In Orwell's novel, 1984, when Winston
Smith sits down at the desk to begin the diary that he has secretly acquired,
the simple possession of which is in itself a crime, he is mortified by the
discovery that he doesn’t have anything to say, and that starting means
re-creating language and its meaning. It means challenging everything that
exists. It means managing to describe the horror that permeates life with the
aim of overcoming it.
We also experience this drama. We feel the loss of
words, words rendered lifeless by the continual muttering of ideology and
advertising.
Words that pass over our rage. Words that are forgotten,
that die out, that are manufactured as commodities or as agents of order. Words
that might incite clouded minds to revolt and tear down the foundations of the
edifice that has darkened our lives and hidden the sky.
We also feel rage at the inadequacy of words, at the
way in which they seem to hide the things that we hold essential for human
life, at the way in which they conspire against us, at how they unite in the
cacophonic dam of the existence that oppresses us. How monstrous words can be,
as obligations, as prohibitions, as the wall of repression that imprisons us.
Perhaps what freedom means and necessitates cannot be described with words.
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