Orwell in Winter

George Orwell's name has been a staple during the past eight years as the language has been twisted into a kind of magician's "sleight of hand." Orwell was a master of the word. There follows a snippett of reflection on the literary giant.

The evening's reading includes two of George Orwell's essays, "Down and Out in Paris," and "The Poor Die." They chronicle a sojourn in Paris shortly after World War I had ended. They are, at once, exotic and familiar. They pull the reader into the situation of the underclasses in postwar France, as if by the lapels. There, to find a world that is at once exotic and painfully familiar. The discovery of it is that poverty is not as awful as one might imagine. The insight is a flash of brilliance. It is simply the way of things. Sickness, on the other hand, is not so easily embraced. The hospital, invented as a refuge for the poor, became a dumping place for those who were unable to summon a physician to their homes. So sickness is poverty's younger sibling. Privation and illness are the constant companions of the poor. To Orwell, they are outrageous intruders.

But Orwellian is not the "end of the world" sort of vision. It is its polar opposite. In a curious way, he is a man of abiding faith. His loathing is a sort of hope. For these are things about which we can do something, were we to focus our attention on them. I admire his rapierlike penetration of the human condition. Like a finely tuned seismograph, he can magnify the most subtle of turnings of the soul. He can evoke in a nod of recognition the web of the human family.

The faithful one requires an Orwell, if for nothing more than a point of departure. His vivid sketche evoke what are our partners in compassion. It is a brilliant light shed on our condition. How contemporaty is the need for an Orwell. In a time when the condition of the poor approaches the great middle classes, increasing numbers of the world's citizens fall into its grip. We need to pay heed.

Reading Orwell is something to do in winter. I wonder what might have happened had his work included Christmas. Divine entry into the human condition is a natural counterpoint to his penetrating vision. Should the vivid chronicle of misery turn an eye to the redemptive power of love, Orwell's gift might have found its completion. As it is, his essays are fragments of reality.

Nonetheless, he shows the way. Would that the heart of love had the power to invite that does Orwell's practiced eye. I have seldom encountered such power to involve me in the situation of complete strangers. An Orwell essay is to literature what a stereoscope is to photography. They are provocative Advent reading.

-December 15-16, 1997

Orwell died on St. Agnes Day, 1950. Maybe it is the spirit of Agnes that inhabits his work. Who knows?