to protect the local population, find the elephant, and kill it. When he found the elephant, it was in a meadow quietly cropping grass with its trunk. It was clear to Orwell that the period of “must” had passed. He decided therefore it was unnecessary to kill the elephant. He then looked behind him. There were a thousand peasants there, watching and waiting, watching and waiting, to see what he would do. It was as if the weight of Britain’s imperial rule over Burma was a stake. He raised his gun. He shot the elephant, and as it fell slowly, for it was a huge animal, and slumped to knees, it gazed at the source of its death: “I perceived,” wrote Orwell, “in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys.”

Over fifty years after I first read George Orwell, his books and essays continue to serve me. When I read this week that Sri Lankan officials are telling the world that a thousand Tamil Tiger rebels have been killed, I know that they may be counting the innocent dead in that number. Orwell tells us that the powerful have the most to lose by being truthful.

When I read the titles of new laws, I know that these titles may conceal the true intent of the law. A few years ago Congress passed a law that I recall may have been entitled the Wilderness Accessibility Act. Many people love the wilderness and of course would want it to be accessible. Yet a little reflection might suggest that if accessibility requires a wilderness to have numerous new roads and numerous new entrances, it has been redefined and is probably no longer wilderness. Orwell tells us we must use our words carefully.

When our former president announced last year that he never practiced torture, I know that he was able to say that and assert it to be true because the meaning of his word torture was not the same word America used when it prosecuted Germans for torture after WWWII and not the same word that America used when it signed the carefully-defined Geneva Conventions. Our president had asked the Justice Department to redefine torture and it obliged him. Orwell tells us that if you change the meanings of words you can begin to control the minds and hearts of those who use the words.

George Orwell’s books have been published in over 65 different languages. He died in 1951 but he continues to speak through his books to all humanity.

Jonathan A. Shaw presently serves on the Sandwich Historical Commission.