I’m sitting on my small, lakeside deck. The wind from the west, behind me, comes in a sudden rush down through the treetops, corrugating the surface in places while the close, quiet water retains a slick sheen. I can both see through to the sand bottom and see the reflections of the shoreside pines extending above me. Across the lake, beyond the far shore, lie the hills and mountains layered out to the horizon, the near-hills bright green, the most distant darkening to blue-black. Dragonflies careen along inches from the surface, sometimes—somehow—stopping mid-air to make a many-eyed scan for smaller insects, food. A yearling merganser is suddenly swooping right past me for a crash-splash-not-yet-mastered water landing. It turns and propels itself closer, invisible feet doing all the work, then catches a glimpse of me, rushes away, dives beneath the surface. I don’t stay focused enough to see where it emerges. My little sailboat tap-taps against the dock where it is secured, its mast shimmying from side to side with the water’s undulations. When the wind pauses, a mosquito hovers close, and I snatch at it but miss, and the wind comes again, and it is gone. One of the small airplanes fitted with floats flies tourists beneath the high clouds to look down upon this vast, wild country, the Adirondack mountains. Just now the clouds part, and shadows of overhead branches move with the motion of my pen against the cream-white page….
Incongruously enough, this entry began with a desire to say something about George Orwell’s 1984. I hear/read the word “Orwellian” so frequently these days as our country hovers on this mad precipice, where nearly half of the country have fallen under the spell of their own Big Brother. But the part of 1984 I found myself considering—the part no one considers enough or much at all these days with such naked authoritarianism on the rise—is the protagonist, Winston’s, deep thirst for beauty and the exhilaration and joy he feels when writing.
As much as anything, the novel imagines a world in which doing what I’m doing now—looking at the profound beauty surrounding me and trying to trace with words the specific things that tease out such deep emotion—are not possible without dire consequences. Winston’s reflections on both are striking. He frequently thinks about— wondering if perhaps he had even dreamed it—what he calls his “Golden Country.”
Consider these two early passages where Winston is utterly overwhelmed with the beauty that surrounds him (also marvel at the beauty of Orwell’s prose).
In the ragged hedge on the opposite side the boughs of the elm trees swayed just perceptibly in the breeze, and their leaves stirred faintly in dense masses like women’s hair. Surely somewhere nearby, but out of sight, there must be a stream with green pools where dace were swimming? ‘Isn’t there a stream somewhere near here?’ he whispered. ‘That’s right, there is a stream. It’s at the edge of the next field, actually. There are fish in it, great big ones. You can watch them lying in the pools under the willow trees, waving their tails.’ ‘It’s the Golden Country—almost,’ he murmured. ‘The Golden Country?’ ‘It’s nothing, really. A landscape I’ve seen sometimes in a dream.’
A thrush had alighted on a bough not five metres away almost at the level of their faces. Perhaps it had not seen them. It was in the sun, they in the shade. It spread out its wings, fitted them carefully into place again, ducked its head for a moment, as though making a sort of obeisance to the sun, and then began to pour forth a torrent of song. In the afternoon hush the volume of sound was startling… The music went on and on, minute after minute, with astonishing variations, never once repeating itself, almost as though the bird were deliberately showing off its virtuosity… Winston watched it with a sort of vague reverence. For whom, for what, was that bird singing? No mate, no rival was watching it. What made it sit at the edge of the lonely wood and pour its music into nothingness?…It was as though it were a kind of liquid stuff that poured all over him and got mixed up with the sunlight that filtered through the leaves. He stopped thinking and merely felt.
In my last post, my birthday poem for my daughter, I looked to the memory of her finding her own words to describe a moment of ineffable beauty, her “Golden City.” How striking that she used a phrase so nearly Winston’s (Orwell’s) exact words! In the quotations above, Winston luxuriates in the simple—forbidden—pleasure of observing beauty. These passages brought me lakeside with my own journal in hand to try to capture some essence of the moment with my own words; and Winston also contemplates the thrill of finding words, watching their near-magical appearance on what was once a blank page.
