Orwell's Roses

by Rebecca Solnit

The very act of trying to look ahead to discern possibilities and offer warnings is in itself an act of hope. octavia butler

The very act of trying to look ahead to discern possibilities and offer warnings is in itself an act of hope. octavia butler

some of their faces painted to look like skulls adorned with flowers in that Mexican tradition that finds life in death and death in life.

some of their faces painted to look like skulls adorned with flowers in that Mexican tradition that finds life in death and death in life.

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.

If war has an opposite, gardens might sometimes be it, and people have found a particular kind of peace in forests, meadows, parks, and gardens.

he visited the sequoia groves in the Sierra Nevada and wrote of these trees that are broader than redwoods, but not quite as tall: “Their silence is more eloquent than the roaring torrents and Niagaras, than the reverberating thunder in [the] Grand Canyon, than the bursting of bombs; and is without menace. The gossiping leaves of the sequoias, one hundred yards above one’s head, are too far away to be heard. I recalled a stroll in the Luxembourg Gardens during the first months of the outbreak of war, stopping under an old chestnut tree that had probably survived the French Revolution, a mere pygmy, wishing I could be transformed into a tree until peace came again.”

(Man Ray) he visited the sequoia groves in the Sierra Nevada and wrote of these trees that are broader than redwoods, but not quite as tall: “Their silence is more eloquent than the roaring torrents and Niagaras, than the reverberating thunder in [the] Grand Canyon, than the bursting of bombs; and is without menace. The gossiping leaves of the sequoias, one hundred yards above one’s head, are too far away to be heard. I recalled a stroll in the Luxembourg Gardens during the first months of the outbreak of war, stopping under an old chestnut tree that had probably survived the French Revolution, a mere pygmy, wishing I could be transformed into a tree until peace came again.”

The trees made the past seem within reach in a way nothing else could: here were living things that had been planted and tended by a living being who was gone, but the trees that had been alive in her lifetime were in ours and might be after we were gone. They changed the shape of time.

“the planting of a tree, especially one of the long-living hardwood trees, is a gift which you can make to posterity at almost no cost and with almost no trouble, and if the tree takes root it will far outlive the visible effect of any of your other actions, good or evil.”

“the planting of a tree, especially one of the long-living hardwood trees, is a gift which you can make to posterity at almost no cost and with almost no trouble, and if the tree takes root it will far outlive the visible effect of any of your other actions, good or evil.” Orwell

“Truths and roses have thorns about them,” says the old aphorism, and Marianne Moore’s poem “Roses Only,” which, like a surprising amount of poetry, is addressed directly to the rose, ends with the remark “Your thorns are the best part of you.” Medieval theologians speculated that there were roses in the Garden of Eden, but the thorns came after the fall from grace.

“Truths and roses have thorns about them,” says the old aphorism, and Marianne Moore’s poem “Roses Only,” which, like a surprising amount of poetry, is addressed directly to the rose, ends with the remark “Your thorns are the best part of you.” Medieval theologians speculated that there were roses in the Garden of Eden, but the thorns came after the fall from grace.

There’s a cultural view in which flowers are dainty, trivial, dispensable—and a scientific one in which flowering plants were revolutionary in their appearance on the earth some two hundred million years or so ago, are dominant on land from the arctic to the tropics, and are crucial to our survival. “How Flowering Plants Conquered the World” is the way a recent scientific article put it. Flowers are the sexual parts of the plants called angiosperms and seeds the offspring of that sexual reproduction, and the revolution was at least as much about the seeds.

There’s a cultural view in which flowers are dainty, trivial, dispensable—and a scientific one in which flowering plants were revolutionary in their appearance on the earth some two hundred million years or so ago, are dominant on land from the arctic to the tropics, and are crucial to our survival. “How Flowering Plants Conquered the World” is the way a recent scientific article put it. Flowers are the sexual parts of the plants called angiosperms and seeds the offspring of that sexual reproduction, and the revolution was at least as much about the seeds.

Most of what we eat is either angiosperm or, for nonvegans, from creatures who fed on angiosperms. There might be evolutionary reasons why we too find flowers so attractive, since our lives are so bound up with theirs, and we have domesticated and bred them to amplify and vary size, forms, colors, and scents. Our lives depend, if not exactly on flowers, then on flowering plants.

