Paperweight

"‘How small’, thought Winston, ‘how small it always was’" (281)

*1984 SPOILERS* When I first read this book, this is the line that broke me. The first time.

I was remembering the glass paperweight from the book 1984 by George Orwell the other day. It is a paperweight with a piece of red/pink coral inside it. The main character in the book Winston Smith (inspo for my Venmo handle) finds it in a store, and it stands out to him because it was beautiful yes, but also because it was a piece of the past. He lives in a world where everything from the past has been destroyed and rebuilt to serve the government. (I hope you are somewhat familiar with the book, it’s a great book, it literally gave me depression for a while, but I loved it.) Anyway, Winston rents a room upstairs in the shop and brings his secret girlfriend Julia, and they spend time pretty much having sex and keeping it from the Thought Police for a couple of days maybe weeks, or months, I forget. In this time, Winston is hopeful of the future because he is given a book that confirms the lies of the world he is living in, and the glass paperweight is like the symbol of that hope (and like at this point of the book, I began to feel hopeful too, I remember sitting on a bench at my community college reading this book sitting straight up, wanting to get to the part where the book was going to tell me how he was planning on overthrowing Big Brother. I read and read as he kept reading the book, and it seemed that there was a secret rebellion somewhere, an invisible army, the awakening of the proles, maybe). Sadly, he was set up by the person who gave him the book, sold him the paperweight, and rented him the room. Winston and Julia were being watched and listened to the whole time. The Thought Police storm in his room, helicopters swarm outside, and before they take Winston and Julia captive, one of them throws the paperweight to the floor, shattering it to pieces. He watches as a piece of coral rolls on the floor onto a mat.

Here is where he realizes how small the coral actually was, from what I imagine the magnification effect from the glass. Obviously, it’s not just literal, but also symbolic. If you look up the symbolism of this online, people usually relate the glass paperweight to Winston’s longing for a connection to a genuine past, one that’s not manipulated by Big Brother. That it also represents hope for the future, which I thought of at first too. But honestly, I kept thinking it represented more than just that. His relationship with Julia. I thought it was a symbol of them being inside the rented room, kind of like in their own bubble, their own little world that seemed big and beautiful, just as the paperweight once did. And once they got arrested and the glass shattered, realizing how foolish they were. The relationship wasn’t going to last forever, of course they were going to get caught sooner or later! They could not keep this up forever. But he knew that from the start.

I don’t want to get too much into my personal thoughts about any of my previous relationships. But that’s literally how I felt from the start of them. I knew it wasn’t going to last, and yes, I think I enjoyed it while it lasted, but it’s a weird feeling knowing that it will end. That it will just be a fragment of my life, and never a whole thing ever again. It can be beautiful and give hope for the future, and it can look big and bright through the glass, but when it breaks, you see everything how it really was inside. Not always, but as a gay person, I knew it would for me. Now it is just broken glass stored in a memory box, in my head and nowhere else.

(And if you’re not planning to read the book or watch the 80s movie, and you’re reading this far…. Winston gets taken to Room 101, a room invented to break people and rebuild them inline with Big Brother. They torture him, but he keeps strong for a while. The last thing they do is put a cage of hungry rats on his face ready to eat his face up. As the gate is opening he breaks, he shouts “do it to Julia, not me!”, And it’s over. Some time passes and he eventually sees Julia again, and they have an awkward encounter, they can hardly look at each other in the face, and they tell each other how they betrayed one another. They give each other glances of dislike, and they never see each other again. He later gets shot in the back of the head. Yeah, I was devastated, to say the least. But he was free.)