Orwell's Roses

by Rebecca Solnit

Trees are an invitation to think about time and to travel in it the way they do, by standing still and reaching out and down.

Roses mean everything, which skates close to meaning nothing.

Most of writing is thinking, not typing, and thinking is sometimes best done while doing something else that engages part of you.

The writer and actor Peter Coyote once remarked that no one cries over artificial flowers, and there’s a particular kind of disappointment when you begin to admire a bouquet or a blossom at a distance and find out closer up that it’s fake. The disappointment arises in part from having been deceived, but also from encountering an object that is static, that will never die because it never lived, that didn’t form itself out of the earth, and that has a texture coarser, dryer, less inviting to the touch than a mortal flower.

As Orwell would convey more powerfully than almost anyone before or since, one of the powers tyrants hold is to destroy and distort the truth and force others to submit to what they know is untrue.

I write this with clean power produced by wind and sun, an option you can choose where I live, because people organized against the power company, and because engineering transformed solar and wind into effective, affordable technologies in the first two decades of the twenty-first century in one of the most overlooked revolutions of all time.

Edward Said’s critique of Mansfield Park is not just that it is all propped up by slave labor but that this knowledge is avoided, in Jane Austen’s society as well as in her novel and its characters.

Scent is a kind of voice, a way in which flowers speak—“caresses floating in the air,” the poet Rainer Maria Rilke called it.

“Miller is writing about the man in the street, and it is incidentally rather a pity that it should be a street full of brothels.”