Significat Passage

『 She always contradicted him when he said anything of this kind. She would not accept is as a law of nature that the individual is always defeated. In a way she realized that she herself was doomed, that sooner or later the Thought Police would catch her and kill her, but with another part of her mind she believed that it was somehow possible to construct a secret world in which you could live as you chose. All you needed was luck and cunning and boldness. She did not understand that there was no such thing as happiness, that the only victory lay in the far future, long after you were dead, that from the moment of declaring war on the Party it was better to think of yourself as a corpse.

"We're the dead," he said.
"We're not dead yet," said Julia prosaically.
"Not physically. Six months, a year - five years, conceivably. I am afraid of death. You are young, so presumably you're more afraid of it than I am. Obviously we shall put it off as long as we can. But it makes very little difference. So long as human beings stay human, death and life are the same thing."

"Oh, rubbish! Which would you sooner sleep with, me or a skeleton? Don't you enjoy being alive? Don't you like feeling: This is me, this is my hand, this is my leg, I'm real, I'm solid, I'm alive! Don't you like this?" 』 (p.135~136)

This passage is significant to me because it tells us how we can choose whether to be optimistic or pessimistic in our lives. While Winston is preoccupied by his shadowed future and thinks it is not worth to live knowing that he must die at some point in his life, Julia wants to enjoy everything to the fullest while she is still alive.

Like Julia, I enjoy every second of my life, and therefore I do my best in whatever I do. Sometimes I do not realize how thankful it is to be alive at this moment. There are millions of people who are suffering from war, starvation, oppression, and separation from their family, and here I am, comfortably sitting on my chair with no such worries.

I have been optimistic most of the time throughout my life so far. When some things turn out to be unsuccessful, I do not let myself down but move on to my new opportunities because I am not concerned of the
result of my accomplishments, but the process of them.
As Julia is not afraid of her future happenings, I will always be optimistic no matter how harsh my situation will be in the future.

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I would like to share another passage with you guys.

"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past."

This is the Party slogan of 1984 and is an important example of the Party's technique of using false history to break down the psychological independence of its members. The Party creates a past that was a time of misery and slavery from which it claims to have liberated the human race, thus compelling people to work toward the Party's goals. Every individual is forbidden from keeping mementos of his or her own pasts, such as photographs and documents. As a result, the citizens have a very short, fuzzy memory, and are willing to believe anything that the Party tells them. Because the Party's version of the past is what people believe, that past has become the truth, though it has no basis in real events.

I do not agree with this Party slogan because I believe only God can control the past and the future. We, humans, can only live in them. Thinking that we can control our own history is selfish and daring because God is the One who leads our lives.