'Down and Out in Paris and London' by George Orwell

Recently looked up Orwell after reading an essay on Orwell and Powell, and another essay about his time and life towards the end of his days.  I have not read Powell, but got reminded of Orwell and looked him up again. Found this book on Gutenberg, and read it on the phone/instapaper.

This one is about poverty. About his time being down and out in Paris and London. About living without food for days, and working in the worst conditions to earn the daily bread. A diary of sorts. A memoir is a better word. In Paris, he works as a 'plongeur' most of the time when he is working. Which means he is a dishwasher, or on the lowliest, most menial rung. When he is out of work, he is pawning his belongings, and trying to figure out how to find food. In London, it is the tramping life for him. No work there, just waiting for work and tramping meanwhile, and spending the nights in Salvation Army hostels, 'spikes', lodging houses. London section is a description of homeless poverty. The inefficient, random, wasted struggle.

At times, esp in the Paris sections, it starts sounding like Waiter Rant (this was a blog I used to read long time ago). Or like Anthony Bourdain writing about restaurant kitchens.  (Recently, I read an old article by him in New Yorker). It makes you wonder, and makes you a bit wary of eating out. And makes you observe the waiters and kitchen staff differently when you are next out for a meal.

At some places, Orwell reminds me of Hemingway. May be, the continental Europe. The eating and living and existing. The way they write.  The prose, a man's journal.

And at times like 'Hunger' by Knut Hamsun. Actually, a lot like Hunger.  The pawn shops, the constant gnawing hunger.

There are observations, and a drawing of conclusions for the society, and reflections on the labours of plongeur, which in the larger scheme of things, looks like wasted labour. But then most of the edifices of the modern world are wasted, needless things. When life is so complicated, the cog, (which most of the humanity ends up becoming), questions its role and the value of its efforts. For the cog, the efforts are everything, the circle bounding its existence. For the wheel, what value?

*

Thoughts on the book: The book is a memoir, not enough to excite any strong feelings. However, it did keep me in its grip. While reading, normally, one imagines and takes oneself where the protagonist is, or the circumstances they are experiencing. In this case, it was not a place or emotion I wished for myself. Most of the time, through this book, in the background, I kept wondering how Orwell found himself in such circumstances in the first place.What was he doing there. And why. And then how did he get from tramping, to being able to write and publish about it. It is indeed a viewpoint not captured enough in books, for a simple reason, that those who tramp, who are on the road, do not find the time enough to pen down their experiences. Except may be, if you are Kerouac.

Other people's words

This morning, while going through a notebook from earlier this year, I came across a collection of quotes. I think few of them were from one of Annie Dillard's books, where she herself quotes a lot of people. And one on photons and gravity from one of the space/quantum books I was reading (I think, not sure). 

Coming across them like this warmed my heart! Little joys. Sharing them here.

"Admire the world for never ending on you, as you would admire an opponent, without taking your eyes off him or walking away."

She quotes Rico Lebrun on drawing. A really beautiful quote:

"The draftsman must aggress; only by persistent assault will the live image capitulate and give up its secret to an unrelenting line." 

Strong words, but such beauty. Come to think of it, applies to anything one pursues and struggles with.

And a couple more:

"Wherever we go,there seems to be only one business at hand - that of finding a workable compromise between the sublimity of our ideas and the absurdity of the fact of us."

"I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until the moment I was lifted and struck." 

Not sure where I read the following though. Beautiful in its simplicity of explaining the nature of reality.

"Between the spacetime continuum and the quanta of space, there is the same relationship as between electromagnetic waves and photons. The waves give an approximate large-scale vision of the photons.

Photons are the way in which waves interact. Continuous space and time are an approximate large-scale vision of the dynamic of quanta of gravity. The quanta of gravity are the way in which space and time interact."

Book-spine poem

I came across this challenge on instagram about making a poem out of book titles - book spine poetry. Made me consider the bookshelf from a new perspective. The raw material. So this Sunday evening, I pulled out all the books with potential to form poetic lines (keeping them back where they belong is another story), and K and I arranged them, rearranged them, picked and discarded a few, and eventually formed this poem. 

