george orwell

as you know i've been reading a collection of george orwell's essays. today i plowed through three of them. with the help of the weather and my boyfriend's need to have a relaxing weekend. plowed is the wrong word. it gives a connotation of hard work, and it isn't. he is quite amusing, and his ideas are quaint. it is interesting that a lot of his opinions are similar to mine. that should contradict what i wrote earlier about his ideas being "quaint", but i believe i'm pretty old-fashioned. not that i want to go back to the victorian times or become amish, but i feel we've traveled far from where we've started and not necessarily in a good direction.

orwell grew up in a middle-class family, and at the age of 9 or 10 he was sent to a boys boarding school. he wrote about his experiences in his famous essay, the joys of... after that he went to one of the english public schools. he eventually ends up in indian as part of the british police force there. he talks about one of his experiences in the essay shooting the elephant. after leaving the british service, he became a writer and commentator for the bbc. he wrote a few novels in his life; most well known are animal farm and 1984. both commonly read as part of the curriculum in american english classes.

i first encountered george orwell in my junior year of high school. i had to read animal farm as part of my government class. i don't know if i even bought the book. a few years ago i desired to read the "classics", the books everyone supposed to read at one time or another, that i never needed to read. 1984 was consumed during that period. his thoughts about the possibilities of the future are interesting, and still completely plausible. excepting the fact that he dates his book in 1984, which has already passed and the events did not occur, the book was creepy in its possibility. if only someone could reedit the book and place the date in 30--. that will give the world one thousand years to bring his book to life. instead of the 60 years he gave it. that brings another thought: orwell thought that sixty years was enough in the future to make his book plausible. he did not have a lot of hope for the state of the world. neither did his readers. i expect that the world will be much like it is in sixty years, except either more of less countries. i'm leaning towards more. as the small cultural and racial groups within countries vie for power and attention they will succeed at getting their own countries. making the world appear even less like the world orwell creates in his book.