Big Brother is watching your trees

1984: Big Brother is watching your trees.

I was recently travelling overseas and found myself reading George Orwell’s classic 1984 (having read all I’d brought with me in the first week, it was the only English language book available!).

What struck me throughout the novel (other than how many of the terms have become contemporary since publication) was how utterly grim and ruined the urban landscape was and how this added to the atmosphere of hopelessness. Yet I was struck by this particular passage, that relates to some earlier posts on natural landscapes ability to soothe. It describes Winston’s only trip outside of the urban dereliction, into the countryside to a dense copse of trees, for an illicit meeting with his fellow thought criminal Julia:

A thrush had alighted on a bough not five metres away, almost at the level of their faces. Perhaps it had not seen them. It was in the sun, they in the shade. It spread out its wings, fitted them carefully into place again, ducked its head for a moment, as though making a sort of obeisance to the sun, and then began to pour forth a torrent of song. In the afternoon hush the volume of sound was startling. Winston and Julia clung together, fascinated. The music went on and on, minute after minute, with astonishing variations, never once repeating itself, almost as though the bird were deliberately showing off its virtuosity. Sometimes it stopped for a few seconds, spread out and resettled its wings, then swelled its speckled breast and again burst into song. Winston watched it with a sort of vague reverence. For whom, for what, was that bird singing? No mate, no rival was watching it. What made it sit at the edge of the lonely wood and pour its music into nothingness? He wondered whether after all there was a microphone hidden somewhere near. He and Julia had spoken only in low whispers, and it would not pick up what they had said, but it would pick up the thrush. Perhaps at the other end of the instrument some small, beetle-like man was listening intently — listening to that. But by degrees the flood of music drove all speculations out of his mind. It was as though it were a kind of liquid stuff that poured all over him and got mixed up with the sunlight that filtered through the leaves. He stopped thinking and merely felt.