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Tag Archives: Essay

Orwell Reflects on His School Days

30 Thursday Nov 2017

Posted by jrbenjamin in Biography

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Biography, education, England, Essay, George Orwell, Such Such Were the Joys

“It was about a year after I hit Johnny Hale in the face that I left St Cyprian’s for ever. It was the end of a winter term. With a sense of coming out from darkness into sunlight I put on my Old Boy’s tie as we dressed for the journey. I well remember the feeling of emancipation, as though the tie had been at once a badge of manhood and an amulet against Flip’s voice and Sambo’s cane. I was escaping from bondage. It was not that I expected, or even intended, to be any more successful at a public school than I had been at St Cyprian’s. But still, I was escaping. I knew that at a public school there would be more privacy, more neglect, more chance to be idle and self-indulgent and degenerate. For years I had been resolved — unconsciously at first, but consciously later on — that when once my scholarship was won I would ‘slack off’ and cram no longer. This resolve, by the way, was so fully carried out that between the ages of thirteen and twenty-two or three I hardly ever did a stroke of avoidable work…

I base these generalizations on what I can recall of my own childhood out look. Treacherous though memory is, it seems to me the chief means we have of discovering how a child’s mind works. Only by resurrecting our own memories can we realize how incredibly distorted is the child’s vision of the world. Consider this, for example. How would St Cyprian’s appear to me now, if I could go back, at my present age, and see it as it was in 1915? What should I think of Sambo and Flip, those terrible, all-powerful monsters? I should see them as a couple of silly, shallow, ineffectual people, eagerly clambering up a social ladder which any thinking person could see to be on the point of collapse. I would no more be frightened of them than I would be frightened of a dormouse. Moreover, in those days they seemed to me fantastically old, whereas — though of this I am not certain — I imagine they must have been somewhat younger than I am now…

I have never been back to St Cyprian’s. Reunions, old boys’ dinners and such-like leave me something more than cold, even when my memories are friendly. I have never even been down to Eton, where I was relatively happy, though I did once pass through it in 1933 and noted with interest that nothing seemed to have changed, except that the shops now sold radios. As for St Cyprian’s, for years I loathed its very name so deeply that I could not view it with enough detachment to see the significance of the things that happened to me there… And if I went inside and smelt again the inky, dusty smell of the big schoolroom, the rosiny smell of the chapel, the stagnant smell of the swimming bath and the cold reek of the lavatories, I think I should only feel what one invariably feels in revisiting any scene of childhood: How small everything has grown… Now, however, the place is out of my system for good. Its magic works no longer, and I have not even enough animosity left to make me hope that Flip and Sambo are dead or that the story of the school being burnt down was true.”

__________

Pulled from the ending of George Orwell’s essay “Such, Such Were the Joys,” first published in 1952 in the Partisan Review. It’s thought he wrote the essay a few years prior, sometime in early 1947, just before he started working on Nineteen Eighty-Four. There’s a lot of gold in the essay, but I especially like that understated, forgiving note on which he ends.

There’s more like this:

  • Julian Barnes assesses his memory of childhood friends
  • Donna Tart on the immense power of a teacher who believes in you
  • Orwell’s biographer, Christopher Hitchens discusses his mom

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How Jesus Talked

08 Tuesday Dec 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Religion, Speeches

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Amos, Bible, Biblical Hebrew, Calling of St. Matthew, Caravaggio, Christianity, Close Encounters with the People of the Past, Essay, Etymology, Greek, Hebrew, Hebrew Bible, Jesus, Jesus Christ, Judaism, language, lecture, linguistics, Mark, New Testament, Old Testament, religion, speech, Sun Valley Writers’ Conference, The Calling of Saint Matthew, The Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus, Thomas Cahill, Translation, Writing

The_Calling_of_Saint_Matthew-Caravaggo_(1599-1600)

“Biblical Hebrew developed as a desert language, and it exhibits the economy of desert people. The very opposite of Victorian English, which never uses fewer words if it can use more, Hebrew will not use three words if two will do. It will not use two words if one will do. If it can get away with silence instead of words, it will do so — and much of the meaning of the Hebrew Bible is to be found in its silences. This is because in the desert every movement is dehydrating; and desert people learn to think before they move and think before they speak. They are elegant conservers of energy.

