With audiobooks I’ve started to read three times as many books as I used to. I’ve gotten smarter and more interesting. You should check them out.
Here’s the first in a series where I review/muse on all the books I’ve listened to so far.
Homage to Catalonia — George Orwell
In tenth grade world history class we were shown a ten minute documentary of Tienanmen Square protests and I welled up. Junior year of college in 2011 I found myself waking up at 3am to stream protests in Cairo and also could not hold in my tears. I remember being in Israel the year before and seeing their tent cities of protesters in Tel Aviv and thinking that was pretty inspiring as well. Yes Obama’s election was a real movement and moment, but since the 2010 tea party wave it didn’t feel like much more change lay on the horizon. I felt like my generation was lame for not standing up for something and here on tv were hundreds of thousands of youth laying their lives on the line for their futures.
Of course instead of actually going to Cairo I sublimated my desire to be grand and heroic by writing history papers about Americans who had more balls than I did. The first was Gouverneur Morris, a forgotten founding father who wrote the Constitution’s preamble and according to Madison gave “the finish to the style and arrangement of the Constitution.” He’s forgotten because he slept with everyone else’s wife so few had nice things to say about him after he died. He was the US ambassador to France during the French Revolution and because he came from a revolutionary state he was the only foreign diplomat who was allowed to hang around when the going got tough.
Another subject was Samuel Gridley Howe, a Bostonian who in 1819 wanted to marry a girl but her daddy said he wasn’t rich enough. So, he decided the right move was to follow Byron’s lead and head out to fight in the Greek Revolution in 1824 armed with a pistol and an MD.
He got there and was disappointed that these Greeks didn’t quite live up to the Ancients. For instance, he thought their guerrilla tactics make them the anti-Spartans. Howe saw that as soon as a general ran out of money he was unable to induce his men to march. He wrote that the general “urged, upbraided, threatened to no effect…and, when he told them that, if it was more dangerous, it was more honorable ‘a fig for the honour!’ says one. ‘We fight for money, not for honour!’”
Even the girls disappointed him! Howe once “found out a most beautiful natural bath, very retired…formed by a little brook which comes tumbling down the hill, and, pitching over a rock into a little basin about four feet deep, runs on continually, leaving the bath full; it is surrounded and overshadowed by thick foliage, and is the very place where I should have expected, in days of yore, to have found some fair nymph bathing.” Surely Howe hoped to repeat Odysseus’ discovery of “fair-robed Nausicaa” and her attendants “bathing themselves/and rubbing their bodies well with oil.” Alas, for Samuel those “nymphs and swains, so beautifully sung by poets of old” had been “transformed into ugly, silly girls, and dirty, lazy loons!” He wrote a month later, now on the island of Hydra. “With very few exceptions, I saw no handsome girls on the mainland. The islanders are more celebrated for beauty; but in Hydra I have not yet seen one who had the least claim to beauty, though some are pretty. Their dresses, so tasteless and uncouth, disfigure them…their clothes are cut exactly in the same style which we see in the pictures of our grandmothers in their bloom.”
Anyway so as I started to read about Americans who flew to Libya and they seemed more like idiots than heroes. I didn’t want to fight for freedom as much anymore.
George Orwell is most certainly not an idiot. I picked up the book in 2011 as part of my foreigners fighting other peoples’ revolutions kick. His Homage to Catalonia is a beautiful piece of writing and political analysis. It starts as Orwell heads to Barcelona to “fight Fascism.” His portrayal of life on the front is as pathos-filled as any you’ll ever get — so far for me only Tolstoy’s Sevastopol Sketches have gotten to the same level. His analysis of how foreign media wrote about the civil war through their own ideological lenses rings true today. His explanation of how a social movement that had a pure heart lost it to foreign (in this case Soviet) influence was heartbreaking and also has Arab Spring resonance. The final set-piece shoot-out in the streets of Barcelona, his gunshot wound and the race to get out of the country is masterfully handled.
A taste:
They laid me down again while somebody fetched a stretcher. As soon as I knew that the bullet had gone clean through my neck I took it for granted that I was done for. I had never heard of a man or an animal getting a bullet through the middle of the neck and surviving it. The blood was dribbling out of the comer of my mouth. ‘The artery’s gone,’ I thought. I wondered how long you last when your carotid artery is cut; not many minutes, presumably. Everything was very blurry. There must have been about two minutes during which I assumed that I was killed. And that too was interesting — I mean it is interesting to know what your thoughts would be at such a time.
My first thought, conventionally enough, was for my wife. My second was a violent resentment at having to leave this world which, when all is said and done, suits me so well. I had time to feel this very vividly. The stupid mischance infuriated me. The meaninglessness of it! To be bumped off, not even in battle, but in this stale comer of the trenches, thanks to a moment’s carelessness! I thought, too, of the man who had shot me — wondered what he was like, whether he was a Spaniard or a foreigner, whether he knew he had got me, and so forth. I could not feel any resentment against him. I reflected that as he was a Fascist I would have killed him if I could, but that if he had been taken prisoner and brought before me at this moment I would merely have congratulated him on his good shooting. It may be, though, that if you were really dying your thoughts would be quite different.
So check it out kids. Homage to Catalonia. Great, great stuff.
Next up, Ten Days that Shook the World by John Reed.