Oct 4, 2006 Comments Off
Under the weather
Yesterday I stayed holed up in the squat — which, yes, is still secure for the time being — due to a chest cold that knocked me on my ass. Gave me time to really dig into the George Orwell biography I’ve been reading. (Wow, crappy American cover; the U.K. version is much nicer.)
Why is it that most of my favorite writers are/were a bit fucked up? One of Orwell’s quotes: “Failure is the only virtue.”
It’s oddly comforting, at the least, that the man who wrote Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, two books that basically changed the way people thought about fiction, was so immersed in self-pity and self-recrimination, and so isolated from the way most other people of his time thought and behaved. Down and Out in Paris and London, for obvious reasons, is still one of my favorite “inspirational” books.
Although I didn’t actually set out to follow Orwell’s example, I was, however, disappointed, in a way, to discover in this biography that he could have always lifted himself out of his situation through his contacts in Paris at the time, including an aunt, but he chose not to: He felt he had something more to learn from the experience. Yet, if I’m disappointed in Orwell I should be disappointed in myself. My situation is much the same.
After 11 months on the streets of Prague what did I learn? That I’m a much more disciplined writer when I wake up on the ground. However, if I were sleeping on the ground this week I wouldn’t be learning much other than new levels of bodily misery. The fine, golden fall weather has finally turned cold and wet. But the landlord hasn’t kicked me out yet and I still have time to nap, to finish off the big pot of passable chili I made a couple days ago and to read how Orwell died, not even 50, lungs collapsed and feeling himself a failure as a writer.