"Orwell's Roses"

[fiefoe]

This turns out to be a most discursive biography of the titular writer, who is dismally prophetic in light of what 简中 is going through, so much so that I don't think I'll be able to read him anytime soon. Rebecca Solnit seems to be a very conscientious person.

• 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.
• The surrealist artist Man Ray fled Europe and Nazis in 1940 and spent the next decade in California. During the Second World War, 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.
• There’s an Etruscan word, saeculum, that describes the span of time lived by the oldest person present, ... 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.
• am not suggesting that one can discharge all one’s obligations towards society by means of a private re-afforestation scheme. Still, it might not be a bad idea, every time you commit an antisocial act, to make a note of it in your diary, and then, at the appropriate season, push an acorn into the ground.” The essay took a tone common in his work, traveling nonchalantly from particulars to generalities, and from the minor to the major—in this case from one particular apple tree to universal questions of redemption and legacies.
• I agreed to go onward to Manchester so as not to spurn the north, and to Cambridge to have a public conversation with my old friend and fellow writer Rob Macfarlane.
• They were roses, and they were saboteurs of my own long acceptance of a conventional version of Orwell and invitations to dig deeper. They were questions about who he was and who we were and where pleasure and beauty and hours with no quantifiable practical result fit into the life of someone, perhaps of anyone, who also cared about justice and truth and human rights and how to change the world.
• During the Second World War, Britain’s Ministry of Food (where Orwell’s wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy Blair, worked) launched rose hip–gathering campaigns to try to supply vitamin C to a nation cut off from imported foods, notably citrus. By 1942, two hundred tons, equivalent to 134 million hips, were reportedly gathered, mostly to be made into syrup, but the ministry also put out recipes for homemade rose hip marmalade,
• she touches on the life of Jacques Lusseyran, who was blinded as a child and at seventeen became an organizer in the Resistance in Paris during the Second World War. “What impressed me as much as his heroic activity was the pause that preceded it,”
• Oxenhandler and Lusseyran suggest that you might prepare for your central mission in life by doing other things that may seem entirely unrelated, and how necessary this may be.
• 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.
• Slashing away at others seemed to be a means of self-definition and self-enhancement that faded away as he grew more confident and more humane as a writer and a person. 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. Even there, of course, biases and blind spots are scattered.
• He would become immensely famous for sentences such as this one in Nineteen Eighty-Four: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.” He is much admired for sentences about the use and abuse of language such as this, from 1946: “Political language . . . is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
• he came across a corpse near the footbridge that was one of the last unbombed bridges across the river through Stuttgart: “A dead German soldier was lying supine at the foot of the steps. His face was a waxy yellow. On his breast someone had laid a bunch of the lilac which was blooming everywhere.” ...The lilacs don’t negate the corpse or the war but they complicate it, as the specific often does the general.
• As a poor man with few options for intimacy, he often relied upon parks and the rural outdoors as locations for sexual activity, a practice reflected in his novels Keep the Aspidistra Flying
• (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.) That aunt, Helene Limouzin, called Nellie, was a suffragist, a socialist (probably the first one he knew), a bohemian, an actress, ... When he was very young, Aunt Nellie introduced him to the first serious writer he met, E. Nesbit, who was known for her rambunctious novels for children, but who was also a cofounder of the democratic socialist group the Fabian Society.
• To spend time frequently with these direct experiences is clarifying, a way of stepping out of the whirlpools of words and the confusion they can whip up. 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.
• He fed from the earth, like Antaeus.”
• And he described the scarring of their faces: they often banged their heads on the low ceilings of the mines, and these workplace cuts were turned into blue tattoos by the coal dust embedded in them, so that “some of the older men have their foreheads veined with it like Roquefort cheese.”
• “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. In 1931, a cheerily brutal book, New Russia’s Primer: The Story of the Five-Year Plan,
• In the year 1924, a woman photographed roses. Despite the few prints Tina Modotti made from her large-format negative, the image became one of the most celebrated in the history of photography.
• the phrase that was to become a refrain for the suffrage movement, the labor movement, and then for radicals of the 1970s and after, declaring that 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,
• The Bible’s prescribed supplement to bread was the word of God, with perhaps the implication that all you needed on this earth was that bread because your joy and solace lay elsewhere. The roses in “bread and roses” can be heard as an explicit rejection of religion as the other half of human need, a proposal for its replacement by the joys and comforts of this world rather than the next.
