Hildegarde

Well, I woke up to find Leslie Nielson died–so the day hasn’t started out as well as it could have.

And I’ll just note, re Cheryl’s comment, that I never took up space in my journals trying to figure out the “root causes” of why I was so awful.  I just went on and on about how I was so awful.

I think I don’t do it on the blog because I know most of you would laugh at me.

But this morning I’m a little short for time, and I just want to note one thing.

Yesterday, I finished a book at one of those mental places where I just couldn’t think of what I wanted to read next.  What I did instead was to read an essay called “The Prevention of Literature” by George Orwell that I have in one of those compendium “readers” that contain a few complete essays and lots of excerpts from books.

Compendiums like that are definitely an exception to my compulsive need to finish everything I start.  For one thing, I don’t read abridged versions of anything if I can help it, so I’m not going to read the excerpts from Homage to Catalonia or 1984.  I’ve already read 1984, and if I want to read Homage to Catalonia, I’ll find a copy of the whole thing and read that.

All that being said, “The Prevention of Literature” was what I had expected it to be, a little piece on the sad post-War decline in the quality of English murders was kind of fun, and then I hit the essay on Rudyard Kipling.

This was one of those things I wish was up on the Net so that I could post a link to it.  For one thing, it reminded me that, no matter how useful Orwell has become to anti-Communisits and anti-totalitarians, he always was a writer on the left.  

What makes him more interesting than most writers on the left is the fact that he’s very aware of the kind of intellectual dishonesty this can cause and the way in which “intellectuals” blind themselves.

But the essays is a weird mixture of highbrow leftwing contempt and reluctant admiration, periodically veering into outright condemnation of the people he calls “enlightened”–just like that, with scare quotes–whenever he gets on to them.

And that led me back to my Kipling short story collection, although the essay itself was about Kipling’s poems.

I ended up reading one of the oddest little stories I’ve ever read in my life, called “The House Surgeon,”  and then sort of sitting back, nonplussed.

I’d tell you what it was about, but it’s one of those things–if you know ahead of time what the point is, you’re not going to be nearly as weirded out as if you come to it fresh, and I have a peculiar feeling that getting the reader weirded out is part of the point here.

Or maybe not.  It’s hard to tell.

Let’s just call this my recommendation of the day–no India, no dialogue writing, a straightforward story about rural Britain.

And really, really peculiar.

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