Compromising Things

In George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, the novel's protagonist, Winston Smith, has a penchant for objects connected to a past quickly fading from memory.

Midway through the novel, he returns to the junk shop where he had purchased a diary, described as a "compromising possession" to have in a society under the ever-watchful rule of the Ministry.

The junk shop was full of miscellaneous things carrying little to no value in the world he now lived. When he approached a table with "a litter of odds and ends -- lacquered snuff-boxes, agate brooches, and the like," a curious item caught his eye: "a round, smooth thing that gleamed softly in the lamplight."

He picked it up to admire it.  It was "a heavy lump of glass, curved on one side, flat on the other, making almost a hemisphere.  There was a peculiar softness, as of rainwater, in both the colour and the texture of the glass.  At the heart of it, magnified by the curved surface, there was a strange, pink, convoluted object that recalled a rose or a sea anemone."

The shopkeeper explained that it was a piece of coral, explaining, "They used to kind of embed it in the glass. That wasn't made less than a hundred years ago.  More, by the look of it.

'It's a beautiful thing,' said Winston.

'It is a beautiful thing,' said the other appreciatively.  'But there's not many that'd say so nowadays.'  He coughed."

Winston purchased it, and "slid the coveted thing into his pocket."

"What appealed to him about it was not so much its beauty as the air it seemed to possess of belonging to an age quite different from the present one.  The soft, rainwatery glass was not like any glass that he had ever seen.  The thing was doubly attractive because of its apparent uselessness, though he could guess that it must once have been intended as a paperweight... it was a queer thing, even a compromising thing, for a Party member to have in his possession.  Anything old, and for that matter anything beautiful, was always vaguely suspect."