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“Life was hierarchical and whatever happened was right. There were the strong, who deserved to win and always did win, and there were the weak, who deserved to lose and always did lose, everlastingly.”
-- George Orwell
The quote comes from an essay titled "Such, Such Were the Joys", which apparently was about his school days, and so might be taken as testimony about school life rather than life in total, but maybe not. It does feel right, anent life in general, except for the use of the word 'deserved', which suggest a moral stamp that may not be appropriate. Shit just happens, or maybe that's just the everlasting loser in me talking.
The article is about Orwell's diary, and we will take down the closing section, in which we see Orwell's apparent disdain for his fellow upperclassmen, with an early invocation of the '99%' slogan.
_ _ _
In the end, who was George Orwell? With the embellishment stripped bare, the diaries present a nastier, more easily irritated side of the man. From the pages of the Daily Telegraph he would read a letter from a Lady Oxford who complained that the war has forced “most people” to part with their cooks. “Apparently nothing will ever teach these people that the other 99 percent of the population exist,” Orwell wrote. No wonder he chose to live so often with those in poverty—true, he was scouting for material, but he also seemed to have truly preferred their company over the social elites, whom he wished would disappear, not quite acknowledging that such vicious classism nudges him rather closer to Stalin, Mao, and some of his other favorite villains.
In January of 1949 he was admitted to Cranham Sanatorium for tuberculosis, and was still there on April 17, when he wrote about being uncomfortable in the most expensive block of the hospital and hearing the voices of upper-class English visitors:
A sort of over-fedness, a fatuous self-confidence, a constant bah-bahing of laughter about nothing, above all a sort of heaviness and richness combined with a fundamental ill-will—people who, one instinctively feels, without even being able to see them, are the enemies of anything intelligent or sensitive or beautiful. No wonder everyone hates us so.
So goes the last entry in Diaries. Orwell died of a massive hemorrhage of the lungs in the early hours of January 21, 1950. On his headstone is inscribed a simple, ineradicable fact: “Here Lies Eric Arthur Blair.”
-- Jimmy So at The Daily Beast
-- George Orwell
The quote comes from an essay titled "Such, Such Were the Joys", which apparently was about his school days, and so might be taken as testimony about school life rather than life in total, but maybe not. It does feel right, anent life in general, except for the use of the word 'deserved', which suggest a moral stamp that may not be appropriate. Shit just happens, or maybe that's just the everlasting loser in me talking.
The article is about Orwell's diary, and we will take down the closing section, in which we see Orwell's apparent disdain for his fellow upperclassmen, with an early invocation of the '99%' slogan.
_ _ _
In the end, who was George Orwell? With the embellishment stripped bare, the diaries present a nastier, more easily irritated side of the man. From the pages of the Daily Telegraph he would read a letter from a Lady Oxford who complained that the war has forced “most people” to part with their cooks. “Apparently nothing will ever teach these people that the other 99 percent of the population exist,” Orwell wrote. No wonder he chose to live so often with those in poverty—true, he was scouting for material, but he also seemed to have truly preferred their company over the social elites, whom he wished would disappear, not quite acknowledging that such vicious classism nudges him rather closer to Stalin, Mao, and some of his other favorite villains.
In January of 1949 he was admitted to Cranham Sanatorium for tuberculosis, and was still there on April 17, when he wrote about being uncomfortable in the most expensive block of the hospital and hearing the voices of upper-class English visitors:
A sort of over-fedness, a fatuous self-confidence, a constant bah-bahing of laughter about nothing, above all a sort of heaviness and richness combined with a fundamental ill-will—people who, one instinctively feels, without even being able to see them, are the enemies of anything intelligent or sensitive or beautiful. No wonder everyone hates us so.
So goes the last entry in Diaries. Orwell died of a massive hemorrhage of the lungs in the early hours of January 21, 1950. On his headstone is inscribed a simple, ineradicable fact: “Here Lies Eric Arthur Blair.”
-- Jimmy So at The Daily Beast
