Orwell, Mark 2
Oct. 11th, 2019 07:37 amI didn’t manage to get through all my Orwell quotes in one post, so here’s a second one. (Ilf and Petrov have set a bad precedent.) The first post focused on Orwell’s general themes in All Art is Propaganda; this second one collects his comments about a few works in particular.
1. Here’s his description of Henry Miller’s early novels, Tropic of Cancer and Black Spring: “The adjective has come back, after its ten years’ exile. It is a flowing, swelling prose, a prose with rhythms in it, something quite different from the flat cautious statements and snackbar dialects that are now in fashion.”
Doesn’t that just make you want to run out and read them both? I have to remind myself that I loathed The Crucible, and it seems unlikely that Henry Miller actually wrote women any better in the 1930s.
(ETA:![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
skygiants has pointed out that Henry Miller and Arthur Miller were in fact two different people. TWO DIFFERENT AUTHORS NAME MILLER HOW VERY DARE. This is like the time I got Raymond Chandler and Raymond Carver confused.)
But nonetheless, it was Orwell’s description of Miller’s work that really solidified for me one of the reasons why Orwell seems so applicable today. “At this date it hardly even needs a war to bring home to us the disintegration of our society and the increasing helplessness of all decent people. It is for this reason that I think that the passive, non-cooperative attitude implied in Henry Miller’s work is justified. Whether or not it is an expression of what people ought to feel, it probably comes somewhere near to expressing what they do feel.”
I feel like this perfectly encapsulates the way a lot of people feel about climate change, and it’s cheering in a deeply grim way to realize that the Allies managed to defeat the Nazis despite going into the war already completely fucking exhausted.
( Read more )
And here, a quote that I wanted to share just on general principles.
“The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one’s love upon other human individuals.”
1. Here’s his description of Henry Miller’s early novels, Tropic of Cancer and Black Spring: “The adjective has come back, after its ten years’ exile. It is a flowing, swelling prose, a prose with rhythms in it, something quite different from the flat cautious statements and snackbar dialects that are now in fashion.”
Doesn’t that just make you want to run out and read them both? I have to remind myself that I loathed The Crucible, and it seems unlikely that Henry Miller actually wrote women any better in the 1930s.
(ETA:
skygiants has pointed out that Henry Miller and Arthur Miller were in fact two different people. TWO DIFFERENT AUTHORS NAME MILLER HOW VERY DARE. This is like the time I got Raymond Chandler and Raymond Carver confused.) But nonetheless, it was Orwell’s description of Miller’s work that really solidified for me one of the reasons why Orwell seems so applicable today. “At this date it hardly even needs a war to bring home to us the disintegration of our society and the increasing helplessness of all decent people. It is for this reason that I think that the passive, non-cooperative attitude implied in Henry Miller’s work is justified. Whether or not it is an expression of what people ought to feel, it probably comes somewhere near to expressing what they do feel.”
I feel like this perfectly encapsulates the way a lot of people feel about climate change, and it’s cheering in a deeply grim way to realize that the Allies managed to defeat the Nazis despite going into the war already completely fucking exhausted.
( Read more )
And here, a quote that I wanted to share just on general principles.
“The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one’s love upon other human individuals.”
