1984 (3,1) Room 101

One of the characters we meet in the holding cell of the Ministry of Love makes for a particularly grisly scene. He has been starved nearly to death, and through him, Orwell primes us to regard Room 101 with a special horror.

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The door opened. With a small gesture the officer indicated the skull-faced man. “Room 101,” he said.

There was a gasp and a flurry at Winston’s side. The man had actually flung himself on his knees on the floor, with his hands clasped together.

“Comrade! Officer!” he cried. You don’t have to take me to that place! Haven’t I told you everything already? What else is it you want to know? There’s nothing I wouldn’t confess, nothing! Just tell me what it is and I’ll confess it straight off. Write it down and I’ll sign it - anything! Not room 101!”

“Room 101,” said the officer.

The man’s face, already very pale, Turned a color Winston would not have believed possible. It was definitely, unmistakably, a shade of green.

“Do anything to me!” he yelled. “You’ve been starving me for weeks. Finish it off and let me die. Shoot me. Hang me. Sentence me to twenty-five years. Is there somebody else you want me to give away? Just say who it is and I’ll tell you anything you want. I don’t care who it is or what you do to them. I’ve got a wife and three children. The biggest of them isn’t six years old. You can take the whole lot of them and cut their throats in front of my eyes, and I’ll stand by and watch it. But not room 101!”

“Room 101,” said the officer.

-- “1984” by George Orwell

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The Savage God

Nihilism, when taken to its darkest direction, does not make for inspiring art. Meaningless art is meaningless.

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The central belief of Dada was that in the face of a radical reality, art mattered less than outrage. It is said that the two founders of the movement, Richard Huelsenbeck, a German poet and medical student, and Hugo Ball, another German poet, found the word “dada” in a French-German dictionary while looking for a stage name for a singer at their Cabaret Voltaire. “Dada” is French baby talk for anything to do with horses. Huelsenbeck used to recite his nonsense sound-poems accompanying himself fortissimo on a tom-tom. According to Ball, “He wanted the [Negro] rhythm reinforced: He would have liked to drum literature into the ground.” As it was, he and his colleagues did their best, bombarding their audiences with insults, noise and nonsense on the principle that, in the words of one of their immediate descendants, Antonin Artaud, “All writing is garbage.”

-- A. Alvarez, “The Savage God”

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81. Seniors' Center

Pop came home with another new window fan from the Seniors’ Center. I said, "I thought you already have one that you don't want."

He says, "It was free! You never turn down anything that they give you for free. They might not ever give you anything free again. That's how the system works."

82. Voices

Kay is here and they are having dinner. Hearing them bantering playfully with each other, complete with giggles and laughter, I find myself wishing it was mother's voice instead.

If she could have been freed from her suicidal thoughts, I wonder how she would be now, twelve years later. Though, in truth, her mental health, her attitudes toward us, was terrible. She really was ill and very hard to live with in the end. Life was not happiness then, either.

Daily Fun

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