Orwell in Paris and London

In my reading through the experiences of people who touched down in Paris, I came to Orwell, who in his "Down and out in Paris and London" really touched the base. Of life, that is.

Poor fella' was so ripped of money in 1920-ies that he, unwillingly, had a chance to experience being among the debased, paupered citizens of those two urban molochs. Investigative, as he was, he made it into a learning experience, learning not about being poor, but about his human fellows.

Often he would offer his practical insight, which undoubtedly should be branded as a leftist one, but a real humanistic, not some brainwashed aparatchik leftist mind. Go you Marxists and learn!

When in Paris he was trying to earn his money by any job which he could find, in London he was waiting for a promised job and had to go penniless for weeks. In Paris he worked down to the cellars of a hotel as a dish-washer, and learned why we should not be frequenting in fancy restaurants, and in London he tried how it is to be a regular tramp, spending nights with the poor tribesmen of the city in a "spike" or any somilar place to which a common London tramp was forced by law. Orwell is not only critical, he gives a practical advise how the things should be improved.

Orwell wrote this text in a very plain writing. I saw recently some poor soul wasting electrons to prove Orwell was not a good writer, exactly because of this style. I ould not less agree with the critic. Enough is to say that I did not care to read, or want to read, any of the blood-sweated word of that poor critic, although he seemed to be a writer of some success. But to Orwell I myself, and in fact many, many people, return quite often with even larger admiration in repeated reading. It might be true he was not an "innovative" writer of a class of Miller or Carver, but then, he never wanted to be such. Orwell was giving a true picture of the world in most of his works, and when he ventured into imaginative world, he was not far from truism about some of the places on Earth at his time. And so much more about (all too) many countries a bit later after his time. If anything, his writings stand the test of time.

It was a shocking realization that many of the effects of being poor, underfed, hopeless about obtaining a job, and hopelessly outcast from the society, seemed so much familiar to me. If anything, I do know what he means by living on 2 slices of bread and a margarine, my comment was only "wow, rich were those Paris tramps, they had a margarine!". I slept on the train station floors or benches and spent not one winter night in search for a not too exposed corner to spend night in wait for a morning train, without money for any lodging. This was only a mild, passing experience... but enough to understand all too well what Orwell was writing about here. He did a fair, very fair job.

As I opened the next book to read, it was written 20 years later, and the writer just decided to travel around US after return from Europe which just started the WWII. He is also a pennyless writer, but he was donated some money and his experience (in Pittsburgh) is thoroughly different:

"I am in a small, supposedly comfortable room of a modern hotel equipped with all the last conveniences. The bed is clean and soft, the shower functions perfectly, the toilet seat has been sterilized since the last occupancym uf I am to believe what is printed on the paper band which garlands it; soap, towels, lights, stationery, everything is provided in abundance.

I am depressed, depressed beyond words. If I were to occupy this room for any length of time I would go mad-or commit suicide."

It is like a direct inversion of sickly dirty, unsanitary world described by Orwell. But he did not mention a word "depression" one, and there was no, in fact, any time when a tramp would have time to be "depressed". What a luxury! World really fared a lot in that 20 years from the shackles of the Great war to the Dawn of the Brave New World! We today are underestimating the power of Change. It is upon us even more than it was upon those guys. Beware, the world is spinning much faster nowadays!

Steppenwolf

When I was closing Hesse's "Steppenwolf"...he!, do not imagine me closing the actual book in paper, those days are almost gone! It was an e-book, this time I read it on Kindle DX, my personal library which travels with me worldwide. So, when I was closing the file, echo of Mozart's laughter mentioned by Hesse at the end of the book came to me. For, as Harry was horrified by the sound of music coming distorted from the loudspeaker of a radio, this is how I would be horrified 30 years ago, when reading it for the first time, if I would know I will read one day not in paper, but electronic version. And in English of all languages, oh my!

But still, as Mozart explains to Harry, the spirit of the music survives such a negligence, and we are to laugh off the screetches of the poor device, and to grasp the spirit behind. The same is with the books: they are, for me, always a conversation with the writer, or with his digestion of the world into the novel. If it is given to me in an expensive hardcover, or in cheap, rugged paperback, or a virtual, nonexistant format of an e-book, what does it have to do with the spirit conveyed? Nothing, perfectly nothing.

When I finished this reading, I did the same as I probably did 30 years ago: went back to the start, to read the "Preface" where is explained what was the condition of the imagined writer of the text. He disappeared from his lodgings to never return, leaving the text behind him.

What could happen to him, indeed? What is the meaning of a big quarrel (with Hermine?) soon after which he left the place? Who quarrels is not idle, has some passion for life... (s)he also laughs, loves, hates... so I assume he went on living some more passionate life than the scholar's death mask of a life which almost brought him to suicide.

I have read this book many times through my life. It would usually bring a somewhat nostalgic memory of myself as a youth, walking the streets of my Baroque city, with heavy thoughts resembling those described in Harry Haller's memoir. Now, when I am of almost his age in the book, I must say I did pretty much of what he needed to catch-up...from both sides. I was a scholar, literally, and I also learned the other ways. Now I see the text as a quite true image of the lively spirit of life. Kind of a shrugging-off of the dust of the "learned" spirit. Always a healthy thing to do.

What, then, was Hesse telling us with this book? That Life is not to be wasted, it is to be lived. Obvious, for us today, but for him (and others) then, it was not at all obvious, it needed a positive confirmation in idea and art. Hesse gave it in Steppenwolf.

There are opinions that Hesse is... simple, primitive. Compared to types of H. Miller, Sartre or Camus, Celine or succh he might be. But, dear fellow readers, put yourself in his shoes, at his time. Go into those mountains of his from which he came, see the average family, and even today you will find so similar to his time narrow-mindedness and limited scope of life, that he should be reborn again and again and write his "simple" books again and again, to light some light in minds of the lost souls of children in the forests. And, before we would think we are so advanced...there is a danger in "living" to forget about the motivation below. It comes from the spirit of music, art, science, which are all just a conveyed spirit of Nature itself. There is no "high" and "low" Nature. It is one of non-divisible entities in our experience. Like the number PI, if you approximate it, it will always come out with sharp edges, construction of the approximation visible below, never smooth as a circle of PI is.