1984 (2, 10) Here Comes a Chopper

Orwell gives us an echo of the nursery rhyme “Oranges and Lemons” as the circle closes and shuts in on Winston and Julia, Orwell’s last man.

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There was a sound of trampling boots below, inside the house and outside. The yard seemed to be full of men. Something was being dragged across the stones. The woman’s singing had stopped abruptly. There was a long, rolling clang, as though the washtub had been flung across the yard, and then a confusion of angry shouts which ended in a yell of pain.

“The house is surrounded,” said Winston.

“The house is surrounded,” said the voice.

He heard Julia snap her teeth together. “I suppose we may as well say good-bye,” she said.

“You may as well say good-bye,” said the voice. And then another quite different voice, a thin, cultivated voice which Winston had the impression of having heard before, struck in: “And by the way, while we are on the subject, Here comes a candle to light you to bed, here comes a chopper to chop off your head!”

Something crashed onto the bed behind Winston’s back. The head of a ladder had been thrust through the window and had burst in the frame. Someone was climbing through the window. There was a stampede of boots up the stairs. The room was full of solid men in black uniforms, with iron-shod boots on their feet and truncheons in their hands.

-- “1984” by George Orwell

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And so much for Winston's proles. Maybe next century.

Rain

Bah, not much blood at all.

It started to rain this morning, and I rushed out bed. Coco came in right away. Ash preferred to lie there pretty on the patio table. The happy surprise is that Sammy was on the scene. I had figured there was no hope of getting him, that he was off on his rounds where ever. I was able to grab him, and then in my eager optimism, I made a grab for Ash too. Which was a mistake. They are't kitten anymore and won't be so easily manhandled. Fortunately, Ash was not too skeeved off, and she came in on her own a few minutes later.

It looks like a decent rain. I won't be watering the lawn on Tuesday.

Cool

I don't think the rain lasted a whole hour, but I'm still letting it stand in for my Tuesday watering, though I might take pity on the trees. One great thing about this rain, though, is that it is beautifully cool, even a touch chilly. It reminds me that we do have a spring before the summer, and spring is not just a couple of weeks in March.

George Eliot

It is interesting to see that Mary Anne Evans and Ayn Rand share this emotional inclination to rhapsodize over economic industry. Though, the spirit of the idea is very different between Rand’s ‘selfishness is ideal’ and Evans’s sense of social responsibility. In Ms. Evans’s hand, this awe for industry has more Christian virtue in it.

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Caleb Garth often shook his head in meditation on the value, the indispensable might of that myriad-headed, myriad-handed labour by which the social body is fed, clothed, and housed. It had laid hold of his imagination in boyhood. The echoes of the great hammer where roof or keel were a-making, the signal-shouts of the workmen, the roar of the furnace, the thunder and plash of the engine, were a sublime music to him, the felling and lading of timber and the huge trunk vibrating star-like in the distance along the highway, the crane at work on the wharf, the piled-up produce in warehouses, the precision and variety of muscular effort wherever exact work had to be turned out, - all these sights of his youth had acted on him as poetry without the aid of the poets, had made a philosophy for him without the aid of philosophers, a religion without the aid of theology. His early ambition had been to have as effective a share as possible in this sublime labour, which was peculiarly dignified by him with the name of ‘business’.

-- “Middlemarch” by George Eliot

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Daily Fun

Oliver Hardy and Stan Laurel with two friends - c. 1930s

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