Holly's Secret Garden

The British author and journalist George Orwell (1903-1950) was famous for his satire against totalitarianism.  Nineteen Eighty-Four , for example, is a very popular novel with the term“Big Brother”becoming a synonym of governmental surveillance. His political writings, together with his essays, established him as one of the most influential voices of the 20th century.

     For those who want to have a good command of academic writing, Orwell’ s essays are the right source for imitation. His style is lucid, vivid and precise. The following passages embody his perspicacious insight on childhood experience, national characteristics and sainthood.

About childhood experience, he perceives child’s distaste for grown-ups, which, I must admit, is an undeniable truth:

A child which appears reasonably happy may actually be suffering horros which it cannot or will not reveal. . . . Not to expose your true feeings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards. Even the affection that one feels for a child, the desire to protect and cherish it, is a cause of misundertanding. One can love a child, perhaps, more deeply than one can love another adult, but is rash to assume that the child feels any love in return. . . . Love, the spontaneous, unqualified emotion of love, was something I could only feel for people who were young. Towards people who were old, I could only feel reverence, respect, admiration or compunction. . . . Part of the reason for the ugliness of adults, in a child’s eyes, is that the child is usually looking upwards, and few faces are at their best when seen from below.      

As for the national characteristics, he remarks that there is something “distinctive and recognizable” in every civilization, a flavor of its own, so to speak. For the English, it is the one characterized by "solid breakfasts,” “gloomy Sundays,” “smoky towns,” “winding roads,” “green fields” and “red pillar-boxes.” Such a flavor is continious and persisting, stretching into the future and past. However much you hate or or laugh at it, you will never be happy away from it for any length of time. It has “entered into your soul.” Good or evil, it is yours; you belong to it. Despite the changing of the world, national characteristics can change only in certain directions because certain alternatives are possible and others are not, like a turnip seed never growing into a parsnip.

He further elaborates on this point, illustrating the unique cultures of the world: "Spaniards are cruel to animals; Italians can do nothing without making a deafening noise; the Chinese are addicted to gambling."  Ah, what a precise label of the Chinese culture! if there is one word to grasp the essence of Chinese culture, "gambling" is the very word!! 

As a journalist, he observed and analyzed the world events happening during WW2. He gave us a candid portrait on Ghandi, a much respected political/religious leader then. In Ghandi, he saw the incompatibility of humanity and sainhood:

The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty,that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one's love upon other human individuals. No doubt alcohol, tobacco, and so forth, are things that a saint must avoid, but sainthood is also a thing that human beings must avoid. . . . In this yogi-ridden age, it is too readily assumed that "non-attachment" is not only better than a full acceptance of earthly life, but that the ordinary man only rejects it because it is too difficult: in other words, that the average human being is a failed saint. It is doubtful whether this is true. Many people genuinely do not wish to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings. If one could follow it to its psychological roots, one would, I believe, find that the main motive for "non-attachment" is a desire to escape from the pain of living, and above all from love, which, sexual or non-sexual, is hard work. But it is not necessary here to argue whether the other-worldly or the humanistic ideal is "higher". The point is that they are incompatible. One must choose between God and Man, and all "radicals" and "progressives", from the mildest Liberal to the most extreme Anarchist, have in effect chosen Man.