Lasting Thoughts
I felt like I was right alongside Orwell while I read this book. The writing is so descriptive and yet simplistic. The world he portrays is haunting and beautiful. I was completely caught up in the ongoing mystery. Where he was going to find his next meal? How he would get himself out of his seemingly hopeless circumstance? The book is filled with lively characters. Orwell has a way of illuminating the humanity in a person, however small it might appear to someone with a lesser eye. Reading this book left me feeling thankful for the place & time I live in. The simple comforts of a basic meal and a bed to sleep in every night.
Most Memorable Quote
“The mass of the rich and the poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothing else, and the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit.”
George Orwell
For reference:
The bold highlights are my own emphasis
The blue highlights are passages I found noteworthy or interesting
The green highlights are passages I found to be well written
Paris
Picture him very pink and young, with the fresh cheeks and soft brown hair of a nice little boy, and lips excessively red and wet, like cherries.
You thought it would be terribly; it is merely squalid and boring. It is the peculiar lowness of poverty that you discover first; the shifts that it puts you to, the complicated meanness, the crust wiping.
You discover boredom which is inseparable from poverty; the times when you have nothing to do and, being underfed, can interest yourself in nothing.
You discover boredom and mean complications and the beginnings of hunger, but you also discover the great redeeming feature of poverty: the fact that it annihilates the future.
It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out. You have talked so often of going to the dogs—and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it. It takes a lot of anxiety.
The luck always changes. Besides, we both have brains — a man with brains can’t starve.
Courage, my little wolf, always the courage! Remember that the bad days are not for ever, and the trouble which seems so terrible will disappear at last.
Hunger reduces one to an utterly spineless, brainless condition, more like the after-effects of influenza than anything else.
There was — it is hard to express it — a sort of heavy contentment a well-fed beast might feel, in a life which had become so simple.
Most of my Saturday nights went in this way. On the whole, the two hours when one was perfectly and wildly happy seemed worth the subsequent headache. For many men in the quarter, unmarried and with no future to think of, the weekly drinking-bout was the one thing that made life worth living.
Sharp knives, of course, are the secret of a successful restaurant.
At this moment there are men with university degrees scrubbing dishes in Paris for ten or fifteen hours a day. One cannot say that it is mere idleness on their part, for an idle man cannot be a plongeur; they have simply been trapped by a routine which makes thought impossible.
If plongeurs thought at all, they would long ago have formed a union and gone on strike for better treatment. But they do not think because they have no leisure for it; their life has made slaves of them.
A slave, Marcus Cato said, should be working when he is not sleeping. It does not matter whether his work is needed or not, he must work, because work in itself is good — for slaves, at least. This sentiment still survives, and it has piled up mountains of useless drudgery.
- I believe that this instinct to perpetuate useless mob work is, at bottom, simply fear of the mob. The mob (the thought runs) are such low animals that they would be dangerous if they had leisure; it is safer to keep them too busy to think.
- A rich man who happens to be intellectually honest, if he is questioned about the improvement of working conditions, usually says something like this:
- ‘We know that poverty is unpleasant; in fact, since it is so remote, we rather enjoy harrowing ourselves with the thought of its unpleasantness. But don’t expect us to do anything about it. We are sorry for you lower classes, just as we are sorry for a cat with the mange, but we will fight like devils against any improvement of your condition. We feel that you are much safer as you are. The present state of affairs suits us, and we are not going to take the risk of setting you free, even by an extra hour a day. So, dear brothers, since evidently you must sweat to pay for our trips to Italy, sweat and be damned to you.’
- It is this fear of a supposedly dangerous mob that makes nearly all intelligent people conservative in their opinions.
- Fear of the mob is a superstitious fear. It is based on the idea that there is some mysterious, fundamental difference between rich and poor, as though they were two different races, like Negroes and white men. But in reality, there is no such difference.
- The mass of the rich and the poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothing else, and the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit.
