The Book of Orwell 4 · 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.
4.1Let me set down a thing I saw with my own eyes. It changed everything I wrote afterwards.
4.2I fought in Spain. While I was there I read newspapers from home and from other countries.
4.3I read a detailed account of a great battle: the day, the place, the numbers of the dead.
4.4I had been in that place on that day. There had been no fighting there.
4.5And I read elsewhere that certain men I knew were agents of the enemy. They were not.
4.6At first I took it for inaccurate reporting. Inaccurate reporting has always existed.
4.7Then I saw that this was of another kind.
4.8The difference is this: the writers had not made a mistake and were not exaggerating. They were writing, to order, that a thing had happened which had not happened at all.
4.9And it was not one paper. It was a whole side, all writing the same version.
4.10If that version settles; if next year’s books are written from it; if in twenty years nobody is left who remembers —
4.11then the thing will have happened.
4.12Something rose in me then that frightened me more than the fighting:
4.13What frightened me was that the very notion that there is such a thing as a fact seemed to be going out of the world.
4.14A man who lies still grants the point: he knows there is a truth over there, and he is dodging it.
4.15This does not dodge. It means to abolish the point — so that henceforth there is nothing that can be checked, only who is doing the writing.
4.16Most of the strength left in my life went on standing against that.
4.17There is only one way to stand against it, and it is a crude one: write down what you saw, as soon as you can, plainly, in a form somebody else can check.
4.18What I saw there, nobody was recording for me. If I did not write it, it might as well not have happened.