Orwell's Roses

by Rebecca Solnit

The contemporary world is full of things that look beautiful and are produced through hideous means. People die so that this mine may profit, that these shoes may be produced as cheaply as possible, that that refinery may spew these toxic fumes in the course of producing its petroleum. I have often thought about this disconnection as a lack of integrity that’s pervasive in modern life.

Wow

faucets, food and clothing appeared in stores, fuel (in our time if not in Orwell’s with the coal chutes and sooty air) was largely invisible, and the work that held all this together was often done by people who were themselves invisible.

Distance was a form of invisibility when it came to how things were made, though exploitation can happen in local agriculture or the back of a restaurant.

“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.”

the potent enemy of totalitarianism is she who is passionate and clear about the distinction between fact and fiction, truth and falsity, and stands on the reality of her own experience and capacity to bear witness to it.

this beauty in which ethics and aesthetics are inseparable, this linguistic beauty of truth and of integrity as a kind of wholeness and connectedness, between language and what it describes, between one person and another, or between members of a community or society, is the crucial beauty for which he strove in his own writing.

Lists are a form of collecting, an inventory of what is available at least to the imagination, and sometimes a reaching for assurance that there is some kind of abundance beyond the privation at hand.

June’s “cloud-bursts.

it was a feeling of having done good unconsciously—the

They seem to assume that reasonability meant eking out as long a life as possible rather than living it as fully as possible. Orwell had all along tended to choose the latter over the former.

He desires the life of the mind and the senses, beauty, history, nature, pleasure, and sex, and the privacy and freedom in which all those things flourish.

The Buddhist parable about the person who, having fallen over a cliff while being chased by a tiger, grasps a strawberry plant that is coming loose, and whose death in a fall is inevitable, advises savoring the strawberry.

If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love.”

Love is subversive. Memory is subversive. Hope is subversive. Even perception is subversive.

“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.”

he saw the willingness to suffer and accept suffering and one’s own flaws and others as part of being human and the price paid for the joys also included.

“Our job,” Orwell declared in the Gandhi essay, “is to make life worth living on this earth, which is the only earth we have.” He asked that roses be planted on his grave. When I checked, a few years ago, a scrappy red rose was blooming there.