Spiritus Vitae: What Makes Us Alive?
Spiritus vitae in Latin is simply breath of life, but what has made man tick for the past thousands of years is what that breath is. Some would say that it is man’s capability to love, that this sequence of chemicals firing off in the brain makes man different than any other living creature. But what if the being has no heartbeat; can it still love from an organ that doesn’t exist? Or can humanity be shut off like a television to such a powerful emotion such as love? George Orwell and Steven Spielberg brought these questions to the forefronts of the minds of millions of people. Through their combined works of 1984 and A.I. they present the question of humanity and our ability to love with the use of imagery, symbolism, and situational irony.
George Orwell’s depiction of Party members as animalistic, subhuman creatures paints a chilling portrait of our regression back to simple primates. Throughout 1984 a society where individual thought and emotions are smothered and annihilated to the point where thinking outside of the lines would get you stuck in Room 101. The totalitarian world vaporizes love, and since love is the basis of what makes human alive, destroys society’s spirit. On the brink of insanity and after enduring endless torture, Winston is enlightened by O’Brien, “[The Proles] are helpless, like the animals. Humanity is the Party. The others are outside—irrelevant” (Orwell 339). The helpless masses of the proles are truly the most alive, but they live in a dystopian world of conformity and social repression. The flipside of the world is that Humanity is the Party” but the definition of humanity has changed. Humanity for Oceania is a lifetime of indentured servitude to the party until your fingers can’t type on the keyboards to rewrite the history. The only love left in the world is the love for Big Brother, and similar to Stockholm syndrome, it is a fondness found through captivity and pain. The imprisonment of...