When I was growing up, we had what I think of as about four levels of dress.

There were shorts, jeans, and casual shirts which were reserved for play.  Then there were school clothes; we did not wear shorts or jeans to school, and when we got home we changed our clothes before we went out to play.  Then there were dressy clothes, sometimes called church clothes.  They served not only for church but for almost any event dressier than school.  By the time I got to college, I had added party clothes. 

Nowadays people seem to have more clothes, but they have fewer levels of clothes. 

People come to church, as a friend put it, in the same clothes they wear to the grocery store.  The children lighting the candles have bare legs and flip-flops hanging out below their acolyte robes. 

Jeans and t-shirts are the norm at our office.  And at the company Christmas party, which is supposed to be a dressy affair, I have seen folks in jeans and sweatshirts.

I have no idea what to make of it all.

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Recently I have been (re)reading some of the classics.  I’ve gone through Jane Austen’s entire collection, rediscovered Jane Eyre, and discovered Robinson Crusoe.

My most recent read was one of the most terrifying novels ever written — George Orwell’s 1984. I had read it in high school, but found it more frightening this time around. When I read it 50 years ago, it was just a cautionary tale.  Now it seems, well, more immediate. More possible. 

But something was missing.  I could have sworn there was a passage in that book in which Winston remembered, as a child, taking a crust of bread away from his baby sister, who was too sick to do more than cry weakly.  When he went back into her room she had been gnawed on by rats.

It was a horrifying scene.  He blamed himself for her death, of course.  And it fully explained his overwhelming fear of the rodents.  That fear eventually caused him to betray Julia, leaving him nothing but to love Big Brother, the final step in the surrender of his mind and will.

That scene was missing in the book I read this past winter.  I know, because I went back and looked for it.  Without it, Winston’s terror in Room 101 is understandable but not fully explained.

Did I make that scene up sometime in the past 50 years?  Did someone take it out because it was too gruesome?  Are they printing more than one version of the classics nowadays?  Did the original version go down the Memory Hole?  Am I committing a Thought Crime?

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I have a suggestion for the makers of the Kindle and the Nook and whatever other similar devices come on the market. 

How about, at the user’s option, the last 20 pages of each book are tinted red, or maybe have a red border.  The 20 pages before that use orange, and maybe the 20 before that use yellow.  It’s a warning system to let others – others who have the audacity to interrupt you when you’re reading – to know the level of peril of speaking to anyone that close to the end of a book.

Come to think of it, there’s no reason a conventional paper book can’t have the same coding system.

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