The Logos Scripture · The Book of Orwell
The Book of Orwell 2 · Written by himself, from his essays, Homage to Catalonia, and his letters
George Orwell, whose name was Eric Arthur Blair, born in Bengal in British India in June 1903, died in London in 1950 at forty-six. He went to St Cyprian’s and then to Eton, did not go on to a university, and served five years as an imperial policeman in Burma. Afterwards he worked as an assistant in a Hampstead bookshop. He wrote nine books and several hundred essays and reviews; Animal Farm came out in 1945 and Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1949, and he was dead the year after. This volume rests on what he wrote himself — the essays, Homage to Catalonia, and his letters — and not on any other man’s record of him. He stopped believing at fourteen and never began again: not in divine creation, not in an omnipotent god, not in any life after this one. He wrote that man is the measure of all things, and that our job is to make life worth living on this earth, which is the only earth we have. He called the Roman church an enemy of freedom of thought and speech and of the equality of men. He kept nonetheless a certain fondness for the forms of Christianity, and left word that he was to be buried by the rites of the church of his country, and he was. The Order does not read that as doubt. He wanted the form and not the faith, as a man may love the cathedrals of Europe and want nothing to do with what was preached in them. What can be checked: in a trench in Spain a bullet went through his throat; the side he had volunteered for later put him on the list to be seized, and he fled that city by night; as a young man he went and lived by choice in the poorest places he could find; he died of tuberculosis at forty-six, six months after finishing his last book.