It was a peculiarly beautiful book. Its smooth creamy paper, a little yellowed by age… The pen was an archaic instrument, seldom used even for signatures, and he had procured one, furtively and with some difficulty, simply because of a feeling that the beautiful creamy paper deserved to be written on with a real nib instead of being scratched with an ink-pencil…. Suddenly he began writing…only imperfectly aware of what he was setting down. His small but childish handwriting straggled up and down the page, shedding first its capital letters and finally even its full stops…
As Winston pays close attention to those “creamy pages” deserving of a good writing implement, I’m writing in my own “creamy,” thick pages of my Moleskine journal with my favorite writing tool, an ultra-fine black Sharpie. I love the ease with which it glides over the page, the slight resistance, the comforting shush it makes especially when the words are coming in a rush I can hardly follow. Winston expresses a similar simple, ineffable joy at seeing his thoughts materialize before him on the page. When he famously writes “DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER!” repeatedly, he experiences a strange moment of utter disconnection, not even fully remembering he had written it, and he stares, overwhelmed, at those seemingly impossible-to-utter words. While I can’t say I’ve experienced anything exactly like this, when I write, I continuously marvel at the way things (ideas, observations, arguments…) come into being that would never have been had I not removed the black plastic cap, undone the thin elastic holding the journal closed and begun to write.
While Orwell certainly—presciently—wanted to warn humanity of a day when truth would no longer matter (whether the cost of chocolate rose or fell, whether Eurasia was friend or foe or had ever been one or the other…whether an election official was urged to commit fraud…), he also invites us to consider the human capacity to recognize immense beauty and to yearn to create responses with written language. Writing that, I look up from the page of my own “straggled” words at the steadily clearing day as a raven far above me and out of sight makes one of its strange vocalizations that seem very nearly actual words, and I take a long swig of extra-strong coffee.
Winston also luxuriates in simple pleasures—the taste of real, non-party-produced food and drink. In his secret room (or so he thought) above Charrington’s shop, he takes great comfort in living for brief periods of time there with Julia as he imagines how people must have lived in the pre-BB era. It thrills him to do what he imagines people were once allowed to do without fear—lounge in unmade beds in the arms of a lover, eat good food, drink strong, flavorful tea, coffee….
1984 reminds us to open our eyes to both the vast beauty surrounding us and to the simpler pleasures many of us forget we have the freedom to enjoy each day.
True, Trump rallies are filled with endless “minutes of hate,” and he regularly says things that seem to belong in a world where 2+2=5. And of course we all watched in real time the angered faces march on the capitol after being driven to a frenzy with volley upon volley of Big-Brother-worthy vitriol. It all too often feels straight from Orwell’s nightmarish world:
Before the Hate had proceeded for thirty seconds, uncontrollable exclamations of rage were breaking out from half the people in the room…In its second minute the Hate rose to a frenzy. People were leaping up and down in their places and shouting at the tops of their voices… The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge- hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current…
But Orwell also sets Winston’s deep appreciation for beauty, his love of language and writing as a direct contrast to the ugly, hate-filled world he inhabits. While I’m saddened daily with stories of the maddening, hate-filled speech and actions of so many, when I’m here at my small, simple cabin on the far side of the lake—my own secret place of wonder and beauty—I am in my “Golden Country,” a sort of “liquid stuff” pouring over me as I work to conjure the right words and feel them glide through the tip of my pen out onto the page.
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Thanks! I’ll definitely give that link a try. The lake deck is at our off-grid, boat access only small cabin in the Adirondack wilderness. We’re very lucky to have acquired it a few years ago.
Ah, a glorious piece of writing Arnie. I’d forgotten that aspect of 1984 - I read it when I was 13 in 1983, determined to read it before its sell-by date! I think I might go back to it. And you have a deck on a lake - how marvellous. We have a deck that looks out over a 12th century English church, a very green and simple view but endlessly inspiring. We face north - so we get rainbows over the church and striking sun across its face. I don’t know if you can listen to BBC Sounds over there but your writing reminded me of a delightful programme called Archive on 4 The Great Outdoors that begins with the wonder of reading nature writing and how ‘it reminds us of a distant summer’.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001ml5f?partner=uk.co.bbc&origin=share-mobile here’s the link if you can get it