I have fond memories of reading his essays, notably Shooting an Elephant [1]. They left a vivid impression on me when I was younger.
[1] https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
Orwell’s Escape
11–20 of 45 posts
Re: Orwell’s Escape
#12I did not like the article, it was like the author was trying to connect the environment Orwell experienced to the book. IMO this is just guesswork, speculation and worst of all denying the author the intellectual prowess. Think about it, if you were to write a book you would not want the circumstances to affect the work and you’d be conscious about it. Saying that author somehow slipped in text because of the condit…
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Re: Orwell’s Escape
#13The article argues that Orwell’s greatest fear wasn’t torture or totalitarianism, but the loss of solitude, and he fled to Jura Island to preserve his inner life.
If he thought solitude was hard to obtain then, one can only imagine his reaction to today's constant connectivity.
I'm sure many people do their best thinking collectively, but I'm with Orwell, and value long periods of solitude and nurturing my inner life.
It seems to be a theme lately. One of the big ideas in Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu is that the only defense against the all-seeing-all-knowing superior being who intends to crush humanity like bugs is the inner thoughts of the Wallfacers.
Individuals must preserve their inner lives against constant assault by not only the state, but by bosses, coworkers, advertisers, friends and family. Maybe most modern psychological, social and even political problems can be traced to the collapse of individual interiority into the collective hivemind of social media and political parties.
The enemy isn’t Big Brother, the enemy is everyone.
Re: Orwell’s Escape
#14I have fond memories of reading his essays, notably Shooting an Elephant [1]. They left a vivid impression on me when I was younger. [1] https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
Thanks! Also read this story decades ago as a young man and it left a strong impression. More then once brought it up as a metaphor in a conversation. For some reason my memory attributed it to Kipling and a few times tried to find it and never could, now I know why, it was Orwell!
Re: Orwell’s Escape
#15The article argues that Orwell’s greatest fear wasn’t torture or totalitarianism, but the loss of solitude, and he fled to Jura Island to preserve his inner life. If he thought solitude was hard to obtain then, one can only imagine his reaction to today's constant connectivity. I'm sure many people do their best thinking collectively, but I'm with Orwell, and value long periods of solitude and nurturing my inner life…
Your comment resonates with me, and is better worded than I would have.
Re: Orwell’s Escape
#16The article argues that Orwell’s greatest fear wasn’t torture or totalitarianism, but the loss of solitude, and he fled to Jura Island to preserve his inner life. If he thought solitude was hard to obtain then, one can only imagine his reaction to today's constant connectivity. I'm sure many people do their best thinking collectively, but I'm with Orwell, and value long periods of solitude and nurturing my inner life…
Sure but you need to be careful not to reflexively reach for modern-style revanchist individualism as the solution. All of our notable achievements have been the result of people acting together, and maintaining a collaborative, even collectivist approach is reconcilable with deeply private individual inner lives.
Not that, reading your comment, I think you're approaching it that way. But I could easily imagine someone reading this and being like "yes exactly that's why libertarianism" or whatever.
Re: Orwell’s Escape
#17The article argues that Orwell’s greatest fear wasn’t torture or totalitarianism, but the loss of solitude, and he fled to Jura Island to preserve his inner life. If he thought solitude was hard to obtain then, one can only imagine his reaction to today's constant connectivity. I'm sure many people do their best thinking collectively, but I'm with Orwell, and value long periods of solitude and nurturing my inner life…
> "terror at the thought of never being alone"
Yea, I think the very concept of this will be very difficult for anyone who's childhood was in the internet era.
I mean, imagine the horror of turning the cell phone off 8-)
Re: Orwell’s Escape
#18I did not like the article, it was like the author was trying to connect the environment Orwell experienced to the book. IMO this is just guesswork, speculation and worst of all denying the author the intellectual prowess. Think about it, if you were to write a book you would not want the circumstances to affect the work and you’d be conscious about it. Saying that author somehow slipped in text because of the condit…
If you read much Orwell, you'll see most of the elements that went into 1984 are present in his earlier writing as well.
"Such, Such Were the Joys" is obvious; other influences I recall are bits of "You and the Atomic Bomb", Down and Out.., Homage..., "Notes on Nationalism", "The Spike" and probably a few I'm forgetting.
What surprises me is how many people think Smith is meant as a sympathetic character; recall what crimes he's willing to commit!
Re: Orwell’s Escape
#19>>> In place of anything like a novel proper, we get a would-be bildungsroman breaking through to the surface in disparate fragments. These scraps are Winston’s yearnings, memories, sensual instincts, which have, as yet, somehow gone unmurdered by the regime. The entire state-sponsored enterprise of Pavlovian sadism in Oceania is devoted to snuffing out this remnant interiority.
The details of Orwell's life were interesting, but the above-quoted paragraph lands as highbrow prose that doesn't say much. I had to look up bildungsroman "A novel whose principal subject is the moral, psychological, and intellectual development of a usually youthful main character". Oh my. It was/is a proper novel. I disagree that it should be characterized as bildungsroman, with all the caveats and flourishes. In fact, it's more about the protagonist's discovery of the truly moral depravity of the culture he lives in. The creative element of the ugliness of the culture is made even more compelling for me by the fact that the storyline avoids the conventional "Shape of Stories" patterns described by Kurt Vonnegut. It ends with the protagonist having all creative life and individuality crushed out of him. Not an easy end to encompass. No happy ending here.
Re: Orwell’s Escape
#20I did not like the article, it was like the author was trying to connect the environment Orwell experienced to the book. IMO this is just guesswork, speculation and worst of all denying the author the intellectual prowess. Think about it, if you were to write a book you would not want the circumstances to affect the work and you’d be conscious about it. Saying that author somehow slipped in text because of the condit…
It's really not subtle. Both 1984 and Animal Farm are critiques of the Soviet Union from the left. Orwell fought on the side of the anarchists in the Spanish Civil War and the betrayal by the Soviet Union soured him on the prospect of its interpretation of communism. This doesn't even require reading his biography, he explicitly wrote about his experiences in Homage to Catalonia.
Where it falls apart is when people try to analyze his works as critiques of communism from the right because while he hated the Soviet Union, that didn't make him anti-communist, quite the opposite. Maybe this explains why his works still resonate with people (at least by pop cultural reference, as most people citing 1984 don't seem to have actually read it): because they're critiques from the left, they also lend themselves to critiquing capitalism (surveillance capitalism and tepid liberalism in particular).