首次接觸 George Orwell，是中學的英國文學堂。 還記得那年，不止有一位而是兩位金髮美女教師來到我們學校，而且都是教我班的！ 其中一位教英國文學，《Animal Farm》是教程之一，我因此認識了 George Orwell 這位作家。
不記得是甚麼時候，我借了同一作家的《1984》來看，覺得故事是一個值得深思的警惕世人的故事。 到最近的社會事件，令我重讀《1984》，這次有了新的體會。
George Orwell 寫這書時，是參考了歷史來預言 1984 年的世界。 歷史的定律，不就是它不斷重複嗎？ 這個特質，充份反映在《1984》上。 這書不單是預言，是歷史，也是現在。 果然，重讀這書，書中一幕幕的情景，竟活生生在現實找到。
就。是。這。麼。近。
令我驚訝的是，所有教訓就這樣坦蕩的放在眼前，竟然還有人看不出來？ 他們有張開眼嗎？ 他們算在活嗎？
書中有些句子或段落，或因為文筆，或因為意思，我記了下來：
“But though slightly drunk he was also suffering under some grief that was genuine and unbearable. In his childish way Winston grasped that some terrible thing, something that was beyond forgiveness and could never be remedied, had just happened. It also seemed to him that he knew what it was.”
沒錯，有些事是無法原諒的，也無法挽救。 心知是甚麼，卻又說不出口。
“If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened – that, surely, was more terrifying that mere torture and death.”
“Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”
“In any case, 62 millions was no nearer the truth than 57 millions, or than 145 millions.”
改記錄是必然會做的事。 所有人都知是錯上加錯，但仍然會照做來掩飾過錯。 記錄是假的話，數字多少也沒有分別。
“Always in your stomach and in your skin there was a sort of protest, a feeling that you had been cheated of something that you had a right to… why should one feel it to be intolerable unless one had some kind of ancestral memory that things had been different?”
有比較過，就知道分別。
“At any moment the tension inside you was liable to translate itself into some visible symptom.”
“And even when they became discontented… their discontent led nowhere, because, being without general ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific grievances. The larger evils invariably escaped their notice.”
人樣豬腦的人其實也不少，他們為人的意義何在？ 做豬就可以了，簡直浪費了做人的 quota。
“Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one.”
想起《愛麗絲夢遊仙境》中，愛麗絲跟帽子先生的對話。
帽子先生： Am I going mad?
愛麗絲： Yes, you’re mad, bonkers, off the top of your head… but… I’ll tell you a secret. All the best people are.
“They were like the ant, which can see small objects but not large ones. And when memory failed and written records were falsified… the claim of the Party to have improved the conditions of human life had got to be accepted, because there did not exist, and never again could exist, any standard against which it could be tested.”
“There it lay, fixed in future time, preceding death as surely as 99 precedes 100. One could not avoid it, but one could perhaps postpone it: and yet instead, every now and again, by a conscious, willful act, one chose to shorten the interval before it happened.”
明知會被判處死刑，兩人依然堅持幽會，在無可避免的結局來到之前，盡力爭取一點自由。 控制自己的死亡，在書中黑暗的絕望世界，也是一種自由。
“The world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.”
這段的心理剖析真是到位。 就是因為他們不明白周圍發生的事，也沒有興趣了解，才一五一十把上面餵他們的通通都吃掉，連歪曲的事實也全盤接受，並樂在其中。 這些人蠢，還要到處造惡，連累了更值得生存的人。
“If you can feel that staying human is worth while, even when it can’t have any result whatever, you’ve beaten them.”
意識形態的勝利，是否真正的勝利？ 還是無力感太強時的自我安慰？
“The two aims of the Party are to conquer the whole surface of the earth and to extinguish once and for all the possibility of independent thought.”
“In a sense it told him nothing that was new, but that was part of the attraction. It said what he would have said, if it had been possible for him to set his scattered thoughts in order.”
自己又何嘗不是這樣？ 看見別人文筆好，懂說話，能暢然把自己心中的理據或感受道出，我是多麼羨慕呀。
“Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity. But stupidity is not enough. On the contrary, orthodoxy in the full sense demands a control over one’s own mental processes as complete as that of a contortionist over his body.”
“To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies – all this is indispensably necessary.”
這就是 doublethink 的定義，這種行為經常發生，只是不會有人指出這行為的名字就是 doublethink，是一種大家都知道的惡行。
“Being in a minority, even a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.”
“And until that happened, though it might be a thousand years, they could stay alive against all the odds, like birds, passing on from body to body the vitality which the Party did not share and could not kill.”
“Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop. Nothing in the world was so bad as physical pain. In the face of pain there are no heroes, no heroes, …”
“Sanity is not statistical” (P.218)
“Sanity was statistical” (P.277)
主角被 101 房間洗體後，思想的的完全改變在這兩句看得出來。
[Afterword] “The mood it expresses is that of near despair about the future of man, and the warning is that unless the course of history changes, men all over the world will lose their most human qualities, will become soulless automatons, and will not even be aware of it.”
若果人不為意地放棄人性，成為了機械人，這會是最可怕的後果。
[Afterword] “in a system in which the concept of truth as an objective judgement concerning reality is abolished, anyone who is a minority of one must be convinced that he is insane.”