Most of what we eat is either angiosperm or, for nonvegans, from creatures who fed on angiosperms. There might be evolutionary reasons why we too find flowers so attractive, since our lives are so bound up with theirs, and we have domesticated and bred them to amplify and vary size, forms, colors, and scents. Our lives depend, if not exactly on flowers, then on flowering plants.

a plant family, Rosaceae, of more than four thousand species, including apples, pears, quinces, apricots, plums, and peaches, as well as brambles and the thorny blackberries and raspberries whose flowers resemble wild roses’ blooms.

a plant family, Rosaceae, of more than four thousand species, including apples, pears, quinces, apricots, plums, and peaches, as well as brambles and the thorny blackberries and raspberries whose flowers resemble wild roses’ blooms.

he won a scholarship to the most elite of all, Eton, where he spent another four years, acquiring an accent that marked him as an outsider among the poor without making him an insider among the rich.

he (Orwell) won a scholarship to the most elite of all, Eton, where he spent another four years, acquiring an accent that marked him as an outsider among the poor without making him an insider among the rich.

The writing is sometimes brilliant, often useful, famously prophetic, and even occasionally beautiful, within a definition of beauty that doesn’t have a lot to do with prettiness.

The writing is sometimes brilliant, often useful, famously prophetic, and even occasionally beautiful, within a definition of beauty that doesn’t have a lot to do with prettiness.

He was good at scorn, as in this pair of sentences from 1944, when he launched a minor campaign against the lazy invocation of jackboots: “Ask a journalist what a jackboot is, and you will find that he does not know. Yet he goes on talking about jackboots.”

He (Orwell) was good at scorn, as in this pair of sentences from 1944, when he launched a minor campaign against the lazy invocation of jackboots: “Ask a journalist what a jackboot is, and you will find that he does not know. Yet he goes on talking about jackboots.”

Therefore you might say that the basic reason why he wasn’t a Communist was because the Communists weren’t Communists and George Orwell was one.” Like William Morris, he believed that paradise was behind us, in the old ways of life, and in the organic world, rather than ahead of us in an urbanized and industrialized future.

Therefore you might say that the basic reason why he wasn’t a Communist was because the Communists weren’t Communists and George Orwell was one.” Like William Morris, he believed that paradise was behind us, in the old ways of life, and in the organic world, rather than ahead of us in an urbanized and industrialized future.

As a writer, you withdraw and disconnect yourself from the world in order to connect to it in the far-reaching way that is other people elsewhere reading the words that came together in this contemplative state. What is vivid in the writing is not in how it hits the senses but what it does in the imagination; you can describe a battlefield, a birth, a muddy road, or a smell—Orwell would become famous for all the stenches mentioned in his books—but it is still black letters on a white page, with no real blood or mud or boiled cabbage.

As a writer, you withdraw and disconnect yourself from the world in order to connect to it in the far-reaching way that is other people elsewhere reading the words that came together in this contemplative state. What is vivid in the writing is not in how it hits the senses but what it does in the imagination; you can describe a battlefield, a birth, a muddy road, or a smell—Orwell would become famous for all the stenches mentioned in his books—but it is still black letters on a white page, with no real blood or mud or boiled cabbage.

A garden offers the opposite of the disembodied uncertainties of writing. It’s vivid to all the senses, it’s a space of bodily labor, of getting dirty in the best and most literal way, an opportunity to see immediate and unarguable effect. At the end of the day if you dug, how much you dug is as clear and definite as is the number of eggs collected from the chickens.

A garden offers the opposite of the disembodied uncertainties of writing. It’s vivid to all the senses, it’s a space of bodily labor, of getting dirty in the best and most literal way, an opportunity to see immediate and unarguable effect. At the end of the day if you dug, how much you dug is as clear and definite as is the number of eggs collected from the chickens.

In an age of lies and illusions, the garden is one way to ground yourself in the realm of the processes of growth and the passage of time, the rules of physics, meteorology, hydrology, and biology, and the realms of the senses.

