The idea of an immense airplane whose sole freight was roses burning its carbon and rushing high over the Caribbean to deliver its burden to people who would never know of all that lay behind the roses they picked up in the supermarket was maybe as perfect an emblem of alienation as you could find. Could roses be more uprooted? “It is only very rarely, when I make a definite mental effort, that I connect this coal with that far-off labour in the mines,” Orwell had written of the stuff he burned at home, and it was even more rarely that anyone connected the roses to the toil in these
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The idea of an immense airplane whose sole freight was roses burning its carbon and rushing high over the Caribbean to deliver its burden to people who would never know of all that lay behind the roses they picked up in the supermarket was maybe as perfect an emblem of alienation as you could find. Could roses be more uprooted? “It is only very rarely, when I make a definite mental effort, that I connect this coal with that far-off labour in the mines,” Orwell had written of the stuff he burned at home, and it was even more rarely that anyone connected the roses to the toil in these greenhouses. They were the invisible factories of visual pleasure.
