Reflections on George Orwell
I would like to share with you an essay, it’s less than 2000 words long, yet, when I first read it its effect on me was quite startling, and the feeling has stayed with me, despite having read this essay many times over the years.
The author is well know:George Orwell, his better known novels are:Nineteen Eighty Four,Animal FarmDown and Out in Paris and LondonThe Road to Wigan PierAnd quite a few more.
He was a man tortured by his upbringing, a rebel in many ways; he fought against Fascism in the Spanish Civil War and became disillusioned with mankind in the relentless pursuit of war.
His one constant in all this mayhem is that he was always against the Totalitarian State.
If you get a chance read some of his Essays.
They are a treasure trove into his mind. But today, I wish to share only one of his essays with you, which as I said earlier, had a profound effect upon me:
Reflections by Roy Tomkinson from, A Hanging, an essay by George Orwell
Orwell as a Police Officer in Burma: “sodden morning of the rains. A sickly light, like yellow tinfoil… We were waiting outside the condemned cells…”You are taken straight in, the scene is set for a hanging. Already, in this first paragraph you can feel death’s icy grip.
“Six tall Indian wardens were guarding him…” the condemned. Two held guns with bayonets fixed. Already, you feel his plight is hopeless as they, “close about him.
”The impatient Superintendent, wished to get it over with so he can have his breakfast.To him, it is just another day at the office, hang a few and then breakfast, an ordinary day. Quicker the better, no compassion, remorse, nothing, but hurry up, we can’t delay breakfast.A dog appears in the yards, happy, wagging his tail and jumps and tried to lick the prisoner’s face.And the Superintendent, well, he’s annoyed, this dog – how dare it delay his breakfast.Suddenly, the realisation with Orwell sets in:“It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man.
When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide.”Then a picture of the gallows floods into your mind, erected in a small yard overgrown with weeds.The prisoner was “half pushed… clumsily up the ladder.” And a rope placed around his neck. The prisoner cried out: Ram! Ram! Ram! Ram! Not urgent and fearful like a prayer or cry for help… rhythmical, almost like the tolling of a bell.
”The dog replied.Barked.Minutes passed.Blank faces.A clanging noise.“Chalo!” Shouted the Superintendent.Silence.Prisoner gone.Rope twisting.The dog was let loose: “it galloped…to the back of the gallows… stopped… barked, and then retreated into a corner… looking timorously out at us.”The Superintendent poked the body with a stick.“He’s all right… Eight minutes past eight. Well, that’s all for this morning…”An enormous relief came over everyone.“One felt an impulse to sing, to break into a run, to snigger.
All at once everyone began chattering gaily.”Now it was time to eat.The comment:“Do you know, sir, our friend (he meant the dead man) when he heard his appeal had been dismissed, he pissed on the floor of his cell. From fright. Kindly take one of my cigarettes, sir. Do you not admire my new silver case, sir?”Fright, cigarettes, a silver case: What is happening here? How the extraordinary is made to feel ordinary."Several people laughed… I found that I was laughing quite loudly.
Everyone was laughing.”How forced death can be so trivialised, see it enough in its raw state, and yes, I suppose it does become ordinary. I think the German concentration camps proved that. You become anaesthetised, and it ceases to even seem wrong. Indeed, it even grows into a kind of rightness. Somehow, you seem to wriggle out of its reality.And then what did they do?“We all had a drink together, native and European alike, quite amicably. The dead man was a hundred yards away.
Read the full essay yourself here is the link:
Read the full essay yourself here is the link:
