In Real Life

In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it.  It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it.  Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy.  The heresy of heresies was common sense.  And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right.  For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four?  Or that the force of gravity works?  Or that the past is unchangeable?  If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable - what then?

Part 1, Chapter 7, 1984, (published 1949)

In principle a Party member had no spare time, and was never alone except in bed.  It was assumed that taking part in some kind of communal recreation: to do anything that suggested a taste for solitude, even to go for a walk by yourself, was always slightly dangerous.  There was a word for it in Newspeak: ownlife, it was called, meaning individualism and eccentricity. 

Part 1, Chapter 8, 1984, (published 1949)

Well, my dears, if you're all still alive, how are you all?  Today we complete Part 1, and tomorrow we commence Part 2! 

This last excerpt, as well as being savagely ironic, is also sort of hilarious.  I refer to my life in three separate parts, or threads, more like, that intertwine every now and again: school, internet, and home.  School and the internet are sort of like a semi-reality, while I refer to my home life as "real life" - where I am completely and unabashedly myself in every single way without having to try.  It's almost funny, how my brother and I will be talking and one of us will stop talking about school and return to a home-related subject by saying "and in real life"...  And this is my ownlife.  I live it completely in my own style, eccentrically I'm sure it would seem to many, and extremely individual.  So I feel the word works well.  But then to not be allowed it.  Well.  Imagine that.