Part of the delight of my garden is that you just get lost in it before you’ve even started to do anything. I walk out to my backyard garden at certain times of the year and I can’t get 30 feet without stopping for 20 minutes because the goumis need trimming. And then I watch the wasps and notice that the lavender and the thyme right next to it need weeding. I love how my garden is very productive outside of the logic of productivity—it makes a lot of stuff that’s edible and nourishing and all that, but it’s also ‘productive’ in ways you wouldn’t think necessarily to measure.”

Part of the delight of my garden is that you just get lost in it before you’ve even started to do anything. I walk out to my backyard garden at certain times of the year and I can’t get 30 feet without stopping for 20 minutes because the goumis need trimming. And then I watch the wasps and notice that the lavender and the thyme right next to it need weeding. I love how my garden is very productive outside of the logic of productivity—it makes a lot of stuff that’s edible and nourishing and all that, but it’s also ‘productive’ in ways you wouldn’t think necessarily to measure.”

“Watching the things of the world come apart and recombine is core Zen work and the fundamental anchorage of every gardener’s life.”

“Watching the things of the world come apart and recombine is core Zen work and the fundamental anchorage of every gardener’s life.”

garden fertility comes out of “the discarded waste of our lives.” Kylie Tseng, a young climate activist I know, inscribed on her well-built compost bin, “Death is never an ending in nature.” And because a garden is always a place of becoming, to make and tend one is a gesture of hope, that these seeds planted will sprout and grow, this tree will bear fruit, that spring will come, and so, probably, will some kind of harvest. It’s an activity deeply invested in the future.

garden fertility comes out of “the discarded waste of our lives.” Kylie Tseng, a young climate activist I know, inscribed on her well-built compost bin, “Death is never an ending in nature.” And because a garden is always a place of becoming, to make and tend one is a gesture of hope, that these seeds planted will sprout and grow, this tree will bear fruit, that spring will come, and so, probably, will some kind of harvest. It’s an activity deeply invested in the future.

The distinction between happiness, which is often imagined as a steady state, like endless sunshine, and joy, which flashes up like lightning, is important. Happiness seems to require having a well-ordered life avoiding difficulty or discord, while joy can and does show up anywhere, often unexpectedly.

The distinction between happiness, which is often imagined as a steady state, like endless sunshine, and joy, which flashes up like lightning, is important. Happiness seems to require having a well-ordered life avoiding difficulty or discord, while joy can and does show up anywhere, often unexpectedly.

“Joy remakes people through combat with forces of subjection [i.e., subjugation]. Joy is a desubjectifying process, an unfixing, an intensification of life itself. It is a process of coming alive and coming apart. Whereas happiness is used as a numbing anesthetic that induces dependence, joy is the growth of people’s capacity to do and feel new things, in ways that can break this dependence.”

“Joy remakes people through combat with forces of subjection [i.e., subjugation]. Joy is a desubjectifying process, an unfixing, an intensification of life itself. It is a process of coming alive and coming apart. Whereas happiness is used as a numbing anesthetic that induces dependence, joy is the growth of people’s capacity to do and feel new things, in ways that can break this dependence.”

That invisibility or that obliviousness is one of the defining conditions of the modern world. Orwell was rectifying this obliviousness when he went up north to meet the working class out of work and down in the mines and to bear witness to that foundational commodity, coal, and the conditions of its extraction. To go down into the earth is to travel back in time, and to excavate it is to drag the past into the present, a process mining has done on a scale so colossal it’s changed the earth all the way up to the upper atmosphere. You can tell this story as a labor story, but you can also tell it as an ecological story, and the two dovetail in the end, as a story of devastation.

That invisibility or that obliviousness is one of the defining conditions of the modern world. Orwell was rectifying this obliviousness when he went up north to meet the working class out of work and down in the mines and to bear witness to that foundational commodity, coal, and the conditions of its extraction. To go down into the earth is to travel back in time, and to excavate it is to drag the past into the present, a process mining has done on a scale so colossal it’s changed the earth all the way up to the upper atmosphere. You can tell this story as a labor story, but you can also tell it as an ecological story, and the two dovetail in the end, as a story of devastation.

Usually when plants die, much of their carbon returns to the atmosphere by decay or other transformation, including burning, and it bonds with oxygen to form carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, a heat-trapping part of the atmosphere. But in the Carboniferous, vast amounts of carbon dioxide taken out of the air by plants did not return. The cycle was broken. As dead plant matter, the carbon went into the swamps and water-soaked earth and became peat. The peat over eons compressed, dried out, and became coal. In boggy places around the earth, the process of peat formation is still going on, and peat bogs, most notably in Ireland, hold huge amounts of carbon.

