Why I Write
Whether puncturing the lies of politicians, wittily dissecting the English character or telling unpalatable truths about war, Orwell's timeless, uncompromising essays are more relevant, entertaining and essential than ever in today's era of spin.
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- If you can read French, I recommend Saint-Simon as the quintessential counter-example. In English, I found "Why I Write" by Orwell very entertaining.
- Silence, John Cage
Man Against Myth, Barrows Dunham
The Elements Of Style, Strunk & White (4th ed.)
Telling Writing, Macrorie
The Zen Teaching Of Huang Po
The Pocket Pema Chödrön
Why I Write, George Orwell
Others come and go from time to time, but those stay.
- Thanks for asking (I too am interested to hear others')
The Days Are Long but the Decades Are Short for simplification, balance and inspiration: https://blog.samaltman.com/the-days-are-long-but-the-decades...
Orwell's Politics and the English Language on the importance of precise use of language: https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
Orwell's Why I Write on critical thinking and clear communication: https://www.telelib.com/authors/O/OrwellGeorge/essay/whyiwri...
Steve Jobs' Stanford Commencement Address (a speech rather than an essay, but worthy of quarterly viewing): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc
Oscar Wilde's A Sentimental Journey Through Literature - a disciplined but scathing repost to a critic who takes shots at Wilde's work without understanding nor appreciating it. Timeless, given how much media is poorly substantiated opinion at best, and outright emotional babble at worst: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/14240/14240-h/14240-h.htm#:~...
- >Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention
--EAB, Why I Write
(The trick could be for some of us amateurs to preferentially attend to the preternaturally funny babies)
- Orwell himself said it was his imagining of communist totalitarianism as it might manifest in Britain. So don't get too hung up on IngSoc (The German Democratic Republic wasn't especially democratic - it was a (newspeak) theme) ;p
Let me see if I can find the actual quote...
[Edit:] There we go: "[Nineteen Eighty-Four] was based chiefly on communism, because that is the dominant form of totalitarianism, but I was trying chiefly to imagine what communism would be like if it were firmly rooted in the English speaking countries, and was no longer a mere extension of the Russian Foreign Office."
With lots of other references to communism, Stalinism and Stalin in the Wikipedia section. One more quote worth relaying:
In his 1946 essay "Why I Write", Orwell explains that the serious works he wrote since the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) were "written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism". Nineteen Eighty-Four is a cautionary tale about revolution betrayed by totalitarian defenders previously proposed in Homage to Catalonia
Hence calling him an anti-communist democratic socialist. :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four#Sources_f...
- > It's their product, it's their labor, they can offer to sell it to anybody who's happy with the terms.
No they can't, and there's precedent for that: food regulations, warranty regulations, refund regulations, regulations on sale to minors, tax regulations etc. - this is in recognition of the fact that without the resources provided by the state and civil society, they wouldn't be able to sell it (or, in some cases, even produce it) in the first place.
> But I could do it with the advantage that their version includes using the machinery of the state to call a restriction of a freedom a freedom.
This is rather ironic, not only because restriction of freedom is what gives us what we regard as higher freedom (almost by definition, e.g. the case of the savage society being less free than ours since there are no laws against murder and theft, thus people cannot pursue their "higher" ends freely) but also because Orwell was himself a socialist![0]
Restrictions on freedom are not merely trade-offs, they are essential to the functioning of society. The point I'm making is that this restriction on the freedom of the seller in this case is based on a conception of freedom in which its opposite (unfreedom) is held within the noun itself. When you speak of the freedom of the seller, you're also speaking of the unfreedom of everyone else.
[0] "Every line of serious work I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it." (George Orwell, 1946, "Why I Write")
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