By George, Part I

No, not that George, the other one. Not that George, either.

It’s not fair to say if George Orwell were alive today, he’d be totally yada yada yada on creation science and intelligent design.

But what if Orwell actually wrote about the subject, even though those two terms were not invented yet?

1984, Book 3, Chapter 3. (george-orwell.org has nearly everything — including typos — as the author’s works are out of copyright) The hero Winston Smith, talking to his friend and captor, O’Brien:

‘But the world itself is only a speck of dust. And man is tiny — helpless! How long has he been in existence? For millions of years the earth was uninhabited.’
“‘Nonsense. The earth is as old as we are, no older. How could it be older? Nothing exists except through human consciousness.'”
And O’Brien, who represents the governing Party, which finally has figured out how to keep people in line, goes on to say dinosaur fossils are frauds and that stars are tiny and very close: “The earth is the center of the universe. The sun and the stars go round it.”

I just reread 1984, well heard it, a terrific unabridged audio version narrated by Frank Muller, to help my upcoming review of What Orwell Didn’t Know: Propaganda and the New Face of American Politics, edited by Andras Szanto for PublicAffairs Books. Then I read parts of the print edition.

The thing is, I forgot how well Orwell could write. Not just polemically about the wonders of freedom and the curse of power. But this novel, 1984, is a capital-N Novel. If you haven’t read it since school, spring 2008 is a good time to do so.

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