The Life and Times of a Paperweight

A simple paperweight of coral and glass can sometimes seem like more than it really is. The coral in a glass shield that protects can seem untouchable. The paperweight holds fast; when papers fly away in the pressuring wind, the coral in it’s glass remains immobile, seeming so strong when the winds pass. However, the truth is beginning to show through small cracks in the dome around the coral, overlooked by most every person, until the day the desk where the weight resides is shaken rigorously. The desk’s great lurch sends the paperweight over the edge, crashing to the floor in a shower of shattered glass, and the coral, no longer protected by its shield, snaps in half. The strength of the coral’s protection was underestimated, and the coral had to pay the price; a scene comparable to Winston Smith’s life in 1984. Like the paperweight, Winston was protected by a glass shield he believed able to keep the thought police from catching him and let him start the beginnings of a revolution against the Party. The only difference was that Winston’s “shield” was only in his mind.

If one were to look close enough one would see that Winston and and the paperweight he purchased in 1984 were very similar. The coral, for instance, is like Winston in the sense that it’s a individual of something bigger. It’s part of the reef but broken off and separate in the same sense that Winston is part of the Party but not with the Party. The coral is part of the reef, but isn’t the reef itself, and Winston is the same with the Party. Winston and the paperweight are also the same in the sense that, to an extent, both are somehow separated from the world around them. With the paperweight, the coral is kept mostly isolated from the world by the glass around it, which bars the coral from the world outside, and, though Winston has a better grasp on reality than most, he is also detached from reality because he believes he is protected from it, which means he chooses not to live in it. Winston knows that what he’s been doing will only lead to a horrible ending for both himself and Julia, but he still pretends that he has some kind of safeguard and that what he’s doing will make a difference when almost no one knows of the felonies that have occurred. No body, that is, except for the thought police, who would make sure that Winston and Julia’s acts against the Party were some how used to make the Party stronger. However, Winston chose to hide behind his glass screen and let it warp his world view and, in the end, the coral found that a glass shield is hardly a shield at all.

Actually, it wasn’t the fact that the shield was glass that set the paperweight or Winston up for destruction so much as the illusion that there was ever a shield in the first place. The coral paperweight was an antique from a time before Winston was even born--it’s more than possible that the old glass over the coral had cracks and chips in it from year past, especially since many of those years saw the bombing and deterioration of much of the city. In all probability, the paperweight was fragile enough by the time Winston found it, that it would have broken from falling a short distance if it hadn’t been smashed like in 1984. In a similar way, if Winston were to make his mental shield a reality, it would be a frail thing resembling very old glass, full of cracks and imperfections. Every fracture would be a loose end left untied, every imperfection a mistake, and every lapse in judgment or overlooked angle making it less protective. Even without the cracks, the shield itself would be lacking in protection; its very substance consisting of lies O’Brien let slip and fantasies encouraged by agents of the Thought Police. In fact, if Winston’s imaginary shield were real, it’s entire existence would, ironically, be mostly controlled by the people it was meant to protect Winston from. The greatest problem, thought, is just that; Winston’s protection from the world was completely imaginary. The Thought Police knew what he was going to do seven years before he even thought of doing it--Winston never had any protection, and any protection he thought he had was in his head only. In the end, Winston’s ultimate demise was from a head full of cracked, old glass painted like armor.

Winston’s downfall, and the like destruction of the paperweight, while brought about by his own illusions, was fated to happen one way or another. A paperweight cannot, by itself, change the fact that it’s made of breakable glass, nor could Winston change the fact that he was not entirely with the party without going insane. The thought police knew this; they knew Winston wasn’t with the party and he couldn’t be because Winston’s version of right and wrong wasn’t the same as the party’s. They knew this seven years in advance. The party also knew that the only way to make Winston see the world through their eyes was to make him insane--under the influence of a controlled insanity. It made sense; after all, what is insanity at its heart, but one’s loss of the ability to tell right from wrong and true from false? How exactly is one supposed to do this when they’re confused and the entire world is telling them everything they believe in is a lie? The answer is simple--they can’t. They have no proof for themselves or the people around them, nothing that they can use to back themselves up when they say ‘I know this is right’ other than their own mind, which is the very thing in question. If there’s no proof, no contradicting ‘fact’, no real support to the contrary, then the only real conclusion that can be drawn, for the general public, and perhaps even the person in question themselves, is that everything said person knows is wrong. This is what the Thought Police did, and they even took it a step further, not only telling Winston he was wrong, but proving it, with facts and force. After alleged fact and theory have been proved wrong, it’s part of human nature that people will seek to find truth and fact to cling to and rely on to make the world make sense again. For Winston, O’Brien stepped in to provide these facts and, in time, like how coral or glass will eventually break and disintegrate for one reason or other, Winston was fated to accept these facts, becoming one of the many others to succumb to the controlled insanity of the Party.

A simple paperweight can give the illusion of life outside of reality; it can give the appearance of a shield that isn’t there, and hide it’s fate to eventually break apart from view. It’s amazing how an object of no particular function other than to sit around, can portray the life of its owner so closely. Winston’s life, from the lies that spurred him on, to his destined decline to insanity, is all showed there, in the small orb of glass that he used to own. Winston was an individual who wanted to make a difference, was lied to, deceived, broken down, and destroyed, despite his best efforts, in the worst way possible. His fall was the remainder of a time passed shattering, the last man in the world dying, and the final trace of any truth flying away in the wind among fragment of broken glass and coral.