sanjoli

“These domestic accounts—which take up a lot of the nearly six-hundred-page compilation of his travel, war, and domestic diaries published in 2009—stand out in his work as records of something almost antithetical to the subjects of a political writer: places in which nothing was seriously wrong and no conflicts raged. The minor troubles—a jackdaw hanging around the chicken coops, potatoes rotted by frost, goats terrified by thunder, birds eating the strawberries, greenfly on the roses, and lots of slugs—worked against the gardener’s agenda but not against any law of nature or morality. The majority of his entries are concerned with his own activity with his domesticated plants and animals, but he makes notes as well on the agricultural fields beyond and the wild things around him. Occasional speculations and small experiments are also recorded.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Orwell's Roses

“When I desire you a part of me is gone: my want of you partakes of me.”
― Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay

“They were roses, and they were saboteurs of my own long acceptance of a conventional version of Orwell and invitations to dig deeper. They were questions about who he was and who we were and where pleasure and beauty and hours with no quantifiable practical result fit into the life of someone, perhaps of anyone, who also cared about injustice and truth and human rights and how to change the world.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Orwell's Roses

“Like William Morris, he believed that paradise was behind us, in the old ways of life, and in the organic world, rather than ahead of us in an urbanized and industrialized future.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Orwell's Roses