As I lay dying

this side of paradise

thinking, fast and slow  

the web of life,

the sound and the fury,

white noise.

All the light we cannot see,

the fabric of reality.

The road not taken.

Fooled by randomness.  

Fun challenge. Other people's words. The physical book pile is the constraint. And the fun is in the eventual discovery of the poem.

'Main Street' by Sinclair Lewis

I read this book over the last few days on Instapaper, on my phone, between essays, and alternating with a few other NF books. However, towards the last quarter of the novel, it was read devotedly to the exclusion of everything else. Guess I was quite drawn in the lives of Carol Milford and the Doc.

This is not the first Sinclair Lewis I've read. I read Babbitt a few years ago; six years may be. At that time, I compared Babbitt to Gatsby. since I read them together. Same times, but very different lives.  On that one, more here.  

Sinclair Lewis wrote Main Street a couple of years before Babbitt. Both are about the North America of a century ago. Almost exactly a century ago. Both are satirical, sort of.

I think Main Street mirrors Babbitt in many ways. A sort of alt-mirror of themes. Where Babbitt was about a man living in a big town/small city/ Chicago/ Zenith (?) seeking answers to the existential questions raised by middle-class life, Main Street is about a woman, living in a small town, seeking answers to existential questions raised by the limits of life in a small town. Big aspirations trapped in feeble wills or the ever-thickening chains of everyday lives. Both try a sort of escape, in their respective books, they both get away from the status quo, look for answers, and eventually, both come back to live their lives as they were. Nothing really changes, not sure what answers they get, but then when are journeys ever about external conquest? They are all journeys inwards, the conquest of that unruly self that keeps questioning, unsatisfied, seeking, not finding. Call it the eternal quest, the eternal seek. Which we all in our own ways grapple with.

Taken together, one may conclude from these books is that male or female,  working or managing house, in a small town or a big city, happiness or satisfaction is elusive if it is not inside you. The seeking of the better, the hope to find meaning needs to be quenched perhaps by accepting that there is no meaning to be found. It is what it is. 

I enjoyed reading Main Street. The life and times captured beautifully. The portrayal is quite detailed. Apart from the main theme of Carol and her pursuits, there are many other small details, incidents throughout the book that make the portrayal rich and brings the characters closer to you. Having grown up in a small town myself, I can sort of identify with what the author says about life in a small town. 

The other thing I realise is that I have grown up since I read Babbitt.  (What is this about growing older, second time I note this week. Guess will need to take the plunge with hair coloring!) 
I have grown in terms of the range of books I could read in between. And then, grown personally a little bit over these years, reflecting more, and hopefully getting wiser and humbler, and perhaps more accepting of people and things. A better way to put it is I have become more peaceful and less restless, and more patient with books and authors and even with points that I might not agree with. 

The one other book that I recently read that may be compared to Main Street is Portrait of a Lady. (more here). Another American, but with a very international bent of mind. Portraying a period of around four decades ago (1870s and 1880s) from Main Street, Isabel Archer is not really Carol Milford. But lives were not very different for women then. They were yet to get the freedom to work while as wives, and were yet to get voting rights, and housework was as complicated as in 1880s. In fact, Isabel Archer gets a slightly wider scope in life, because a) she has money or as they said in that time, fortune (which ironically becomes the dooming point, and the novel is the sort of tracing of  the path fortune sends her on rather than what she chooses) and b) she is travelling and experiencing lives and cultures which poor Carol dreams of while living her curtailed life in Gopher Prairie.

Both are portrayals of women in two different, disparate lives. And for some reason, now I feel, both treat their heroines with a bit of irony, and a bit of inferior brush strokes. Very different from say what George Eliot would do with Dorothea (Middlemarch) or Maggie (Mill on the Floss) or Austen with Elizabeth Bennett (Pride and Prejudice). Somehow, there is more respect and equity in the way women portray women, more compassion too. My prejudice at the moment, may be. Sprung right after comparing Carol with Isabel, and then remembering the other few heroines I have encountered.