Usually when plants die, much of their carbon returns to the atmosphere by decay or other transformation, including burning, and it bonds with oxygen to form carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, a heat-trapping part of the atmosphere. But in the Carboniferous, vast amounts of carbon dioxide taken out of the air by plants did not return. The cycle was broken. As dead plant matter, the carbon went into the swamps and water-soaked earth and became peat. The peat over eons compressed, dried out, and became coal. In boggy places around the earth, the process of peat formation is still going on, and peat bogs, most notably in Ireland, hold huge amounts of carbon.

“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.”

“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.”

In 1800, Britain mined and used 10 million metric tons of coal; by 1853, that had risen to 71 million tons, peaking at 292 million tons in 1913. By 1920, more than one in twenty British workers was in coal, and the country was still mining and using 232 million tons in 1936, when Orwell went to Wigan. In 2015, the last deep coal mine closed; by 2017, coal production had dropped to 3 million tons; and in 2019, the country went a fortnight without using coal to generate power for the first time since 1882.

In 1800, Britain mined and used 10 million metric tons of coal; by 1853, that had risen to 71 million tons, peaking at 292 million tons in 1913. By 1920, more than one in twenty British workers was in coal, and the country was still mining and using 232 million tons in 1936, when Orwell went to Wigan. In 2015, the last deep coal mine closed; by 2017, coal production had dropped to 3 million tons; and in 2019, the country went a fortnight without using coal to generate power for the first time since 1882.

The beauty of roses may lie in part in their tenderness, in the petals as soft as the cheek of a child—a youthful complexion was once described as “blooming.” The petals of this domesticated flower are fleshy without being thick or tough like a magnolia petal, delicate without being as frail as one of the wildflowers that wilts as soon as you pick it, and this quality that resembles human skin lasts as they lose their crispness and sag, as though gravity first arrived in middle age, before their smoothness erodes into tiny wrinkles that fracture the smooth surface as the flower begins to wither in earnest. 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.

The beauty of roses may lie in part in their tenderness, in the petals as soft as the cheek of a child—a youthful complexion was once described as “blooming.” The petals of this domesticated flower are fleshy without being thick or tough like a magnolia petal, delicate without being as frail as one of the wildflowers that wilts as soon as you pick it, and this quality that resembles human skin lasts as they lose their crispness and sag, as though gravity first arrived in middle age, before their smoothness erodes into tiny wrinkles that fracture the smooth surface as the flower begins to wither in earnest. 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.

Fresh is another word that indicates youth, newness, but also mortality or transience. Something that will never fade or die was never fresh.

Fresh is another word that indicates youth, newness, but also mortality or transience. Something that will never fade or die was never fresh.

The beauty of flowers is not merely visual; it’s metaphysical, and tactile, and with many of them olfactory: they can be smelled and touched and sometimes tasted. Some lead to fruit or seeds or other bounty humans value or even depend upon, so a flower is also a promise. You look at a flower at one stage and know that other stages came before and will come after. The beauty of roses may also lie in the way they are appealing at every phase from bud to dried and dead, and that their fading is slow and graceful. Camelias in full bloom have a form close to roses, but they go briskly from hard bud to wide-open flower to a brown sodden mess that drops from the stem to rot on the ground, and a lot of other flowers also decline this way. “Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds,” but roses rarely fester.

The beauty of flowers is not merely visual; it’s metaphysical, and tactile, and with many of them olfactory: they can be smelled and touched and sometimes tasted. Some lead to fruit or seeds or other bounty humans value or even depend upon, so a flower is also a promise. You look at a flower at one stage and know that other stages came before and will come after. The beauty of roses may also lie in the way they are appealing at every phase from bud to dried and dead, and that their fading is slow and graceful. Camelias in full bloom have a form close to roses, but they go briskly from hard bud to wide-open flower to a brown sodden mess that drops from the stem to rot on the ground, and a lot of other flowers also decline this way. “Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds,” but roses rarely fester.