When Amos, the great prophet of the Northern Kingdom, tries to move the people to abandon their trivial pursuit of economic status and to take account of the poor, he says most beautifully:

Ve-yigal ka-maim mishpat, ve-tsedaka k’nachal eytahn,

which I would translate, ‘Let your justice flow like water, and your compassion like a never-failing stream.’ The English takes twenty syllables, the Hebrew only fifteen — and this is Hebrew at its most expansive…

If the misplaced reverence of translators can make the people of the Bible sound as they never did in life, no one brings on attacks of reverence more often than Jesus, who was actually humorous, affectionate, and down-to-earth, who spoke to his friends and followers in a clear and bracing manner, was often blunt, sometimes vulgar, and always arresting. Never did he employ the dreary, self-righteous, even priggish sound that some of his admirers would wish for him. Despite the popularity of the King James Version, Jesus was not a 17th-century Englishman…

In Mark’s Gospel, the most primitive of the four gospels, the first words that Jesus speaks are: ‘The Time has come. The Kingdom of God draws near…’ The next word is almost always translated as ‘repent’ or ‘convert’ — which makes Jesus sound like a sidewalk freak with a placard in his hands. But the word Mark uses is metanoiete, which means literally in Greek ‘change your minds.’ For the Greeks, the mind was considerably more than it is for us. It was the core of the person, the center of his being. The word we would use is ‘heart.’ So… I have translated the Greek as ‘Open your hearts’ — a far cry from ‘repent!'”

__________

Excerpted from Thomas Cahill’s speech “Close Encounters with the People of the Past”.

Cahill, who has written some of the most enjoyable and broadly accessible popular history out there, has published a few books that hover around the ancient Greeks and early Christian church. I recommend starting with Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus.

The image: a section of Caravaggio’s 1599 masterpiece The Calling of Saint Matthew.

Related reading:

  • Does the beauty of the Bible attest to its truth? (Einstein, C.S. Lewis, and others answer)
  • Cahill ponders why the Christian worldview was revolutionary
  • Cahill’s brief, brilliant introduction to Saint Augustine

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Politics Is a Strong and Slow Boring of Hard Boards

07 Friday Aug 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Politics

≈ Comments Off on Politics Is a Strong and Slow Boring of Hard Boards

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Essay, Government, lecture, Max Weber, political philosophy, politics, Politics as a Vocation

Portrait of German political economist and social scientist Max Weber (1864 - 1920), a founder of the discipline of sociology, who called himself 'The Enemy of the Squires' and championed the cause of social and economic reform in Wilhelmine Germany, circa 1910. His most famous work is 'The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism' (1905) in which he explored the cultural and religious roots of Western capitalism. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

“Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards. It takes both passion and perspective. Certainly all historical experience confirms the truth — that man would not have attained the possible unless time and again he had reached out for the impossible. But to do that a man must be a leader, and not only a leader but a hero as well, in a very sober sense of the word. And even those who are neither leaders nor heroes must arm themselves with that steadfastness of heart which can brave even the crumbling of all hopes. This is necessary right now, or else men will not be able to attain even that which is possible today. Only he has the calling for politics who is sure that he shall not crumble when the world from his point of view is too stupid or too base for what he wants to offer. Only he who in the face of all this can say ‘In spite of all!’ has the calling for politics.”

__________

Max Weber, writing in the final paragraph of his truly edifying political-philosophical essay, “Politics as a Vocation”. You’ll find it in his Essays in Sociology. (Buy the book, but the whole thing’s here.)

Though Weber wrote his essay in German, adapted as it was from a 1919 lecture he gave to the Free Students Union in Bavaria, I can’t help but love the double entendre of “boring” in the opening sentence. Whenever there’s a showmen performing rhetorical tricks — like a magician proudly parading his assistant or waving a colored hankerchief — reach for your pocket, and see who’s pulling out your wallet.

Thanks to my friend M.S. for reminding me of this one.

There’s more:

  • Gore Vidal makes the case that politicians are “supposed to be awful”
  • Weber argues for a new, simple definition of the state
  • What was the founding fathers’ view of human nature?

