QOTD: humanism
Monday the 21st of November 2005
Another concept you can find in an Orwell essay is that of carrying on the human heritage. He writes of this in Inside The Whale when he takes up the question of whether or not in a time of political crisis like the first half of the twentieth century it is morally permissible to write fiction or poetry that does not deal directly with the calamity. He’s ambivalent, but he says that if he were a soldier in the trenches, he would have much rather got hold of Prufrock than some war poem, because such writing undoes the negations of war, certifies the value of the concrete and the individual and the conscious that war annihilates; in short, carries on the human heritage.