Dante at the end of his Divine Comedy journeys through a series of concentric rings to a great rose that is the heart of Paradise itself. He addresses the Virgin Mary, who was often represented as a rose: Within your womb was lit once more the flame Of that love through whose warmth this flower opened To its full bloom in everlasting peace.

Dante at the end of his Divine Comedy journeys through a series of concentric rings to a great rose that is the heart of Paradise itself. He addresses the Virgin Mary, who was often represented as a rose: Within your womb was lit once more the flame Of that love through whose warmth this flower opened To its full bloom in everlasting peace.

In Mexico, roses have a particular significance as the flower that cascaded forth from Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin’s coarse-woven cloak on December 12, 1531, only a decade after the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire.

In Mexico, roses have a particular significance as the flower that cascaded forth from Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin’s coarse-woven cloak on December 12, 1531, only a decade after the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire.

women’s votes would “go toward helping forward the time when life’s Bread, which is home, shelter and security, and the Roses of life, music, education, nature and books, shall be the heritage of every child that is born in the country, in the government of which she has a voice. There will be no prisons, no scaffolds, no children in factories, no girls driven on the street to earn their bread, in the day when there shall be ‘Bread for all, and Roses too.’ ”

women’s votes would “go toward helping forward the time when life’s Bread, which is home, shelter and security, and the Roses of life, music, education, nature and books, shall be the heritage of every child that is born in the country, in the government of which she has a voice. There will be no prisons, no scaffolds, no children in factories, no girls driven on the street to earn their bread, in the day when there shall be ‘Bread for all, and Roses too.’ ”

Bread fed the body, roses fed something subtler: not just hearts, but imaginations, psyches, senses, identities. It was a pretty slogan but a fierce argument that more than survival and bodily well-being were needed and were being demanded as a right. It was equally an argument against the idea that everything that human beings need can be reduced to quantifiable, tangible goods and conditions. Roses in these declarations stood for the way that human beings are complex, desires are irreducible, that what sustains us is often subtle and elusive.

Bread fed the body, roses fed something subtler: not just hearts, but imaginations, psyches, senses, identities. It was a pretty slogan but a fierce argument that more than survival and bodily well-being were needed and were being demanded as a right. It was equally an argument against the idea that everything that human beings need can be reduced to quantifiable, tangible goods and conditions. Roses in these declarations stood for the way that human beings are complex, desires are irreducible, that what sustains us is often subtle and elusive.

The Vermeer paintings have nothing, of course, to say directly about war or justice or the law or how you fix your society; they tell no news and propagandize no cause. In Diana and Her Nymphs, a kneeling woman washes another’s feet while two others look on, and one turns her back, a plebeian moment among divinities. Weschler notes that Vermeer worked in a turbulent, war-plagued time, and that “the pressure of all that violence (remembered, imagined, foreseen) is what those paintings are all about” but that they are about it by being its opposite, about the peace we crave in times of war, the stillness in uproar, about the persistence of the everyday and its beauty.

The Vermeer paintings have nothing, of course, to say directly about war or justice or the law or how you fix your society; they tell no news and propagandize no cause. In Diana and Her Nymphs, a kneeling woman washes another’s feet while two others look on, and one turns her back, a plebeian moment among divinities. Weschler notes that Vermeer worked in a turbulent, war-plagued time, and that “the pressure of all that violence (remembered, imagined, foreseen) is what those paintings are all about” but that they are about it by being its opposite, about the peace we crave in times of war, the stillness in uproar, about the persistence of the everyday and its beauty.

the least political art may give us something that lets us plunge into politics, that human beings need reinforcement and refuge, that pleasure does not necessarily seduce us from the tasks at hand but can fortify us. The pleasure that is beauty, the beauty that is meaning, order, calm. Orwell found this refuge in natural and domestic spaces, and he repaired to them often and emerged from them often to go to war on lies, delusions, cruelties, and follies—and to go to war as a soldier in Spain. In his essay on T. S. Eliot he famously noted that “all art is to some extent propaganda,” insofar as propaganda is advocacy, and every artist’s choices are a kind of advocacy for what matters, what deserves attention, but he was opposed to propaganda in the sense that Blunt called for it: as art and artists subservient to a party’s or state’s agenda. Elsewhere he wrote, “There is no such thing as genuinely non-political literature.”

