“Our job”

LISTEN. Finished the library book I decided not to buy, when that Moleskine caught my eye. May have to go back and get it.

Rebecca Solnit's Orwell is a flawed but emboldening secular saint, an imperfect meliorist whose commitment to liberty, honest language, and the quotidian surface delights of this earth could not be more timely. The resemblance of this concluding passage to that James line I like to quote about how "the earth of things" must "resume its rights" is striking.

"The antithesis of transcendent might be rooted and grounded, and Orwell was attached to the ordinary joys and pleasures and the love of the things of this world and not the next. He wrote another one of his credos in the essay: "The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one's love upon other human individuals. No doubt alcohol, tobacco and so forth are things that a saint must avoid, but sainthood is also a thing that human beings must avoid. . . . Many people genuinely do not wish to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings." That is, he saw the willingness to suffer and accept suffering and one's own flaws and others as part of being human and the price paid for the joys also included. The commitment to the things of this world could also be the focus of a spiritual discipline, a willingness to sacrifice, and a warmth he saw Gandhi as lacking. In some sense, perhaps his unsaintly martyr Winston Smith became fully human through his misadventures, and his recognition of the beauty of the washerwoman was part of that, a new capacity to see imperfect and unidealized beauty. "Our job," Orwell declared in the Gandhi essay, "is to make life worth living on this earth, which is the only earth we have." He asked that roses be planted on his grave. When I checked, a few years ago, a scrappy red rose was blooming there."
…
"The work he did is everyone's job now. It always was."

— Orwell's Roses by Rebecca Solnit