Orwell's Roses

by Rebecca Solnit

A friend said, “He was a rebel against his own biological condition and he was a rebel against social conditions; the two were very closely linked together.”

(There’s a whole history to be written about bohemian aunts and queer uncles, about those family members who swoop down to encourage misfit children in ways their parents won’t or can’t.) That aunt, Helene Limouzin, called Nellie, was a suffragist, a socialist (probably the first one he knew), a bohemian, an actress, and a contributor to left-wing publications.

Orwell did not believe in permanent happiness or the politics that tried to realize it, but he did believe devoutly in moments of delight, even rapture, and he wrote about them often, from these early books to Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Orwell once called himself a Tory anarchist, and though he had elements of the rebel and the revolutionary about him, he was a lover of tradition, stability, rusticity, and domestic routine.

Think of the Carboniferous as a sixty-million-year inhale by plants, sucking carbon dioxide from the sky, and the last two hundred years as a monstrous human-engineered exhale, undoing what the plants did so long ago.

The meaning subverts the form, and elegance of form is always capable of being corrupted by what meaning it delivers. “The first thing that we demand of a wall is that it shall stand up,” Orwell wrote in his critique of the painter Salvador Dalí. “If it stands up, it is a good wall, and the question of what purpose it serves is separable from that. And yet even the best wall in the world deserves to be pulled down if it surrounds a concentration camp.” Form cannot be separated from function.

The contemporary world is full of things that look beautiful and are produced through hideous means. People die so that this mine may profit, that these shoes may be produced as cheaply as possible, that that refinery may spew these toxic fumes in the course of producing its petroleum. I have often thought about this disconnection as a lack of integrity that’s pervasive in modern life.

Authoritarians often coerce people to go along with what they know are lies, making them reluctant coconspirators who may be deceiving yet other parties. Knowledge is power, and the equitable distribution of knowledge is inseparable from other forms of equality. Without equal access to the facts, equal capacity in decision-making is impossible.

Authoritarians see truth and fact and history as a rival system they must defeat.

As he begins to write, with an inkwell and an old-fashioned pen, he reflects that “he was already dead.” And then, “Now that he had recognized himself as a dead man it became important to stay alive as long as possible.” But he doesn’t do that. He decides instead to live as fully as possible, pursuing a series of dangerous actions—keeping a diary of subversive thoughts, skipping obligations, engaging in solitary wandering, a love affair, a venture into political resistance—as the novel progresses. But he’s a condemned man from the outset. His only freedom lies in what he says and does along the way.

Things that matter for their own sake and serve no larger purpose or practical agenda recur as ideals in the book.

There he hoped that he could get some fishing in. The fishing pole, like the trees and roses he planted, the son he adopted, and maybe the marriage he embarked upon from a hospital bed, seems like a gesture of hope, not that the future was certain, but that it was worth reaching for.

The antithesis of transcendent might be rooted and grounded, and Orwell was attached to the ordinary joys and pleasures and the love of the things of this world and not the next. He wrote another one of his credos in the essay: “The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one’s love upon other human individuals.

it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings.”

Orwell’s signal achievement was to name and describe as no one else had the way that totalitarianism was a threat not just to liberty and human rights but to language and consciousness, and he did it in so compelling a way that his last book casts a shadow—or a beacon’s light—into the present. But that achievement is enriched and deepened by the commitments and idealism that fueled it, the things he valued and desired, and his valuation of desire itself, and pleasure and joy, and his recognition that these can be forces of opposition to the authoritarian state and its soul-destroying intrusions. The work he did is everyone’s job now. It always was.