About the title of my blog

You may (or may not) be wondering about the weird title I gave to my blog.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell famously depicts the life under a totalitarian regime. There are many quotes from this book that people know about (even without being aware of their source). As for me, it’s one of my favourite books ever, and I think it is sane to regularly reflect on the distance between today’s world and Big Brother’s. Just take these iconic sentences and see how they sound “normal” in the Brexit / Trump world:

WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

I wanted to pay my tribute to what many consider to be one of the most influencial novel of the 20th century. I often think about that simple sentence that reminds us we should remain humble no matter who we are. I chose it name this site for this reason.

Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.

Interestingly, in Nineteen Eighty-Four, even though the action takes place in London, the characters live in a country called “Oceania”. Since I just moved to Australia, I thought it was also fun to reference this book!

More recently, I had the joy to discover another great book by Orwell, and that is not Animal Farm. Although it belongs to a completely different genre than science-fiction, I think Homage to Catalonia is a rare chance to spend more time with George Orwell. Parts of it may send shivers down your spine. I’ve always been fascinated by the Spanish Civil War. We study it a lot in our Spanish classes in High School in France, but you need to read a lot about it to be able to capture the complexity of the situation back then.

Anyway, if you want to learn more about Nineteen Eighty Four and the meaning of some sentences / paragraphs, you can head to Sparknotes, which has great analyses of famous quotes from the book.