Orwell's Roses

As a writer, you withdraw and disconnect yourself from the world in order to connect to it in the far-reaching way that is other people elsewhere reading the words that came together in this contemplative state. What is vivid in the writing is not in how it hits the senses but what it does in the imagination;

“Truths and roses have thorns about them,” says the old aphorism,

preparing a garden and with it a life.

There’s a cultural view in which flowers are dainty, trivial, dispensable—and a scientific one in which flowering plants were revolutionary in their appearance on the earth some two hundred million years or so ago, are dominant on land from the arctic to the tropics, and are crucial to our survival.

I am not suggesting that one can discharge all one’s obligations towards society by means of a private re-afforestation scheme. Still, it might not be a bad idea, every time you commit an antisocial act, to make a note of it in your diary, and then, at the appropriate season, push an acorn into the ground.”

“They were the kind of people who . . . tack a ‘fucking’ on to every noun,” he wrote in his diary of the experience, “yet I have never seen anything that exceeded their kindness.”

excavating an ancient world to burn up in the present one.

That invisibility or that obliviousness is one of the defining conditions of the modern world.

(There’s a whole history to be written about bohemian aunts and queer uncles, about those family members who swoop down to encourage misfit children in ways their parents won’t or can’t.)