- Fear of the mob is a superstitious fear. It is based on the idea that there is some mysterious, fundamental difference between rich and poor, as though they were two different races, like Negroes and white men. But in reality, there is no such difference.
London
It gives one a very strange feeling to be wearing such clothes. I had worn bad enough things before, but nothing at all like these; they were not merely dirty and shapeless, they had — how is one to express it? — a gracelessness, a patina of antique filth, quite different from mere shabbiness.
Dirt is a great respecter of persons; it lets you alone when you are well dressed, but as soon as your collar is gone it flies towards you from all directions.
For the first time I noticed, too, how the attitude of women varies with a man’s clothes. When a badly dressed man passes them they shudder away from him with a quite frank movement of disgust, as though he were a dead cat. Clothes are a powerful thing.
- Dressed in a tramp’s clothes it is very difficult, at any rate for the first day, not to feel you are genuinely degraded.
- You might feel the same shame, irrational but very real, your first night in prison.
It was a low-ceiled cellar deep underground, very hot and drowsy with coke fumes, and lighted only by the fires, which cast black velvet shadows in the comers.
He kept making little rushes at the other, sticking out his face and screaming from a few inches distant like a cat on a wall, and spitting.
It was malnutrition and not any native vice that had destroyed his manhood.
‘The stars are a free show; it doesn’t cost anything to use your eyes.’
*** “If you set yourself to it, you can live the same life, rich or poor. You can still keep on with your books and your ideas. You just got to say to yourself, ‘I’m a free man in here’ — he tapped his forehead — and you’re all right.”
With all this, he had neither fear, not regret, nor shame, nor self-pity. He had faced his position and made a philosophy for himself.
— He considered himself in a class above the ordinary run of beggars, who, he said, were an abject lot, without even the decency to be ungrateful.
*** He had managed to keep his brain intact and alert, and so nothing could make him succumb to poverty. He might be ragged and cold, or even starving, but so long as he could read, think and watch for meteors, he was and he said, free in his own mind.
Life on earth, he said, is harsh because the plant is poor in the necessities of existence.
“The worst thing in this life is the cold, and the next worst is the interference you have to put up with.”
Beggars do not work, it is said; but, then, what is work?
Money has become to grand test of virtue. By this test beggars fail, and for this they are despised.
A beggar, looked at realistically, is simply a businessman, getting his living, like other businessmen, in the way that comes to hand. He has not, more than most modern people, sold his honour; he has merely made the mistake of choosing a trade at which it is impossible to grow rich.
Evidently, a word is an insult simply because it is meant as an insult, without reference to its dictionary meaning; words, especially swear words, being what public opinion chooses to make them.
People are wrong when they think that an unemployed man only worries about losing his wages; on the contrary, an illiterate man, with the work habit in his bones, needs work even more than he needs money. An educated man can put up with enforced idleness, which is one of the worst evils of poverty.
- The man who really merits pity is the man who has been down from the start, and faces poverty with a blank, resourceless mind.
He [Bozo] had not eaten since the morning, had walked several miles with a twisted leg, his clothes were drenched, and he had a halfpenny between himself and starvation. With all of this, he could laugh over the loss of his razor. One could not help admiring him.
A clergyman and his daughter came and started silently at us for a while, as though we had been aquarium fishes, and then went away again.
He has been on the road six months, but in the sight of God, he seemed to imply, he was not a tramp. I imagine there are quite a lot of tramps who thank God they are not tramps.
For of course it gores without saying that if a tramp finds no women at his own level, those above — even a very little above — are as far out of his reach as the moon.
The evil of poverty is not so much that it makes a man suffer as that it rots him physically and spiritually. And there can be no doubt that sexual starvation contributes to this rotting process.
*** I shall never again think that all tramps are drunken scoundrels, nor expect a beggar to be grateful when I give him a penny, nor be surprised if men out of work lack energy, nor subscribe to the Salvation Army, not pawn my clothes, nor refuse a handbill, nor enjoy a meal at a smart restaurant. That is a beginning.
New Words
arrears
patina
etiolated
comers
abject
excrescence
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