the least political art may give us something that lets us plunge into politics, that human beings need reinforcement and refuge, that pleasure does not necessarily seduce us from the tasks at hand but can fortify us. The pleasure that is beauty, the beauty that is meaning, order, calm. Orwell found this refuge in natural and domestic spaces, and he repaired to them often and emerged from them often to go to war on lies, delusions, cruelties, and follies—and to go to war as a soldier in Spain. In his essay on T. S. Eliot he famously noted that “all art is to some extent propaganda,” insofar as propaganda is advocacy, and every artist’s choices are a kind of advocacy for what matters, what deserves attention, but he was opposed to propaganda in the sense that Blunt called for it: as art and artists subservient to a party’s or state’s agenda. Elsewhere he wrote, “There is no such thing as genuinely non-political literature.”

Gazing upon the walls filled with images of auto assembly lines and workers dwarfed by machinery, I realized that capitalists and communists of the era shared a devotion to mechanization and to industrialization as phenomena that would allow human beings to transcend the limits of nature. While they disagreed about the ideal structure of society, they agreed about humanity’s destiny in crucial respects. That belief in science and technology as means to dominate the natural world and the misplaced confidence that those in charge would deploy those forces wisely were crucial to modernism. Avant-garde artists, communists, technicians, and capitalists of the era shared a vision that looked forward to a shining future. Looking back it seems like hubris and dangerous delusion.

Gazing upon the walls filled with images of auto assembly lines and workers dwarfed by machinery, I realized that capitalists and communists of the era shared a devotion to mechanization and to industrialization as phenomena that would allow human beings to transcend the limits of nature. While they disagreed about the ideal structure of society, they agreed about humanity’s destiny in crucial respects. That belief in science and technology as means to dominate the natural world and the misplaced confidence that those in charge would deploy those forces wisely were crucial to modernism. Avant-garde artists, communists, technicians, and capitalists of the era shared a vision that looked forward to a shining future. Looking back it seems like hubris and dangerous delusion.

The collapse of modernism and that hubris had many causes, including the rise in audibility of nonwhite and nonwestern voices, but environmental science and politics were key ingredients too. Environmentalists look at where human activity harms the natural world and seek to reverse or prevent that harm. They recognize what is reckless, shortsighted, and destructive about our species and suggest caution is due in all our actions and respect for the nonhuman world is essential to human survival.

The collapse of modernism and that hubris had many causes, including the rise in audibility of nonwhite and nonwestern voices, but environmental science and politics were key ingredients too. Environmentalists look at where human activity harms the natural world and seek to reverse or prevent that harm. They recognize what is reckless, shortsighted, and destructive about our species and suggest caution is due in all our actions and respect for the nonhuman world is essential to human survival.

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.”

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. Bread can be managed by authoritarian regimes, but roses are something individuals must be free to find for themselves, discovered and cultivated rather than prescribed. “We know only that the imagination, like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity,” Orwell declares at the end of “The Prevention of Literature,” and the roses in “bread and roses” mean a kind of freedom that flourishes with privacy and independence.

A society seeking to reinvent human nature wants to reach down into every psyche and rearrange it. Bread can be managed by authoritarian regimes, but roses are something individuals must be free to find for themselves, discovered and cultivated rather than prescribed. “We know only that the imagination, like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity,” Orwell declares at the end of “The Prevention of Literature,” and the roses in “bread and roses” mean a kind of freedom that flourishes with privacy and independence.

one last dismissal of utopia: “They wanted to produce a perfect society by an endless continuation of something that had only been valuable because it was temporary.” That is, they wanted to fix and control something that was of its essence fluid and uncontrollable, like desire, like joy. They wanted to make roses into bread, or win the bread and throw away the roses.

one last dismissal of utopia: “They wanted to produce a perfect society by an endless continuation of something that had only been valuable because it was temporary.” That is, they wanted to fix and control something that was of its essence fluid and uncontrollable, like desire, like joy. They wanted to make roses into bread, or win the bread and throw away the roses.

