I’ve just come up for air – i’ve just finished a really unique book i’ve been reading and talking about lately, Coming up for air by George Orwell. It was surely worth reading. It’s sometimes so light and cheerful that you almost hear the birds singing outside, even if there’s only the noise of passing cars and trains, but at other times it’s so dark and depressing that you could be depressed all evening just because of it, maybe not even realising what’s causing it – and all this in a way, that you not only can see everything that’s printed on the pages well alive around yourself, but its pre-second-world-war era world simply encages you, gets to the depths of you, and changes your way of thinking. It’s very similar to the effect of 1984, with the difference that since (most of) the communist regimes have already fallen, so there’s quite a low chance that such a world could become reality sometime. It’s the exact different with this book: you know, that this world it’s about really exists, it’s not a bit fictional, but the possible most real, so real that we’re living in it too. No, i don’t mean that times around the world war, but that world that’s starting to materialize around that time, that world George, the “hero” of the book, who’s not even a bit of a hero (at least so you think) is so bitter to accept, the very world we live in.

Yesterday i was reading Orwell (still Coming up for air), and i had to look up a Keats poem, Ode to a nightingale in an anthology. Accidentally i’ve found a poem, a sonnet, to be exact, that really touched me. It was written in 1849 by the english poet Matthew Arnold. It must’ve been a shock to him when the Revolution failed.

Not in sunk Spain’s prolong’d death agony;
Not in rich England, bent but to make pour
The flood of the world’s commerce on her shore;
Not in that madhouse, France, from whence the cry
Afflicts grave Heaven with its long senseless roar;
Not in American vulgarity,
Nor wordy German imbecility—

Lies any hope of heroism more.
Hungarians! Save the world! Renew the stories
Of men who against hope repell’d the chain,
And make the world’s dead spirit leap again
On land renew that Greek exploit, whose glories
Hallow the Salaminian promontories,
And the Armada flung to the fierce main.

Matthew Arnold – Sonnet to the Hungarian Nation

I wanted to write a blogpost, ‘coz why not, but simply i have no inspiration… that’s strange. Well, this proves that watching more than one episodes of the same anime at once sucks everything out of me. Either good or bad, creative or destructive, it’s out. I get tired, and the only thing that somewhat does me pleasure is chatting with others and reading. Oh, did i mention reading? Well, that Orwell piece i’m reading now, Coming up for air is really a masterpiece. Having read 1984, i see some thoughts appear in this book that are the main motifs of the popular little brother. For some reason, i tend to think of that book as male. But there are also some that are definitely feminine, though i could not mention one now. There must be, and that’s it. The good question is, what decides the gender of a book? I think that not even such “dry” books like encyclopediae or scientific writings are genderless, neutral things. Anyway, that Coming up for air is really shocking. Even now, that i’m well into it, and closer to the end than the beginning, i still couldn’t find any story in it, but it’s not even missing. I only realise its absence when someone asks me the typical “what’s it about?” question… And i could only tell them that about a fat, red-faced, middle-aged man. That’s about all.

It’s here. Arrived just moments ago. Won’t see me for a while.