Reading Orwell in an election year

A few excerpts from George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language":

"Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent and our language — so the argument runs — must inevitably share in the general collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.

Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers.

...

In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing. Where it is not true, it will generally be found that the writer is some kind of rebel, expressing his private opinions and not a "party line." Orthodoxy, of whatever color, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style. The political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestoes, White papers and the speeches of undersecretaries do, of course, vary from party to party, but they are all alike in that one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, homemade turn of speech. When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases -- bestial atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder -- one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker's spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favorable to political conformity.

...

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as "keeping out of politics." All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.

...

I have not here been considering the literary use of language, but merely language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought. Stuart Chase and others have come near to claiming that all abstract words are meaningless, and have used this as a pretext for advocating a kind of political quietism. Since you don't know what Fascism is, how can you struggle against Fascism? One need not swallow such absurdities as this, but one ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one's own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase -- some jackboot, Achilles' heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno, or other lump of verbal refuse -- into the dustbin, where it belongs.

The full text of the essay is available here.

Who you calling bookworm?

I have nothing against lending books to people. Most of the time I get them back, and if I don't, well, I hope the other person enjoys the book as much as I did. It's as simple as that. None of my books are rare first editions, and given that I buy used when I can, they usually are a bit worn already. Very rarely will I write in them, and if I do, it's usually to underline a striking passage.

But I wonder if anyone I lent books to within the last year or so noticed the notched pages.

I turn down as teensy a corner as possible on pages that have striking passages. Some books, like Blood Meridian and The Phantom Tollbooth, have about every other page notched. Why not just write, add my marginalia? I could, but frankly, I'm lazy. And besides, my system marks the page, not the passage, so I actually have to re-read to find it when I flip back through. And it's less obtrusive, more subject to interpretation. I may find the first line of page 97 stunning, but another person could skim over the page and find a gem of a quote in the second paragraph, and on re-read #2 or 20, I may fall in love with the last sentence of the third paragraph. Reading is, and always should be, about discovery.

Flipping through some of my books, I found this page marked in Herman Hesse's Demian, which I read for the first time this summer; on the heels of graduation, it spoke to me then. It still resonates:

"At this point a sharp realization burned within me: each man has his 'function' but none which he can choose himself, define, or perform as he pleases. It was wrong to desire new gods, completely wrong to want to provide the world with something. An enlightened man had but one duty--to seek the way to himself, to reach inner certainty, to grope his way forward, no matter where it led. The realization shook me profoundly, it was the fruit of this experience. I had often speculated with images of the future, dreamed of roles that I might be assigned, perhaps as poet or prophet or painter, or something similar.

All that was futile. I did not exist to write poems, to preach or to paint, neither I nor anyone else. All of that was incidental. Each man had only one genuine vocation--to find the way to himself. He might end up as a poet or a madman, as prophet or criminal--that was not his affair, ultimately it was of no concern. His task was to discover his own destiny--not an arbitrary one--and live it out wholly and resolutely within himself. Everything else was only a would-be existence, an attempt at evasion, a flight back to the ideals of the masses, conformity and fear of one's inwardness. The new vision rose up before me, glimpsed a hundred times, possibly even expressed before but now experienced for the first time by me. I was an experiment on the part of Nature, a gamble within the unknown, perhaps for a new purpose, perhaps for nothing, and my only task was to allow this game on the part of primeval depths to take its course, to feel its will within me and make it wholly mine. That or nothing!"

Awesome quote to start off a new year, yes? I need to re-read the whole book now.

Food for thought

Someone recently shared with me one of those stop-and-make-you-think quotes from Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. I've read it before (am about due for a re-read, actually), but if you haven't yet, it's a great book; most people are probably familiar with its anti-censorship theme, though Bradbury himself recently said it was actually about the dangers posed to reading by too much television watching. Either interpretation yields a rich, relevant message, and I look forward to re-reading the book with a new interpretive lens. Bradbury is a brilliant writer with brilliant ideas, including this one:

Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there. It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.

I read the quote once, was ready to pass it over, and stopped to process. I wonder, really, what I've touched and left an impression on--it's not the sort of thing we tend to think about in the rush, rush, rush of the daily grind. I teach, true, and I make some hand-crafted things; perhaps it's self-deprecation, but I don't think I've left my mark. Yet. And I wonder what that mark, that touch, will be, and on whom, and when. I like his word choice--touch--to reach out, to connect, to make meaningful contact, physical or otherwise, with another human being. It seems to be increasingly missing in our daily interactions. But I digress...

What about you? Who or what have you touched? What will you leave behind?