Orwell's Roses

by Rebecca Solnit

There’s an Etruscan word, saeculum, that describes the span of time lived by the oldest person present, sometimes calculated to be about a hundred years. In a looser sense, the word means the expanse of time during which something is in living memory. Every event has its saeculum, and then its sunset when the last person who fought in the Spanish Civil War or the last person who saw the last passenger pigeon is gone. To us, trees seemed to offer another kind of saeculum, a longer time scale and deeper continuity, giving shelter from our ephemerality the way that a tree might offer literal shelter under its boughs.

Dawn had come across the place when it was up for sale a few years earlier and told Graham about it and he rushed over to see it. They bought it immediately, after ascertaining that it was tiny and cramped and unsuitable for hosting their families at holidays and met absolutely none of their criteria about living near the sea or near pubs and shops.

This unfamiliar Orwell also brings to mind a famous Buddhist parable about a person chased by a tiger who, in flight, stumbles over a cliff and grasps a small plant to prevent falling to her death. It’s a strawberry plant that is gradually becoming uprooted and will soon give way, and it has one beautifully ripe strawberry dangling from it. What, asks the parable, is the right thing to do at that moment, and the answer is to savor the berry. It’s a story suggesting that we are always mortal and might die sooner than we think: there are often tigers, there are sometimes strawberries.

(There’s a whole history to be written about bohemian aunts and queer uncles, about those family members who swoop down to encourage misfit children in ways their parents won’t or can’t.)

An incident he recalls that likely took place in Wallington shows how—to use another rustic metaphor—fruitful the rural was for him: “I saw a little boy, perhaps ten years old, driving a huge cart-horse along a narrow path, whipping it whenever it tried to turn. It struck me that if only such animals became aware of their strength we should have no power over them, and that men exploit animals in much the same way as the rich exploit the proletariat.” Thus was Animal Farm born.

In the spring of 1936, a man planted roses. To write it that way makes the man the protagonist, but the roses were protagonists as well.

I think this sums up the book

As Michael Pollan wrote in The Botany of Desire, we think of these plants as something we domesticated, but it could be argued that they domesticated us to tend and propagate them.

uh huh

As my friend Joe Lamb, who’s a tree surgeon and poet with a degree in evolutionary biology, remarked to me, “One way of looking at trees is that they are captured light. Photosynthesis, after all, captures a photon, takes a little energy from it before re-emitting it at a lower wavelength, and uses that captured energy to turn air into sugars, and then sugars into the stuff that makes leaves, wood, and roots. Even the most solid of beings, the giant sequoias, are really light and air.”

“All that is solid melts into air,” Marx and Engels famously wrote in The Communist Manifesto, and though they were talking about social and technological change, they could have been describing the return of buried carbon to the upper atmosphere.

…uh huh

Two days later he went down once more, admiring the men’s forms when they worked stripped to the waist and noting that with one bath a week they must live blackened from the waist down six days out of seven.

If they were stripped to the waist, aka shirtless, why would they be blackened from the waist down and not the waist up?

The mortality of flowers is also part of their essential nature, and they’ve been used to represent the fleeting, evanescent nature of life again and again, with the implication that that which does not last is more precious for it.

(In 1938, he and Eileen named their dog Marx “to remind us that we have never read Marx,” Eileen wrote to a friend, adding “now we have read a little and taken so strong a personal dislike to the man that we can’t look the dog in the face.”)

The same year, the man who seems to have been her greatest love, the dashing Cuban revolutionary Julio Antonio Mella, was assassinated as they walked arm in arm one evening in Mexico City. She was blamed, attacked in the press, and deported.

Brutal

“Execution was the favored solution to every problem, including those caused by previous executions,” writes Adam Hochschild. “When the national census showed that his reign of terror was shrinking the country’s population, Stalin ordered the members of the census board shot. The new officials, not surprisingly, came up with higher figures. Between about 1929, when Stalin had vanquished his rivals and concentrated power in his hands, and his death in 1953, most historians now estimate that he had been directly responsible for the deaths of somewhere around 20 million people.”

She reminded me what my Black neighbors had taught me earlier that decade, that the yearning to be more rugged, more rustic, more rough, more scruffy, is often a white and a white-collar yearning, and that those who have only recently escaped agricultural work, maybe sharecropping or slavery or migrant labor, who have survived being treated as dirty or backward, are often glad to be polished and elegant. You have to feel securely high to want to go low, urban to yearn for the rural, smooth to desire roughness, anxious about artificiality to seek this version of authenticity. And if you see the countryside as a place of rest and respite you’re probably not a farmworker.

By the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, appreciation of nature was often exhibited as a sign of refinement and even virtue. Of course Stalin loved his gardens and greenhouses at his dachas and the Nazis conflated ideas about racial purity and the protection of nature, particularly of forests, and not a few of the early American conservation groups promoted eugenicist views. There might be virtuous ways to love nature, but the love of nature is no guarantor of virtue.

Charles Blair, whose inheritance in Jamaica consisted of land and human beings, married Mary Fane, and they had another Charles Blair, who in turn had a youngest son named Thomas Richard Arthur Blair. This grandson of the man dominating the Reynolds painting, this grandfather of the man at the center of this book, went into the church and spent time in India and, apparently, Tasmania. In his thirties, while traveling to and fro from India, the minister Thomas Blair married fifteen-year-old Frances Catherine Hare, whom he met in the Cape of Good Hope in what is now South Africa. They were citizens of empire more than of England.

I extremely do not care

But paradise is a walled garden, defined in part by what it shut out.

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. It could be said on the one hand that Sackler would be better represented by a poppy, and on the other that peddling opiates was at the heart of the British Empire (and was Orwell’s father’s life work).

Margaret Atwood has made a different case for why Nineteen Eighty-Four is not quite the dystopia it is often taken for. “Orwell has been accused of bitterness and pessimism—of leaving us with a vision of the future in which the individual has no chance, and where the brutal, totalitarian boot of the all-controlling Party will grind into the human face, for ever,” she wrote in The Guardian in 2003. 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.” She borrowed this device to suggest in the mock-scholarly afterword to her novel The Handmaid’s Tale that the regime at the heart of it would likewise perish.

Horror doesn’t have to be permanent to matter.

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. But that achievement is enriched and deepened by the commitments and idealism that fueled it, the things he valued and desired, and his valuation of desire itself, and pleasure and joy, and his recognition that these can be forces of opposition to the authoritarian state and its soul-destroying intrusions. The work he did is everyone’s job now. It always was.

One might note that decades of fossil-fuel-sponsored climate denial and resultant inaction provide a vivid illustration of the degradation of science under capitalism. The long pretense by the mainstream media and by US and sometimes British government officials that there were two sides to the science, or no basis for the science, was a betrayal of facts and lives and the future. They often repeated frameworks and talking points originated by fossil-fuel corporations, whether they knew it or not.