OxBlog

Monday, June 16, 2003

# Posted 1:33 PM by Patrick Belton  

ON ORWELL'S CENTENARY BIRTHDAY, the Economist offers an essay on the essayist (and novelist)'s moral vision:
Camus was the better novelist, but their moral vision was remarkably close. Personal engagement and behaving decently mattered more to them in politics than policy or dogma. Neither was happy in party camps. They were distrusted by right and left alike. Both recognised the violence that could result from bad thinking and bad writing—a lesson Orwell put memorably into “Politics and the English Language”. Both believed in the boundlessness of our duty to resist injustice, yet took a bleakly limited view of how far any of us could succeed. Orwell, who was allergic to theory and speculation of all kinds, would have hated the word, but in a sense he was England's existentialist.

Preachy Orwell certainly was. But his anti-authoritarian sermons could almost always make you laugh. He was a master of the one-liner: “Good prose is like a window pane”; “At 50, everyone has the face he deserves.” Whether his weekly column was on writing clearly, resisting tyranny or making tea, he always made it sound like a matter of life and death.
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