Orwell's Roses

by Rebecca Solnit

“She had had her momentary flowering, a year, perhaps, of wild-rose beauty and then she had suddenly swollen like a fertilized fruit and grown hard and red and coarse, and then her life had been laundering, scrubbing, darning, cooking, sweeping, polishing, mending, scrubbing, laundering, first for children, then for grandchildren, over thirty unbroken years. At the end of it she was still singing.”

He has been defeated; he has managed to live first, and though those victories are fleeting they are victories. Are there victories that are not temporary?

As the novelist and speculator on utopias and dystopias Octavia Butler put it, “The very act of trying to look ahead to discern possibilities and offer warnings is in itself an act of hope.”

“Our job,” Orwell declared in the Gandhi essay, “is to make life worth living on this earth, which is the only earth we have.”