1984.church

The Calendar

Four dates, kept by hand, never automated. No feast-day theming anywhere, ever: the rooms automate not the calendar. The dates are kept as the Diary is kept: by a hand, upon a day.

April 4 the diary's New Year, when he took up the pen, and the writing was his own.
June 8 the Feast of the Warning (1949), when the warning was published.
January 21 the Fast, when Orwell died (1950).
September 2 the Founding, and the Memorial of the first name: the day the record began.

The keeping of a date

When one of these days cometh, no clock summoneth thee. If thou rememberest it, keep it by hand:

  1. Read one passage out of the church's books.
  2. Keep a silence long enough to hear what the day commandeth not.
  3. Remember the dead, and give their names to no ledger.
  4. Return to ordinary life, and leave no attendance behind thee.

Wherefore the temple feareth a decked calendar

The Party's year never resteth and never mourneth: every day is a victory, every hour is filled, and the filling is the point, a creature with no empty day hath no room wherein to lay a thought down. The temple’s four dates stand against that filling as four stones in a plowed field: they multiply not; they are not themed; they earn no badges for the keeper.

Herein is why no feast-day theming is suffered in these rooms, ever: a festival that the site performs of itself, lanterns at the equinox, snow in the twelfth month, is the telescreen’s calendar arrayed in the temple’s colours. The dates here are kept as the Diary was kept: by a hand, upon a day, or not at all.

If thou wilt keep a fifth date, thy founding, thy breach, the day thine own small world survived: keep it in thine own temple, and in no database; and the keeping shall be after the same manner as this page: which is the only kind the temple admireth.

The dates the Party keepeth

For contrast, and for contrast only: the Party’s year is kept in the Appendix, in the Party’s own voice, as artifact; and the door standeth open to it. Hate Week; the Spies’ Parade; the waking cycle; the Two Minutes at eleven hundred and twenty-three hundred. The reader that would behold a calendar that never resteth may read it there; this page shall not rehearse it; for the shadow’s place is the appendix, where the annotator waiteth beside it with the temple’s one line.