selene1022 wrote:
> On Jun 25, 7:59 pm, georgeorw... DeleteThis @email.com wrote:
>> On 25 juin, 13:51, selene1022 <selene10... DeleteThis @yahoo.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Moral and mental glaciers melting slightly
>>> Betray the influence of his warm intent.
>>> Because he taught us what the actual meant
>>> The vicious winter grips its prey less tightly.
>>> Happy 104th EAB...
>> a little copy and paste from my site:
>>
>> George Orwell
>> by Robert Conquest
>> (1969)
>>
>> Moral and mental glaciers melting slightly
>> Betray the influence of his warm intent.
>> Because he taught us what the actual meant
>> The vicious winter grips its prey less tightly.
>>
>> Not all were grateful for his help, one finds,
>> For how they hated him, who huddled with
>> The comfort of a quick remedial myth
>> Against the cold world and their colder minds.
>>
>> We die of words. For touchstones he restored
>> The real person, real event or thing;
>> -And thus we see not war but suffering
>> As the conjunction to be most abhorred.
>>
>> He shared with a great world, for greater ends,
>> That honesty, a curious cunning virtue
>> You share with just the few who don't desert you.
>> A dozen writers, half-a-dozen friends.
>>
>> A moral genius. And truth-seeking brings
>> Sometimes a silliness we view askance,
>> Like Darwin playing his bassoon to plants;
>> He too had lapses, but he claimed no wings.
>>
>> While those who drown a truth's empiric part
>> In dithyramb or dogma turn frenetic;
>> -Than whom no writer could be less poetic
>> He left this lesson for all verse, all art.
>>
>> You might agree that at least a few of these lines describe Robert
>> Conquest as well. Have you read this article? :http://opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110009618
>>
>> I randomly checked some June 25 items in the CW, to see if anything
>> special would come up: it seems it was just another day for Orwell.
>> For example 1940 - he went to put his name down for the Home Service
>> Battalions. But here's a lovely entry from his 1946 domestic diary:
>>
>> '25.6.46. Fine till evening, when rain started. Boat arrived this
>> morning, but too wet & sea too rough to fish. Varnished boat &
>> prepared rollers. It is extremely difficult to find straight pieces of
>> timber here. Even when cutting pieces for stool legs, I find that any
>> sizeable & strong branch has a kink in it.
>>
>> 'Another rose, this time a pink one, is out. I suppose this is the dog
>> rose, but it looks a bit different for the English kind - much more
>> stunted, & stems more spiny - & seems to have a faint sweetbriarish
>> scent in both flowers & leaves. I don't think it can be the
>> sweetbriar, which so far as I know never has a flower.
>>
>> 'There is catmint or peppermint all over the place down by the sea.
>> Foxgloves now almost past their best. Today found a mushroom - a
>> "true" mushroom, I think.
>>
>> 'Thinned out radishes & lettuces doing well so long as I can keep the
>> rabbits & slugs off them. Set some more peat into "threes". Total
>> amount we have cut would not be more than 2 cwt.'
>>
>> ah, very much like *my* birthday.
>> B.
>
> Thanks for a reminder of what a nature lover Orwell was. Quiet
> birthdays are the best ones.
>
> As for Conquest, what better tribute for EAB? Not only is RC a fine
> poet, who captured Orwell's essence, he is also one of the last still
> alive who knew him.
>
Rebecca Solnit quotes Orwell elsewhere in *Hope in the Dark* and carries
some of his spirit with her, I think. This especially:
"...Judeo-Christian culture's central story is of Paradise and the Fall.
It is a story of perfection and of loss, and perhaps a deep sense of
loss is contingent upon the belief in perfection. Conservatives
rear-project narratives about how everyone used to be straight,
God-fearing, decently clad, and content with the nuclear family,
narratives that any good reading of history undoes. Activists, even
those who decry Judeo-Christian heritage as our own fall from grace, are
as prone to tell the story of paradise, though their paradise might be
matriarchial or vegan or the flip side of the technological utopia of
classical socialism. And they compare the possible to perfection, again
and again, finding fault with the former because of the latter. Paradise
is imagined as a static place, as a place before or after history, after
strife and eventfulness and change: the premise is that once perfection
has arrived, change is no longer necessary. This idea of perfection is
also why people believe in saving, in going home, and in activism as
crisis response rather than everyday practice.
Moths and other nocturnal insects navigate by the moon and stars. Those
heavenly bodies are useful for them to find their way, even though they
never get far from the surface of the earth. But lightbulbs and candles
send them astray; they fly into the heat or the flame and die. For these
creatures, to arrive is a calamity. When activists mistake heaven for
some goal at which they must arrive, rather than an idea to navigate by,
they burn themselves out, or they set up a totalitarian utopia in which
others are burned in the flames. Don't mistake a lightbulb for the moon,
and don't believe that the moon is useless unless we land on it. After
all those millennia of poetry about the moon, nothing was more prosaic
than the guys in space suits stomping around on the moon with their
flags and golf clubs thirty-something years ago. The moon is profound
*except* when we land on it.
The Czech novelist Milan Kundera said several years before his country
liberated itself from Soviet-style communism, 'Totalitarianism is not
only hell, but also the dream of paradise -- the age-old dream of a
world where everybody would live in harmony, united by a single common
will and faith, without secrets from each other.... If totalitarianism
did not exploit these archetypes, which are deep inside us all and
rooted deep in all religions, it could never attract so many people,
especially during the early phases of its existence. 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.... It is extremely easy to
condemn gulags but to reject the totalitarian poesy which leads to the
gulag by way of paradise is as difficult as ever.
Paradise is not the place in which you arrive but the journey toward it.
Sometimes I think victories must be temporary or incomplete; what kind
of humanity would survive paradise? The United States has tried to
approximate paradise in its suburbs, with luxe, calme, volupté,
cul-de-sacs, cable television, and two-car garages, and it has produced
a soft ennui that shades over into despair and a decay of the soul
suggesting that paradise is already a gulag. Countless desperate
teenagers will tell you so. For paradise does not require of us courage,
selflessness, creativity, passion: paradise in all accounts is passive,
is sedative, and if you read carefully, soulless..."
c/o M
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