Seize Zašto Pišem I Drugi Eseji Written By George Orwell Offered As Audio Books

It is that the characters are so carefully graded as to give almost every type of reader a character he can identify himself with.
Most boys' papers aim at doing this, hence the boyassistant Sexton Blake's Tinker, Nelson Lee's Nipper, etc.
who usually accompanies the explorer, detective or whatnot on his adventures, But in these cases there is only one boy, and usually it is much the same type of boy.
In the Gem and Magnet there is a model for very nearly everybody,

If a Chinese character appears, he is still the sinister pigtailed opiumsmuggler of Sax Rohmer no indication that things have been happening in China sinceno indication that a war is going on there, for instance.
If a Spaniard appears, he is still a dago or greaser who rolls cigarettes and stabs people in the back no indication that things have been happening in Spain.

One of the few authentic classdifferences, as opposed to classdistinctions, still existing in England is that the working classes age very much earlier.
They do not live less long, provided that they survive their childhood, nor do they lose their physical activity earlier, but they do lose very early their youthful appearance.
This fact is observable everywhere, but can be most easily verified by watching one of the higher age groups registering for military service the middle and upperclass members look, on average, ten years younger than the others.
It is usual to attribute this to the harder lives that the working classes have to live, but it is doubtful whether any such difference now exists as would account for it.
More probably the truth is that the working classes reach middle age earlier because they accept it earlier.
For to look young after, say, thirty is largely a matter of wanting to do so, This generalization is less true of the betterpaid workers, especially those who live in council houses and laboursaving flats, but it is true enough even of them to point to a difference of outlook.
And in this, as usual, they are more traditional, more in accord with the Christian past than the welltodo women who try to stay young at forty by means of physicaljerks, cosmetics and avoidance of childbearing.
The impulse to cling to youth at all costs, to attempt to preserve your sexual attraction, to see even in middle age a future for yourself and not merely for your children, is a thing of recent growth and has only precariously established itself.
It will probably disappear again when our standard of living drops and our birthrate rises,

I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway.
I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written.
In the past people deliberately lied, or they unconsciously coloured what they wrote, or they struggled after the truth, well knowing that they must make many mistakes but in each case they believed that facts existed and were more or less discoverable.
And in practice there was always a considerable body of fact which would have been agreed to by almost everyone.
If you look up the history of the last war in, for instance, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, you will find that a respectable amount of the material is drawn from German sources.
A British and a German historian would disagree deeply on many things, even on fundamentals, but there would still be that body of, as it were, neutral fact on which neither would seriously challenge the other.
It is just this common basis of agreement, with its implication that human beings are all one species of animal, that totalitarianism destroys.
Nazi theory indeed specifically denies that such a thing as the truth exists, There is, for instance, no such thing as Science, There is only German Science, Jewish Science, etc, The implied objective of this line of thought is a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past.
If the Leader says of such and such an event, It never happened well, it never happened.
If he says that two and two are five well, two and two are five, This prospect frightens me much more than bombs and after our experiences of the last few years that is not a frivolous statement.


But is it perhaps childish or morbid to terrify oneself with visions of a totalitarian future Before writing off the totalitarian world as a nightmare that can't come true, just remember that inthe world of today would have seemed a nightmare that couldn't come true.
Against that shifting phantasmagoric world in which black may be white tomorrow and yesterday's weather can be changed by decree, there are in reality only two safeguards.
One is that however much you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing, as it were, behind your back, and you consequently can't violate it in ways that impair military efficiency.
The other is that so long as some parts of the earth remain unconquered, the liberal tradition can be kept alive.

Since cricket takes up a lot of time and is rather an expensive game to play, it is predominantly an upperclass game, but for the whole nation it is bound up with such concepts as good form, playing the game, etc.
, and it has declined in popularity just as the tradition of don't hit a man when he's down has declined.


Early in the war the New Yorker had a picture of a little man approaching a newsstall littered with paper with such headlines as Great Tank Battles in Northern France, Big Naval Battle in the North Sea, Huge Air Battles over the Channel, etc.
, etc. The little man is saying Action Stories, please, That little man stood for all the drugged millions to whom the world of the gangster and the prizering is more real, more tough, than such things as wars, revolutions, earthquakes, famines and pestilences.
From the point of view of a reader of Action Stories, a description of the London blitz, or of the struggles of the European underground parties, would be sissy stuff.
On the other hand, some puny gunbattle in Chicago, resulting in perhaps half a dozen deaths, would seem genuinely tough.
This habit of mind is now extremely widespread,

He is a popular writer there are many such in America, but they are still rarities in England who has caught up with what is now fashionable to call realism, meaning the doctrine that might is right.
The growth of realism has been the great feature of the intellectual history of our own age.
Why this should be so is a complicated question, The interconnexion between sadism, masochism, successworship, powerworship, nationalism, and totalitarianism is a huge subject whose edges have barely been scratched, and even to mention it is considered somewhat indelicate.

There is no such thing as a genuinely nonpolitical literature, and least of all in an age like our own, when fears, hatreds, and loyalties of a directly political kind are near to the surface of everyone's consciousness.


During a period of three hundred years, how many people have been at once good novelists and good Catholics
.
. .
Prose literature as we know it is the product of rationalism, of the Protestant centuries, of the autonomous individual.
And the destruction of intellectual liberty cripples the journalist, the sociological writer, the historian, the novelist, the critic, and the poet, in that order.

One wants to live, of course, indeed one only stays alive by virtue of the fear of death, but I think now, as I thought then, that it's better to die violently and not too old.
People talk about the horrors of war, but what weapon has man invented that even approaches in cruelty some of the commoner diseases Natural death, almost by definition, means something slow, smelly and painful.
Even at that, it makes a difference if you can achieve it in your own home and not in a public institution.


A thing we perhaps underrate in England is the advantage we enjoy in having large numbers of welltrained and rigidlydisciplined nurses.
No doubt English nurses are dumb enough, they may tell fortunes with tealeaves, wear Union Jack badges and keep photographs of the Queen on their mantelpieces, but at least they don't let you lie unwashed and constipated on an unmade bed, out of sheer laziness.


If you look at almost any literature before the later part of the nineteenth century, you find that a hospital is popularly regarded as much the same thing as a prison, and an oldfashioned, dungeonlike prison at that.
A hospital is a place of filth, torture and death, a sort of antechamber to the tomb.
No one who was not more or less destitute would have thought of going into such a place for treatment.
And especially in the early part of the last century, when medical science had grown bolder than before without being any more successful, the whole business of doctoring was looked on with horror and dread by ordinary people.