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Vineyard Haven

15 Sunday Mar 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Essay

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Beach, Essay, Havanas in Camelot, In Vineyard Haven, Seaside, Small Town, Vineyard Haven, William Styron

William Styron 324

“Mostly I love the soft collision here of harbor and shore, the subtly haunting briny quality that all small towns have when they are situated on the sea. It is often manifested simply in the sounds of the place — sounds unknown to forlorn inland municipalities, even West Tilbury. To the stranger, these sounds might appear distracting, but as a fussy, easily distracted person who has written three large books within earshot of these sounds, I can affirm that they do not annoy at all. Indeed, they lull the mind and soul, these vagrant noises: the blast of the ferry horn — distant, melancholy — and the gentle thrumming of the ferry itself outward bound past the breakwater; the sizzling sound of sailboat hulls as they shear the waves; the luffing of sails and the muffled boom of the yacht club’s gun; the eerie wail of the breakwater siren in dense fog; the squabble and cry of gulls. And at night to fall gently asleep to the far-off moaning of the West Chop foghorn. And deep silence save for the faint chink-chinking of halyards against a single mast somewhere in the harbor’s darkness.

Vineyard Haven. Sleep. Bliss.”

__________

The last paragraph of William Styron’s “In Vineyard Haven,” the final essay in his fantastic collection Havanas in Camelot: Personal Essays.

William Styron 2

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The Problem with Nationalism

19 Thursday Feb 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Essay, Politics, War

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Essay, George Orwell, Nationalism, Notes on Nationalism, Patriotism

George Orwell

“All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts. A British Tory will defend self-determination in Europe and oppose it in India with no feeling of inconsistency. Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage — torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians — which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by ‘our’ side.

The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them. […]

Moreover, although endlessly brooding on power, victory, defeat, revenge, the nationalist is often somewhat uninterested in what happens in the real world. What he wants is to feel that his own unit is getting the better of some other unit, and he can more easily do this by scoring off an adversary than by examining the facts to see whether they support him. All nationalist controversy is at the debating-society level. It is always entirely inconclusive, since each contestant invariably believes himself to have won the victory. Some nationalists are not far from schizophrenia, living quite happily amid dreams of power and conquest which have no connection with the physical world.”

__________

From George Orwell’s essay “Notes on Nationalism,” published in May 1945.

More prophetic words for the politics of today:

  • Joseph Conrad identifies the two main traits of terrorists (1907)
  • Schumpeter sees there’s always a reason for empires to invade (1919)
  • Brandeis writes that a government’s contempt for law is contagious (1928)
  • Raymond Chandler observes a newspaper is a business — nothing more (1953)

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Friendship as a Conservative Act

06 Friday Feb 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Essay, Philosophy

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Andrew Sullivan, Conservativism, Essay, Friends, friendship, Matthew Sitman, Michael Oakeshott, On Being Conservative, Philosophy

Michael Oakeshott

“Friends are not concerned with what might be made of one another, but only with the enjoyment of one another; and the condition of this enjoyment is a ready acceptance of what is and the absence of any desire to change or to improve. A friend is not somebody one trusts to behave in a certain manner, who supplies certain wants, who has certain useful abilities, who possesses certain merely agreeable qualities, or who holds certain acceptable opinions; he is somebody who engages the imagination, who excites contemplation, who provokes interest, sympathy, delight and loyalty simply on account of the relationship entered into… The relationship of friend to friend is dramatic, not utilitarian; the tie is one of familiarity, not usefulness; the disposition engaged is conservative, not “progressive.” And what is true of friendship is not less true of other experiences – of patriotism, for example, and of conversation – each of which demands a conservative disposition as a condition of its enjoyment.”

__________

From Michael Oakeshott’s essay “On Being Conservative”.

I found this excerpt in my friend Matthew Sitman’s wonderful short tribute to his friend and colleague Andrew Sullivan, on the day that their blog TheDish, the internet’s best news and commentary hub, wraps up for good. I like all of Matthew’s writing, which I encourage you to follow as he sets off toward greener pastures, though this final paragraph about his business-friendship with Andrew really did it for me today:

I can’t help but feel joy that my friend is leaving blogging behind. His deepest interests are not political, as my own story of meeting and getting to know Andrew should indicate. The daily jousting on the web, however brilliantly he executed it, does not reveal the core of the Andrew I know. Instead, if asked to describe the man, what comes to mind is the time we talked about God hour after hour one sunny Spring day, or the eagerness with which he showed me Provincetown my first visit there. I look forward to the day, soon arriving, when reciting our favorite Philip Larkin poems supplants discussion of web traffic, and when, after going to Mass together, we can converse about Jesus without worrying over Monday morning’s blogging.

