Orwell's Roses

by Rebecca Solnit

and dishonesty without joining other leftists who became conservatives tolerating other forms of brutality and deception.

Orwell wrote in 1944, “The really frightening thing about totalitarianism is not that it commits ‘atrocities’ but that it attacks the concept of objective truth; it claims to control the past as well as the future,” a framework that

would morph into Big Brother’s “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” The attack on truth and language makes the atrocities possible. If you can erase what has happened, silence the witnesses, convince people of the merit of supporting a lie, if you can terrorize people into silence, obedience, lies, if you can make the task of determining what is true so

The first victim of war is truth, goes the old saying, and a perpetual war against truth undergirds all authoritarianism...

Russia’s current authoritarian leader, Vladimir Putin, has been rehabilitating Stalin’s reputation. Lysenko’s seems to be coasting along on this revisionism and on some distortions of the significance of epigenetics.

The Scottish artist and garden maker Ian Hamilton Finlay once wrote, “Certain gardens are described as retreats when they are really attacks.” The gardens of Orwell are sown with ideas and ideals and fenced around by class and ethnicity and nationality and the assumptions therein, and there are plenty of attacks hovering in the background.

And the French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson said something similar earlier in the 1930s: “The world is going to pieces and people like Adams and Weston are photographing rocks!”

When Eric Blair chose the name George Orwell, he distanced himself from the Blairs but covered himself in Englishness twice over. Saint George was England’s patron saint, and King George V was on the throne at the time. As a schoolboy, Orwell had been stuffed with enough Greek and Latin to know the name’s origin in words for earth and for work, so that it meant farmer, earthworker.

The seventeenth-century poet Robert Herrick’s famous lines “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may / Old time is still a-flying” are about the old varieties of roses that bloomed briefly in the spring.

The rose geneticist Charles C. Hurst wrote in 1941, “The introduction of the China Rose to England towards the end of the eighteenth century caused a complete revolution in the garden Roses of Europe, America and the Near East. .

David Austin, the famous rose breeder who died in 2018 after six decades of producing roses that had both the fragrance and old forms of earlier roses with the repeat flowerings of floribunda and hybrid tea roses.

He called them all English roses and gave them English names drawn from literature, society, and history, including Ancient Mariner, the Wife of Bath, Thomas à Becket, and Emily Brontë, along with those of various aristocrats, horticulturalists, and Shakespeare characters from Falstaff to Perdita, and the Brooklyn-born pharmaceutical opioids profiteer Mortimer Sackler.

I 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.

In the introduction to the thick Everyman’s edition of Orwell’s Collected Essays, John Carey declares, “He almost never praises beauty and when he does he locates it in rather scruffy and overlooked things . . . the eye of the common toad, a sixpenny rosebush from Woolworth’s.”

Anything old, and for that matter anything beautiful, was always vaguely suspect.” Suspect as a sign of the consciousness and pleasure the party sought to eradicate, as the experience Orwell praises in “The Lion and the Unicorn” when he describes hobbies as a private activity that totalitarianism seeks to starve.

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. But it wasn’t coveralls I’d come to see. It was roses and the labor that produced those roses. And soon enough we were in one of the dozens of greenhouses.

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

The workers have a slogan, “The lovers get the roses, but we workers get the thorns.” A rose is beautiful, but a greenhouse with thousands upon thousands of roses, a place producing millions per year, with stems and leaves and petals all strewn on the floor and heaped together in bins as byproduct, was not.

honest

Devaluing voices allows a society to be officially against something it in practice tolerates or encourages, by pretending it doesn’t exist. One of Orwell’s most significant blind spots is around gender, around how marriages and families can become authoritarian regimes in miniature, down to the suppression of truths and promulgation of lies that protect the powerful.

loathing

. . Totalitarianism demands, in fact, the continuous alteration

their best

In the novel’s appendix about Newspeak, Orwell describes how the word free was shrunk to mean only free from, as in “this dog is free from lice.”

The ethical purpose sharpened the aesthetic means, he makes clear, and politics saved him from insignificance. “In a peaceful age I might have written ornate or merely descriptive books, and might have remained almost unaware of my political loyalties. As it is I have been forced into becoming a sort of pamphleteer.” But pamphleteer was neither a bad job nor one without aesthetic demands and pleasures: “What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art. . . . I write . . . because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.”

A deep instinct warns them not to destroy the family, which in the modern world is the sole refuge from the State.”

Rereading a significant book is like revisiting an old friend: you find out how you’ve changed when you encounter them again; you see differently because you’re different.

Winston Smith is far from exemplary or heroic, but he does resist. That resistance consists not of activity that will overthrow the regime—though he aspires and eventually volunteers to do so—but thoughts and acts that violate its precepts. Those precepts are rooted in controlling consciousness and culture, not just actions and infrastructure.

She rests her case on the final section of the book, the appendix on Newspeak cast as a historical document, noting that “the essay on Newspeak is written in standard English, in the third person, and in the past tense, which can only mean that the regime has fallen, and that language and individuality have survived. For whoever has written the essay on Newspeak, the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four is over. Thus, it’s my view that Orwell had much more faith in the resilience of the human spirit than he’s usually been given credit for.”

The disease had been rampant in the nineteenth century and into the twentieth—John Keats, Emily Brontë, Henry David Thoreau, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Anton Chekhov, and Franz Kafka are among the writers who died of it.

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 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. That era produced responses such as the website the Memory Hole, named after the desktop pit into which Winston Smith dumped newspaper articles once their account of history had been replaced by a more expedient version.

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.

The work he did is everyone’s job now. It always was.