![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
1984 (1,8) Coral
Sep. 6th, 2011 07:58 amWhen Winston walks into the junk shop, he could not have been relieved to be immediately recognized. “I recognized you on the pavement... You’re the gentleman that bought the young lady’s keepsake album,” enthused the proprietor. Winston rolls along with it, and he even catches sight of another dainty, over-fine item:
In thinking about this scene and the proprietor’s familiarity with Winston, I started wondering when Winston’s goose was first cooked, and that it probably was when he first bought the diary. Given how proactive the government is in suppressing the least hint of heterodoxy, it makes sense that they would have sent a crew to give Winston’s loft a thorough going-over, so that, as Winston feared, his doom was already sealed when he first wrote his rebellious thoughts down, and the Party was just letting him go for a while to see what he would do, to see if he would lead them to more traitors, more free-thinkers.
If this is true, then it was a sorry piece of bad luck for the dark-haired girl to start to get involved with him, when all he touches would be meant for death. But we are getting ahead of ourselves again.
It was a heavy lump of glass, curved on one side, flat on the other, making almost a hemisphere. There was a peculiar softness, as of rainwater, in both the color and texture of the glass. At the heart of it, magnified by the curved surface, there was a strange, pink, convoluted object that recalled a rose or a sea anemone.Winston buys this pretty relic of the pre-Revolution world. This fancily set piece of coral will continue to have a place in the narrative and is worth a special mention.
“What is it?” said Winston, fascinated.
“That’s coral, that is,” said the old man. “It must have come from the Indian Ocean. They used to kind of embed it in the glass. That wasn’t made less than a hundred years ago. More, by the look of it.”
“It’s a beautiful thing,” said Winston.
In thinking about this scene and the proprietor’s familiarity with Winston, I started wondering when Winston’s goose was first cooked, and that it probably was when he first bought the diary. Given how proactive the government is in suppressing the least hint of heterodoxy, it makes sense that they would have sent a crew to give Winston’s loft a thorough going-over, so that, as Winston feared, his doom was already sealed when he first wrote his rebellious thoughts down, and the Party was just letting him go for a while to see what he would do, to see if he would lead them to more traitors, more free-thinkers.
If this is true, then it was a sorry piece of bad luck for the dark-haired girl to start to get involved with him, when all he touches would be meant for death. But we are getting ahead of ourselves again.
