A good friend of mine recommended the book to me. What a treat.
Orwell's commentary from a man between two worlds. Written in 1937, after industrial mechanisation had changed everything, yet before we had forgotten what it was like before that. To hear that "unemployment" was a term not known before, but from now on would be tracked as an unavoidable statistic. To hear from an notably objective thinker how English classes were strained and changed and not changed.
I forget that great writers used to be literary critics, social commentators, journalists, and also struggling souls. Orwell ( I read his real name was Eric Blair!) seems to judge only willful blindness and falsity in himself and others. And even the willfully blind and false he does not judge too hard. I can feel his effort to claw through falsity and hubris, and that wonderful British term "priggishness". The 3D complexities of reality come through because a real compassion in him.
One of my favorite parts is how he tears apart our modern wish to lessen work, to eliminate work, to have machines do more and more for us. To eliminate my need to use my hands eliminates a very large part of my consciousness. How can that be good? I might, with my newfound leisure, do leisure work of building second-rate furniture. And why is that preferable to how I actually did useful work before?
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