Orwell

In Orwell’s Burmese days as a police officer of the Empire, he once got a call that an elephant had broken loose. He went to get on top of the matter. At first, he thought he might not have to shoot the poor but gigantic creature, as it seemed rather docile, until ...

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But at that moment I glanced round at the crowd that had followed me. It was an immense crowd, two thousand at the least and growing every minute. It blocked the road for a long distance on either side. I looked at the sea of yellow faces above the garish clothes - faces all happy and excited over this bit of fun, all certain that the elephant was going to be shot. They were watching me as they would watch a conjurer about to perform a trick. They did not like me, but with the magical rifle in my hands I was momentarily worth watching. And suddenly I realized that I should have to shoot the elephant after all. The people expected it of me and I had got to do it; I could feel their two thousand wills pressing me forward, irresistibly. And it was at this moment, as I stood there with the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped the hollowness, the futility of the white man's dominion in the East. Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd – seemingly the leading actor of the piece; but in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind. I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys. He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalized figure of a sahib. For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the "natives," and so in every crisis he has got to do what the "natives" expect of him. He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it. I had got to shoot the elephant. I had committed myself to doing it when I sent for the rifle. A sahib has got to act like a sahib; he has got to appear resolute, to know his own mind and do definite things. To come all that way, rifle in hand, with two thousand people marching at my heels, and then to trail feebly away, having done nothing – no, that was impossible. The crowd would laugh at me. And my whole life, every white man's life in the East, was one long struggle not to be laughed at.

-- George Orwell, “Shooting an Elephant” (Autumn 1936)

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91 degrees

91 degrees. True, it is not a June 91, all torrid and torturous, but neither is it a March 78 degrees.

Nina Zero

We are near the end of the novel. Wrex has rescued Nina from her psychopathic captors. However, Wrex is also the reason why Nina has gotten in all this trouble, and Nina realizes that his motives are not wholly pure and lovey-dovey. They are at a diner, and he is putting on the charm, being all hand-holdy.

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He said, “C’mon babe, let’s go somewhere where we can, you know, be alone.”

“You want to make love now, after all that’s happened?”

He thought about it a second, said, “Well, yeah.”

I jerked my hands away.

“So what’s wrong with that?”

“A million years, Wrex. The space of time between now and when the dinosaurs roamed the earth. That’s how long it’s gonna be before our private parts ever touch again.”

-- “Shooting Elvis” by Robert M. Eversz

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Celebrities and Stuff

ONTD

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Restless Evenings

These evening, when I am cleaning up after dinner, I still feel this restlessness, draining me of the will to go on, and I continue to feel as though the answer is to have a journal of brief entries, no more than a hundred words. I actually want to say fifty, but I need more room, and a hundred words is still only a moderate-size paragraph. It doesn’t have to be quasi-poetry, made up of short lines. I only need something that I can read in one bite. A well-tuned paragraph works. But the Three Journal takes the last of my time and energy.