Essays

by George Orwell

So much of his worldview seems to be about his experience of violence and the political context in which he experienced it.

The scale and scope of violence that was part of European life in the first half of the 20th century is so hard to fathom. Reading Orwell really drives home the idea that this experience was such a formative part of not just political, financial and public life, but the way in which people forged their beliefs and their sense of self - who they were in the world and the ways in which they understood themselves and their role in society.

I’m sure none of this is new to most people, but the difference when compared to how we define ourselves and our shape and place in the world today is nearly impossible to fathom.

His description of the man on his way to be hung is an exceptionally vivid example of the profound way he was effected by the violence he witnessed.

It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide. This man was not dying, he was alive just as we were alive. All the organs of his body were working—bowels digesting food, skin renewing itself, nails growing, tissues forming—toiling away in solemn foolery. His nails would still be growing when he stood on the drop, when he was falling through the air with a tenth of a second to live. His eyes saw the yellow gravel and the grey walls, and his brain still remembered, foresaw, reasoned—reasoned even about puddles. He and we were a party of men walking together, seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding the same world; and in two minutes, with a sudden snap, one of us would be gone—one mind less, one world less.

The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius

Why is the nation state such a strong psychological force? We are so much closer geographically to Washington than Ottawa yet Ottawa is much closer economically, politically, legally.