Orwell's Roses

by Rebecca Solnit

have often thought that much of the beauty that moves us in the natural world is not the static visual splendor that can be captured in a picture, but time itself as patterns, recurrences, the rhythmic passage of days and seasons and years, the lunar cycle and the tides, birth and death. As harmony, organization, coherence, pattern itself is a kind of beauty, and some of the psychic distress of climate change and environmental disruption is in the shattering of this rhythm. The order that matters most is not spatial but temporal. Sometimes pictures convey this, but the habit of seeing in pictures encourages us to lose sight of the dance.

a vast flower industry with its own problems has grown up in Colombia, which raises 80 percent of the roses sold in the United States, along with many other kinds of flowers for export.

A similar industry in Kenya and Ethiopia supplies the European flower market.

The slogans were in that genre often called Orwellian, which is to say they were ominous in their insincerity and unsettling in their contradictions and their imposition on workers who seemed unlikely to agree wholeheartedly with them or to be wearing them by choice.

They get 104 roses per year from each square meter, our guides told me.

“At Wallington. Crocuses out everywhere, a few wallflowers budding, snowdrops just at their best. Couples of hares sitting about in the winter wheat and gazing at one another. Now and again in this war, at intervals of months, you get your nose above water for a few moments and notice that the earth is still going round the sun.”

Another crucial aspect of any regime of lies is the unequal distribution of the privacy that protects our thoughts and actions. The powerful become unaccountable because their actions are concealed and misrepresented, while ordinary people are deprived of privacy through surveillance and encouraged to inform on one another to the authorities.

Hannah Arendt famously wrote, “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”

Totalitarianism demands, in fact, the continuous alteration of the past, and in the long run probably demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth.”

on January 5, a piece on the pleasures of junk shops, which he differentiated from antique shops for their dusty obscurity, their broken items of no value, and their proprietors, who tended to be enigmatic figures with little interest in sales. He noted that their “finest treasures are never discoverable at first glimpse; they have to be sorted out from among a medley of bamboo cake-stands, Britannia-ware dish-covers, turnip watches, dog-eared books, ostrich eggs, typewriters of extinct makes, spectacles without lenses, decanters without stoppers, stuffed birds, wire fire guards, bunches of keys, boxes of nuts and bolts, conch shells from the Indian Ocean, boot trees, Chinese ginger jars and pictures of Highland cattle.”

Among junk-shop treasures he listed glass paperweights “that have a piece of coral enclosed in the glass, but these are always fantastically expensive.” Just such a paperweight would be purchased by Winston Smith and become one of Nineteen Eighty-Four’s central symbols (and a junk-shop proprietor is a crucial figure in the novel). He described the appeal of these shops to “the jackdaw inside all of us, the instinct that makes a child hoard copper nails, clock springs, and the glass marbles out of lemonade bottles. To get pleasure out of a junk shop you are not obliged to buy anything, nor even to want to buy anything.”

February, he admitted, “is a particularly detestable month with no virtue except its shortness.

Thanks to the food rationing that had begun during the war (but wouldn’t end until the 1950s), they were chronically short on flour and bread and always urging guests to bring some.

The age of Trump and climate denial are of course over-the-top Orwellian; since before the year 1984, editorialists have reached for the novel to describe corrosive politics, including Ronald Reagan’s bland euphemisms for class and race war and Tony Blair and George W. Bush’s campaign of deceit to launch wars against that abstraction “terror” that killed perhaps a million nonabstract human beings.