Orwell's Roses

by Rebecca Solnit

What is it that makes it possible to do the work that is of highest value to others and one’s central purpose in life? It may appear—to others, sometimes even to oneself—trivial, irrelevant, indulgent, pointless, distracted, or any of those other pejoratives with which the quantifiable beats down the unquantifiable.

“Political language . . . is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

“A dead German soldier was lying supine at the foot of the steps. His face was a waxy yellow. On his breast someone had laid a bunch of the lilac which was blooming everywhere.” It makes a picture and strikes a balance, that yellow face and those lilacs, death and life, the vigor of the spring and the immense devastation of the war. The lilacs don’t negate the corpse or the war but they complicate it, as the specific often does the general.

Nature itself is immensely political, in how we imagine, interact with, and impact it, though this was not much recognized in his era.

Most of writing is thinking, not typing, and thinking is sometimes best done while doing something else that engages part of you. Walking or cooking or laboring on simple or repetitive tasks can also be a way to leave the work behind so you can come back to it fresh or find unexpected points of entry into it.

The Zen practitioner and gardener Wendy Johnson writes, “Watching the things of the world come apart and recombine is core Zen work and the fundamental anchorage of every gardener’s life.”

To garden is to make whole again what has been shattered: the relationships in which you are both producer and consumer, in which you reap the bounty of the earth directly, in which you understand fully how something came into being.

The novelist Milan Kundera wrote not long after he escaped communist Czechoslovakia in 1975, “Once the dream of paradise starts to turn into reality, however, here and there people begin to crop up who stand in its way, and so the rulers of paradise must build a little gulag on the side of Eden. In the course of time this gulag grows ever bigger and more perfect, while the adjoining paradise gets ever smaller and poorer.”

A society seeking to reinvent human nature wants to reach down into every psyche and rearrange it.

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.

“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. No doubt alcohol, tobacco and so forth are things that a saint must avoid, but sainthood is also a thing that human beings must avoid. . . . Many people genuinely do not wish to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings.”