Bibliopath #20: In which we inevitably talk about Orwell
Dear reader,
There comes a time in the life of every email newsletter about sentences where we have to talk about George Orwell.
For example, we could start here:
At present we know only that the imagination, like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity.
It's a sentence that gets its force from a single metaphor—the imagination like a wild animal, that will not breed in captivity. But it's a metaphor that calls attention not so much to the source of the comparison, but its surrounds—how and why would you keep imagination in captivity in the first place?
But as always, context matters. I found the sentence here, in an essay, drawn from a lecture titled 'How George Orwell Predicted the Challenge of Writing Today', by Masha Gessen. By 'Today', she means in the midst of totalitarianism, of the kind arising around the world. Totalitarianism tries to suffocate imagination, not allowing it room to breathe, nor breed.
Gessen herself has a beautiful sentence in:
And yet I think this is the job of writers right now: to describe what we do not yet see, or what we see but cannot yet describe, which is a condition almost indistinguishable from not seeing.
In that almost lies so much of the writer's work, no, of the creative's work, no, the work of the person trying to maintain hope in a political atmosphere of despair and outright liemaking. The writer can tend fires within that, tease possibility from the impossibility, and mark the way forward, even and especially when you cannot see the way ahead.
I was reminded by my minister in a recent sermon that 'all of our vocation is inescapably political', just as Orwell would suggest that all writing is political writing. We still have not quite learnt the lessons of Orwell. Orwell's example in the previous link, in 'Politics and the English Language' that "people are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements", is in no way different from the illegal imprisonment of refugees based on a fiction of borders and whiteness.
Of all the things we cannot say, we don't have room to say "I can't imagine it getting any worse". For it is only through imagination, free to roam and flourish, that it gets any better.
Imagine with me,
Guan