This text comes from Penguin Books, the Great Ideas collection. It contains seven essays on a variety of subjects including a debate on whether it is worth it to spend more money on tobacco or reading material. My favorite essays are The Prevention of Literature and How the Poor Die. The former concerns free speech and journalism in a totalitarian society. The later, Orwell’s experience in a French hospital for the poor while experiencing a spat pneumonia.
In ‘Literature’, the general argument is that under a totalitarian government, art and literature will perish. Those in the journalist profession will write predominately for the state, where lies are written and one’s career will flourish. Truth and ‘reality’ are overlooked, and pushing the lies of the government is the common practice. Interestingly, one can see this practice in the corporate media, pushing lies to manipulate public opinion. For example, in Australia the recent false flags of antisemitism attacks, later revealed to be untrue. The Australian mainstream media pushed these lies hard. In the US, the Russia gate fiasco, lasting over 4 years, turned out to be a permanent government psyop that the democratic party advertised relentlessly. Added too, the Hunter Biden Laptop story at the end of the presidential campaign of 2020. We were told it was “Russian Disinformation”, and the corporate media ran with it. In terms of truth and literature, Orwell writes:
...as I have tried to show – certain that literature is doomed if liberty of thought perishes. Not only is it doomed in any country that retains a totalitarian structure; but any writer who adopts the totalitarian outlook, who finds excuses for persecution and falsification of reality, thereby destroys himself as a writer. (40-41)
Do we currently live in a totalitarian regime? A subject for another time.
How the Poor Die gives the reader a clear window into the medicos in France post WWI. Orwell is dying of a lung ailment, fronting up to a public hospital for the general population. Imagine a large warehouse with single beds right next to each other that appears to go on forever. The place smells of rotting flesh and human feces. There is no bedside manner to speak of; the medical staff treating you without humanity like cadavers in first year medical school. Rather than a place of healing, it is really a pre-morgue waiting area and the inhabitants suffering, hoping for death.
After reading this piece, my appreciation for modern medicine grew tenfold.
The last essay, Such, Such Were the Joys, is Orwell’s reflections of his time in boarding school, 7 to 12 years of age, where it has a Dickensian flavor, and cruelty, starvation, beatings and psychological torture was the mainstay of the institution. Orwell’s head mistress and her sidekick, a sadistic little man who relished beating the lads, are the stuff of nightmares.
Most of these essays were written and published around 1946-47, a few years before the writer’s death in 1950.
Orwell always gives us thoughts and ideas to ponder.