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Mark Twain on the Jews

28 Wednesday Jan 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Essay, History

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Anti-Semitism, Concerning the Jews, Essay, history, Jews, Judaism, Mark Twain, Palestine, Philo-Semitism, racism, The Innocents Abroad

Mark Twain

“If the statistics are right, the Jews constitute but one quarter of one percent of the human race. It suggests a nebulous puff of star dust lost in the blaze of the Milky Way. Properly, the Jew ought hardly to be heard of, but he is heard of, has always been heard of. He is as prominent on the planet as any other people, and his importance is extravagantly out of proportion to the smallness of his bulk.

His contributions to the world’s list of great names in literature, science, art, music, finance, medicine and abstruse learning are also very out of proportion to the weakness of his numbers. He has made a marvelous fight in this world in all ages; and has done it with his hands tied behind him. He could be vain of himself and be excused for it. The Egyptians, the Babylonians and the Persians rose, filled the planet with sound and splendor, then faded to dream-stuff and passed away; the Greeks and Romans followed and made a vast noise, and they were gone; other people have sprung up and held their torch high for a time but it burned out, and they sit in twilight now, and have vanished.

The Jew saw them all, survived them all, and is now what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age, no weakening of his parts, no slowing of his energies, no dulling of his alert but aggressive mind. All things are mortal but the Jews; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?”

__________

Mark Twain, writing in his short essay “Concerning the Jews” (1898).

Though his essay is almost entirely philo-Semitic, Twain did include within it his view that the Jewish people, “like the Christian Quaker,” were unwilling servicemen – that they had “an unpatriotic disinclination to stand by the flag as a soldier.” However, after the War Department figures showed Jewish overrepresentation in the U.S. military, Twain issued a retraction which he titled “The Jew as Soldier.”

In 1867, a mere eight decades before the state of Israel’s formal declaration, Twain traveled to Palestine and chronicled his trip in The Innocents Abroad. One particular quote sheds adequate light on his assessment of the place:

[It is a] desolate country whose soil is rich enough, but is given over wholly to weeds-a silent mournful expanse… A desolation is here that not even imagination can grace with the pomp of life and action… We never saw a human being on the whole route… There was hardly a tree or a shrub anywhere. Even the olive and the cactus, those fast friends of the worthless soil, had almost deserted the country.

Go on:

  • Twain’s hilarious, furious letter in which he calls the recipient, “An idiot of the 33rd degree, and scion of an ancestral procession of idiots stretching back to the Missing Link”
  • Twain’s daily routine

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What Is a ‘State’?

11 Wednesday Jun 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Political Philosophy

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Anarchy, Brest-Litovsk, Definition of the State, Essay, Government, lecture, Leon Trotsky, Max Weber, Monopoly of the Use of Force, political philosophy, Politics as a Vocation, State, violence

Max Weber

“But what is a ‘political’ association from the sociological point of view? What is a ‘state’? Sociologically, the state cannot be defined in terms of its ends. There is scarcely any task that some political association has not taken in hand… Ultimately, one can define the modern state sociologically only in terms of the specific means peculiar to it, as to every political association, namely, the use of physical force.

‘Every state is founded on force,’ said Trotsky at Brest-Litovsk. That is indeed right. If no social institutions existed which knew the use of violence, then the concept of ‘state’ would be eliminated, and a condition would emerge that could be designated as ‘anarchy,’ in the specific sense of this word. Of course, force is certainly not the normal or the only means of the state — nobody says that — but force is a means specific to the state. Today the relation between the state and violence is an especially intimate one. In the past, the most varied institutions — beginning with the sib — have known the use of physical force as quite normal. Today, however, we have to say that a state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory. Note that ‘territory’ is one of the characteristics of the state. Specifically, at the present time, the right to use physical force is ascribed to other institutions or to individuals only to the extent to which the state permits it. The state is considered the sole source of the ‘right’ to use violence.”

__________

Sociologist Max Weber, writing in his seminal 1919 essay “Politics as a Vocation”.

This is the best definition of the state that I’ve read. It is also, in a nutshell, what we Americans have never understood about our guns — that although we may have the right to violently defend our selves and our property, we ultimately cede to the state the right to legitimately exercise force.

Read on:

  • Andrew Jackson elaborates on the importance of the rule of law
  • Martin Luther King outlines when and how you should break the law
  • Chief Justice Robert Jackson argues why the state must let people think freely

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