“One realized afterwards that one had been in contact with something strange and valuable. One had been in a community where hope was more normal than apathy or cynicism, where the word ‘comrade’ stood for comradeship and not, as in most countries, for humbug. One had breathed the air of equality.” This is another kind of joy that matters in his work, the joy in ideals affirmed and realized, in solidarity, in spirit, in possibility, in meaning. The absence of all those things is the everyday condition of life in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

“One realized afterwards that one had been in contact with something strange and valuable. One had been in a community where hope was more normal than apathy or cynicism, where the word ‘comrade’ stood for comradeship and not, as in most countries, for humbug. One had breathed the air of equality.” This is another kind of joy that matters in his work, the joy in ideals affirmed and realized, in solidarity, in spirit, in possibility, in meaning. The absence of all those things is the everyday condition of life in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

the 106-acre quaking aspen forest in Utah whose forty thousand or so trees share a common root system, are essentially clones of one another, and constitute a single organism larger than any other on Earth and about eighty thousand years old. Or with the underground mycorrhizal networks sometimes called the wood wide web that connect trees to one another in forests, circulating nutrients and information that make some forests a communicating community of not-so-individual trees.

the 106-acre quaking aspen forest in Utah whose forty thousand or so trees share a common root system, are essentially clones of one another, and constitute a single organism larger than any other on Earth and about eighty thousand years old. Or with the underground mycorrhizal networks sometimes called the wood wide web that connect trees to one another in forests, circulating nutrients and information that make some forests a communicating community of not-so-individual trees.

There was a broad and deep belief in the first two thirds of the twentieth century that everyone and everything could be reinvented, that the old ways could be swept away, the past forgotten, the future controlled, human nature reshaped, and it often was yoked to the idea that an elite—sometimes an elite of scientists, sometimes of politicians—could be trusted with these immense transformations. Eugenics was in its own way, like Lamarckism, an idea that human beings could be pressed into perfection, a monstrous means justified by dubiously utopian ends. Many then seemed to believe that human nature, as psychology as well as biology, was malleable enough that the way humans lived and thought and loved and worked could be reinvented.

There was a broad and deep belief in the first two thirds of the twentieth century that everyone and everything could be reinvented, that the old ways could be swept away, the past forgotten, the future controlled, human nature reshaped, and it often was yoked to the idea that an elite—sometimes an elite of scientists, sometimes of politicians—could be trusted with these immense transformations. Eugenics was in its own way, like Lamarckism, an idea that human beings could be pressed into perfection, a monstrous means justified by dubiously utopian ends. Many then seemed to believe that human nature, as psychology as well as biology, was malleable enough that the way humans lived and thought and loved and worked could be reinvented.

Behind that is the question of how much he lied to himself while he forced everyone around him to lie about everything. Did he lose sight of the falsity as he commanded the nation to obey his dictates? What did it mean to be the enforcer of lies, to prop up illusions and conceal brutal realities, to demand obedience to a version of reality that was a result of your orders and suppressions rather than the data?

Behind that is the question of how much he lied to himself while he forced everyone around him to lie about everything. Did he lose sight of the falsity as he commanded the nation to obey his dictates? What did it mean to be the enforcer of lies, to prop up illusions and conceal brutal realities, to demand obedience to a version of reality that was a result of your orders and suppressions rather than the data?

Books were banned, facts were banned, poets were banned, ideas were banned. It was an empire of lies. The lies—the assault on language—were the necessary foundation for all the other assaults.

Books were banned, facts were banned, poets were banned, ideas were banned. It was an empire of lies. The lies—the assault on language—were the necessary foundation for all the other assaults.

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,”

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,”framework that would morph into Big Brother’s “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”

a framework that would morph into Big Brother’s “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”

authoritarianism is itself, like eugenics, a kind of elitism premised on the idea that power should be distributed unequally.

authoritarianism is itself, like eugenics, a kind of elitism premised on the idea that power should be distributed unequally.

“between 1725 and 1825 nearly four thousand enclosure acts appropriated more than six million acres of land, about a quarter of cultivated acreage, to the politically dominant landowners. . . . It got rid of open-field villages and common rights and contributed to the late eighteenth century’s crisis of poverty.”

“between 1725 and 1825 nearly four thousand enclosure acts appropriated more than six million acres of land, about a quarter of cultivated acreage, to the politically dominant landowners. . . . It got rid of open-field villages and common rights and contributed to the late eighteenth century’s crisis of poverty.”