A thought has been going through my head for the past few days, so I'm going to explore it a bit. I'm reading 1984 again and am amazed by the meaning and depth in the book. I'm a speed reader, I can zip right through a book, picking up on the plot and characters, but missing alot of the subtlety and deeper meaning. I'm finding myself re-reading sections of 1984. I'm finding myself putting the book down and thinking about what I've just read, what I've just realized, what I've just learned and recognized. I'm finding that 1984 is a classic for more reasons than one.
The thought that won't go away is this.....We need to have places in our world where peace exists, where we can get away from day to day stresses and worries, and where the "natural order" of things is restored. It doesn't matter how often we visit these places, if ever. What truly matters is that these places exist and we remember that. Winston, in 1984, has his small rented room. This room isn't being watched. This room is his. It's his space, a place where he knows sanity exists. Edward Abbey wrote of the importance of Wilderness in the same vein. He wrote of the need for people to know that somewhere, the natural order reigns, and it doesn't matter if you paid the cell phone bill or not. I was struck by Abbey's writing on the subject many years ago, and am now fascinated to find the same idea expressed in 1984
Where is my Wilderness? Where is my rented room? Where is the place I can go to in my mind where bills and work and other people don't matter? My place is actually a wilderness. It's the Seven Lakes Wilderness. When I was fighting the swirling emotions of a divorce, addictions, miscarriages and severe depression I began to hike alone in this wilderness. I would enter the silence of the trail into the basin and my burden would fall off with each step. Suddenly all my woes seemed insignificant, they assumed their proper proportion in regards to the world as a whole. One evening, standing naked in an alpine lake, watching the sun set below a high ridge, listening to the frogs, watching the nighthawks swoop, smelling the smoke from my campfire, I realized that I was going to be ok.
Edward Abbey and George Orwell are right.