Fariha’s Reviews > Essays > Status Update
Fariha
is on page 420 of 1369
Reading Mr Malcolm Muggeridge’s brilliant and depressing book, The Thirties, I thought of a rather cruel trick I once played on a wasp. He was sucking jam on my plate, and I cut him in half. He paid no attention, merely went on with his meal, while a tiny stream of jam trickled out of his severed oesophagus. Only when he tried to fly away did he grasp the dreadful thing that had happened to him.
— 11 hours, 34 min ago
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Fariha’s Previous Updates
Fariha
is on page 422 of 1369
One cannot see the modern world as it is unless one recognises the overwhelming strength of patriotism, national loyalty. In certain circumstances it can break down, at certain levels of civilisation it does not exist, but as a positive force there is nothing to set beside it. Christianity and international Socialism are as weak as straw in comparison with it.
— 11 hours, 28 min ago
Fariha
is on page 396 of 1369
But the process of Americanisation is going on all the same. The American ideal, the "he-man'', the "tough guy", the gorilla who puts everything right by socking everybody else on the jaw, now figures in probably a majority of boys' papers. In one serial now running in the Skipper he is always portrayed, ominously enough, swinging a rubber truncheon.
— Jan 15, 2026 06:37AM
Fariha
is on page 396 of 1369
To what extent people draw their ideas from fiction is disputable. Personally I believe that most people are influenced far more than they would care to admit by novels, serial stories, films and so forth, and that from this point of view the worst books are often the most important, because they are usually the ones that are read earliest in life.
— Jan 15, 2026 05:50AM
Fariha
is on page 395 of 1369
Not only is a five-to-six-pound-a-week standard of life set up as the ideal, but it is tacitly assumed that that is how working-class people really do live. The major facts are simply not faced. It is admitted, for instance, that people sometimes lose their jobs ; but then the dark clouds roll away and they get better jobs instead.
— Jan 15, 2026 05:46AM
Fariha
is on page 381 of 1369
Most revolutionaries are potential Tories, because they imagine that everything can be put right by altering the shape of society ; once that change is effected, as it sometimes is, they see no need for any other. Dickens has not this kind of mental coarseness. The vagueness of his discontent is the mark of its permanence.
— Jan 14, 2026 05:37AM
Fariha
is on page 380 of 1369
The thing that drove Dickens forward into a form of art for which he was not really suited, and at the same time caused us to remember him, was simply the fact that he was a moralist, the consciousness of "having something to say". For you can only create if you can care.
— Jan 14, 2026 05:34AM
Fariha
is on page 355 of 1369
Dickens had had vivid glimpses of "low life"—life in a debtor's prison, for example—and he was also a popular novelist and able to write about ordinary people. So were all the characteristic English novelists of the nineteenth century. They felt at home in the world they lived in, whereas a writer nowadays is so hopelessly isolated that the typical modem novel is a novel about a novelist.
— Jan 10, 2026 08:04AM
Fariha
is on page 355 of 1369
It is not merely a coincidence that Dickens never writes about agriculture and writes endlessly about food. He was a cockney, and London is the centre of the earth in rather the same sense that the belly is the centre of the body. It is a city of consumers, of people who are deeply civilised but not primarily useful. A thing that strikes one when one looks below the surface of Dickens's books is that,
— Jan 10, 2026 08:02AM
Fariha
is on page 336 of 1369
A time is coming when even the comparatively comfortable will suffer under the terror of lawless governments, created in their own choice or by their acquiescence....For it only needs a turn of the screw, an increase of tension, and the fragile and rather imaginary partitions by which the masses of all the world are allowed to cherish their divisions will blow away.
— Jan 05, 2026 10:33AM
Fariha
is on page 331 of 1369
In every country except those which are definitely outside the war-orbit, the supposed necessity to prepare for war is being systematically used to prevent every kind of social advance. It goes without saying that this happens in the Fascist countries, but "guns before butter" also rules in the democracies.
— Jan 05, 2026 10:23AM
It is as though in the space of ten years we had slid back into the Stone Age. Human types supposedly extinct for centuries, the dancing dervish, the robber chieftain, the Grand Inquisitor, have suddenly reappeared, not as inmates of lunatic asylums, but as the masters of the world. Mechanisation and a collective economy seemingly aren’t enough. By themselves they lead merely to the nightmare we are now enduring: endless war and endless underfeeding for the sake of war, slave populations toiling behind barbed wire,....We are living in a nightmare precisely because we have tried to set up an earthly paradise. We have believed in “progress”, trusted to human leadership, rendered unto Caesar the things that are God’s—that approximately is the line of thought.
There is no wisdom except in the fear of God; but nobody fears God; therefore there is no wisdom. Man’s history reduces itself to the rise and fall of material civilisations, one Tower of Babel after another. In that case we can be pretty certain what is ahead of us. Wars and yet more wars, revolutions and counter-revolutions, Hitlers and super-Hitlers—and so downwards into abysses which are horrible to contemplate, though I rather suspect Mr Muggeridge of enjoying the prospect.