Letter to Eric (George Orwell)
Dear Eric Arthur Blair,
In these days I have been reading the graphic novel version of your essay "Such, Such Were The Joys" (I love that the title is a quote from this poem by William Blake, nDr) in which you speak about your boyhood.
Discovering what you went through before you became the author of your masterpieces, I sense that I finally get you more.
After reading your book 1984, at the very last word of the last page I said aloud "this book is evil" (which believe me, I have never said about any book) and almost threw it away. I deeply resented you, for understanding so sharply the system and still not finding a solution for all, an happy ending or at least an open one.
To say that the hope is in the proles* is not enough for inspiring us hope, especially if the proles doesn't do anything at all and at the end the main character even betrays his own soul. Why have you led us to such a dead-end road? Were you searching a catharsis, by giving us the worst ending? Or were you trying to definitely kill your own hope, as you were struggling with the difficulties of making a real impact on reality?
Your book 1984 left me with the strong impression that we cannot see humanity anywhere anymore, neither in enemies or in heroes. The denial of conscience and free will in your last pages is total, with no return. If so, what's left of desirable to want to live on? The problem with books, is that once they are out there in the world, you cannot stop them for propagating ideas and feelings...and I fear too many may have felt discouraged or excused by your work.
After reading about your boyhood, I sense a bit more of what you have been carrying on with you.... In fact now I believe your 1984 would need one more chapter just to explain the reader how to take it all, not only from the historical point of view, but from the psychological one too. I guess at that time there wasn't much knowledge on trauma and healing....
You went into a school full of abuses, where being humans meant to be "weak". That school was also the perfect portrait of the leading powers in society: no equality, hypocrisy, classism, patriarchal mindset and so on.
I found interesting when you say that children perceive reality (and especially adults) in a very different way than adults do. You don't deny the abuses, and still you try to be honest with the way you have perceived them and even notice a few "good effects" they had on "educating you".
You are aware of how you went through the denial of your own feelings: you didn't know how to fully express them and stay safe at the same time. At some level you made for yourself acceptable the abuse, as questioning reality and its system was not an option.
However, a soulful part of you was still screaming "this is unjust", "that's non sense", and was secretly taking notes for an essay that you would have written only many years later, from a safe zone.
Eric, I see why you decided to use another name, George, to publish with some peace of mind the writings that could easily have offended your parents or someone you knew...also people that genuinely have "invested" (what a lovely bank term, uh?) in your education via scholarships. It's hard to be seen as ungrateful, or a failure, and still sustain it.You may have wanted to avoid shame too, that risk of a stinky pity we feel when others look at us, after they've discovered our own tragedies.
Surely you knew that someone else who went in the same school in the same years and in the same condition as yours, could have said "oh come on, it wasn't that bad". Who are we for forcing others to see as we do? or to make them feel empathy towards us, when they are probably still disconnected from their own pain? Maybe it wasn't that bad, after all? Should you use dissociation too, as many do, as a coping strategy?
Why after all you, Eric, should once again have risked to be blamed for being "too sensitive", too weak, for the system? It's all right, I get it. Let's make George take it all. Maybe it's a bless that readers only look at the signature in the book, not finding who you really are and what you really meant...
I now believe in 1984 it's your George speaking, giving us the worst you experienced as a child and onwards: all the paranoid, hopeless thoughts, the worst ending, all of it. The nightmare, without desires or escape, without redemption. The heroes going to fail, as they cannot do any better. Winston Smith, the protagonist in 1984 has indeed shown the courage to change his own reality, but he couldn't succeed against the external world, as he also made the mistake to trust wrong allies...
I wonder if George's dystopia is meant to protect the innocence of little Erich, or to console him for sticking with the system, being a journalist, writing books ...as otherwise he would have been poor and alone in a fight impossible to win, as it was as a kid. If it was cowardy as an adult that you couldn't forgive yourself for, at least we understand: it was safer for you to do so, and you didn't know any better. A child relies on external objects/people for his sense of safety, while as adults we should be ready to take responsibility of it. Being courageous means to know that safety, holding on the known, is a costly illusion. We don't become spiritually adult by relying on other external objects like money and position, things that if we loose, we would feel lost as babies. We become adults when even if we loose everything, still we decide to trust life and our capacity to hold on (like your beloved author Kipling once said), witnessing violence and still finding the humanity behind people's action (as Etty Hillesum has shockingly written in her diaries).
You wanted alert us from the danger of totalitarianism? The way you did, I suspect, can only give us more of the same. It actually became the blueprint for totalitarianism... Possibly even a evidence for many that submitting to the strongest power is not that bad, as there's no alternative anyway.
That's why I am writing you.
I wanna tell you how much I appreciate to have read your works anyway, including the evil enclosed there, especially now that I feel more at ease in deconstructing and embrace it. I appreciate the fact that you depicted so sharply the world we live in. And I am grateful even more that in the years between your life and mine, history has proved your general dystopian vision of humanity...is not the final word on us.
There have been, still there are, names in history that have had a huge impact on reality for better: they took the time to find true reliable allies, to influence the culture, and when they did, yes indeed they found the support of the prole too. There are right now people all around the world putting their efforts to make the difference, using their own names (to go towards a shameless world), trying to held the trauma with enough care to heal it (so to not carry it on in the next generation) and still building up enough power in themselves and their structures (so to make a change). They are proving there's always an alternative. They are a lighthouse.
Yes I just wished one more chapter in 1984 from you, especially considering that it is a novel and it stays in people's minds as a finished story (without the grace of developing). I now sense it was beyond your capacities what I asked for.
As during the occupied Europe, someone took the initiative to write a manual of resistance, with direct instructions on how to slowly sabotage the system making everyone their own part, so now some people have enough knowledge and are ready to make a shift in order to not perpetrate the same forms of violence on anyone, neither on their own "enemies". This kind of peaceful fight is not undertaken for the promise that humanity one day will win. It's taken because it's a victory already, at any given moment.
I had to write it down, so this little wordy message can carry on somewhere in the internet.
If I misunderstood you, in many ways, I apologize. I just wish I could ask you directly. I just believe there's no time for giving so much space to evil anymore, and I certainly believe you're not what you have suffered and carried on to us as "inevitable". Your eyes are not just intelligent, but those of a good man too. Deep down I know you have served a purpose... Which is not ended. I will engage more with you, as I have just discovered your essay "Why I write". I know it can prove my understanding of you wrong in many ways. Still I wanted to write you as it's true for me right now. Without double checking, without fear of being less than perfect.
If you find it odd someone is writing to you, to the past, please reflect on that: as a writer you have started a correspondence with the future. I even expect you'll reply soon or later...with a word, an insight, something...--------------------
* "If there was hope, it must lie in the proles, because only there, in those swarming disregarded masses, eighty-five percent of the population of Oceania, could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated. The Party could not be overthrown from within. Its enemies, if it had any enemies, had no way of coming together or even of identifying one another. Even if the legendary Brotherhood existed, as just possibly it might, it was inconceivable that its members could ever assemble in larger numbers than twos and threes. Rebellion meant a look in the eyes, an inflection of the voice; at the most, an occasional whispered word. But the proles, if only they could somehow become conscious of their own strength, would have no need to conspire. They need only to rise up and shake themselves like a horse shaking off flies. If they chose they could blow the Party to pieces tomorrow morning. Surely sooner or later it must occur to them to do it." (1984)