• The poem was set to music not long after its creation. In the 1930s, seniors at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts incorporated the song into their graduation rites.
• In a 2005 essay by Lawrence Weschler titled “Vermeer in Bosnia,” a judge in The Hague how he could stand to listen to the stories of atrocities day after day in the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia of the mid-1990s. The judge, reports Weschler, brightened as he answered: “As often as possible I make my way over to the Mauritshuis museum, in the center of town, so as to spend a little time with the Vermeers.”
• Weschler’s essay suggests that 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.
• 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,
• Orwell defended both the literal green spaces of the countryside and the garden in which he spent so much time and the metaphysics of free thought and unpoliced creation.
• “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.
• “It is curious, but till that moment I had never realised what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide.”
• The flints in the fields between Baldock and Wallington were more beautiful than those I had seen before. Covetousness and curiosity seized hold of me, ... There were dozens every square meter, from chips and shards to big irregular lumps weighing several pounds. The latter resembled, at first glance, at least to my eye, small animals and large internal organs. They constituted a dictionary of flint possibilities and I was picking up a vocabulary of form from it.
• But it’s Vavilov whose work lives on through seeds, the ones he found, collected, cultivated, the ones his followers protected in the seed bank during the Siege of Leningrad.
• Stalin’s lemons failed, and though a single tree—an olive, a yew, a sequoia, a sacred fig—may live a millennium or more, the wheat fields around Wallington were reminders that even seeds for annuals or practices like farming could outlast a regime, a dictator, a pack of lies, and a war against science.
• A garden is what you want (and can manage and afford), and what you want is who you are, and who you are is always a political and cultural question.
• The Scottish artist and garden maker Ian Hamilton Finlay once wrote, “Certain gardens are described as retreats when they are really attacks.” The gardens of Orwell are sown with ideas and ideals and fenced around by class and ethnicity and nationality and the assumptions therein, and there are plenty of attacks hovering in the background.
• 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.
• 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.
• The man standing so confidently in an English countryside—or Reynolds’s idealized version thereof—was the owner of plantations and slaves, which did not appear in this painting. Or in other terms, the elegance of the men and their temperate-zone landscape of leisure is underwritten by labor in a brutal industry in the tropics.
• It’s almost the opposite argument of Lawrence Weschler’s “Vermeer in Bosnia,” in which the serenity of Vermeer’s paintings helps a war-crimes-tribunal judge slog through his days and years of listening to perpetrators’ and victims’ tales of atrocity. In that case, the retreat is a refuge from which one goes forth to deal with the reality of cruelty and injustice and suffering; in this, the gardens and country homes are escapes for people avoiding facing suffering and their own complicity in it. Garden retreats, garden attacks.
• The profound confinement of slavery and the labor-intensive sugar plantations haunt places so superficially antithetical they serve almost as alibis: the landscapes of scenic beauty that seem to have nothing to do with manipulation, labor, production, and politics. In that sense, the apoliticalness of nature was itself a political production.
• Teak forests near a coast, fields of sugarcane on an island, and opium poppies in the center of a continent, landscapes of labor and exploitation stretched around the world, often and maybe usually invisible to their distant beneficiaries. I don’t believe in ancestral guilt, but I do believe in inheritance, and Orwell came from people who benefited from the imperial enterprise and the domestic hierarchies and who sometimes held real power.
• Some think Ralph Lauren launched the current chintz blitz by using the material last year for both home furnishings and clothes.” That’s when they caught my eye and stirred a longing in me, a kind of desire to possess not just the roses or whatever pillowcase or jacket they were on but to taste what they seemed to promise: a certain kind of comfortableness, confidence, solidity, and rootedness that was inseparable from a particular kind of Anglophilia.
• These rose-strewn clothes and cushions and linens were like the sweets you both crave and are a little sickened by even before you bite into them. They beckoned from afar with promises about the place they belonged to, which was a place I never did or would. Perhaps their distance was in time: they beckoned from a never-never land of an idealized past, the past of the pastoral and paradise. But paradise is a walled garden, defined in part by what it shut out.
• It is less that these things are authentically desirable than that our desires have been pruned and trained and cultivated so as to turn toward them the way a sunflower tilts to the sun, and the force of that desire is authentic even if its origin is manipulated.
• Lauren made explicit what was implicit in these textile images: their ties to a particular sector, one that he had no qualms trying to enter or, rather, to reinvent with himself as at the center of an empire invoking safaris, polo, aristocracy, heritage, devaluing its putative essence by reinventing it as surface.
• Polo was a Persian and Indian game before the British picked it up. Calico comes from the coastal Indian city of Calicut, from which Europeans exported spices as well as the light cotton fabric. The word chintz first appeared in English in seventeenth-century records of the East India Company and seems to come from a Hindi word meaning spray or sprinkle.
• Even the models for all those English chintz roses were likely new breeds crossed with the roses that came from China, roses that had, as most European roses did not at the time, the capacity to bloom and bloom for months rather than in one burst. The seventeenth-century poet Robert Herrick’s famous lines “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may / Old time is still a-flying” are about the old varieties of roses that bloomed briefly in the spring.
• I wasn’t sure if the act of acquiring was one of submission or conquest or a nebulous mixture of both, and I too bought some tea and went to a similarly thronged Liberty of London and bought some floral fabric.
• (Jamaica Kincaid:) All they see is some frumpy, wrinkled-up person passing by in a carriage waving at a crowd. But what I see is the millions of people, of whom I am just one, made orphans: no motherland, no fatherland, no gods, no mounds of earth for holy ground, no excess of love which might lead to the things that an excess of love sometimes brings, and worst and most painful of all, no tongue.”
• Sentences such as “Almost as if ashamed of the revulsion and hostility they have for foreign people, the English make up for it by loving and embracing foreign plants wholesale” are brisk declarations of war, or rather recognitions of old wars in many forms, including botany, gardens, names, and ideas of the beautiful and the just.
• The thorns were never far away. Strands of twine stretched from wooden posts held the stems in place, and there was a sense of crowding, of compression, of repetition, and almost of confusion from so many roses in so many rows stretching so far that vanishing point perspective came in and you could see roses and poles and support beams getting smaller and smaller in the distance that was still inside the plastic greenhouse.
• don’t know how I’d learned long ago that the conditions that produced the roses for sale in supermarkets and florists were disturbing, but they had made these roses, for me, items where the tension between what something looks like and what it means as a product of labor and industry was particularly strong.
• How many aspects of a thing can you strip away before it ceases to be what it is called; when does something cease to be itself and become something else; when does meaning fall apart or definition stretch until it shreds?
• Scent is a kind of voice, a way in which flowers speak—“caresses floating in the air,” the poet Rainer Maria Rilke called it. Say it with flowers; these were mute.
• In his 1946 essay “The Prevention of Literature,” Orwell writes that lies are “integral to totalitarianism, something that would still continue even if concentration camps and secret police forces had ceased to be necessary.” To have total power is to have power over truth and fact and history and to reach for it over dreams and thoughts and emotions. He continues, “From the totalitarian point of view history is something to be created rather than learned. A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy,
• Smith’s colleague at the Ministry of Truth, whose task it is to shrivel the language, declares, “Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.” Each word is a set of relationships, direct and indirect, a species in an ecosystem. The death of a word thins out a language and the possibilities of thought. Eventually the system collapses into ruins as thinking becomes impossible, the way an ecosystem collapses when key species become extinct.
• credo: “But I could not do the work of writing a book, or even a long magazine article, if it were not also an aesthetic experience. Anyone who cares to examine my work will see that even when it is downright propaganda it contains much that a full-time politician would consider irrelevant. I am not able, and do not want, completely to abandon the world view that I acquired in childhood. So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information.” What might be considered irrelevant is a series of pleasures and personal commitments, akin to the roses in “bread and roses.”
• he obtained a supply of streptomycin, a new drug being used to treat TB in the United States, not yet available to patients in Britain. Perhaps because his doctors had no experience with the medicine, he took a high daily dose that made his skin turn red and flake off, his hair and nails come out, and ulcers appear in his mouth that bled in the night so that his mouth was glued shut with dried blood every morning.
• The fishing pole, like the trees and roses he planted, the son he adopted, and maybe the marriage he embarked upon from a hospital bed, seems like a gesture of hope, not that the future was certain, but that it was worth reaching for.