Brendha da Silva’s Reviews > A Collection of Essays > Status Update

“If you look into your own mind, which are you, Don Quixote or Sancho Panza? Almost certainly you are both. There’s one part of you that wishes to be a hero or a saint, but another part of you is a little fat man who sees very clearly the advantages of staying alive with a whole skin. He is your unofficial self, The voice of the belly protesting against the soul.”

“To win over the working class permanently, the fascists would have to raise the general standard of living, which they are unable and probably unwilling to do. The struggle of the working class is like the growth of a plant. The plant is blind and stupid, but it knows enough to keep pushing upwards towards the light, and it will do this in the face of endless discouragements.”

“Before the war the worship of money was entirely unreflecting and untroubled by any pang of con-science. The goodness of money was as unmistakable as the goodness of health or beauty, and a glittering car, a title or a horde of servants was mixed up in people's minds with the idea of actual moral virtue.” 33

“There never was, I suppose, in the history of the world a time when the sheer vulgar fatness of wealth, without any kind of aristocratic elegance to redeem it, was so obtrusive as in those years before 1914.”

Essay: Such, Such Were the Joys…

Can you imagine what he’d say if he saw the “sheer vulgar fatness of wealth” of the 2010s and 2020s

A SINGULAR MIND, THIS MAN. His analysis of Gandhi’s politics may be brief, but its DEEP. Damn!

Orwell on Henry Miller?? I mean come onn!!! This is what dreams are made of! AND tracing that particular brand of romantic-cynicism that gave rise to the appetite for Miller (and Miller himself!) to English literary culture in the 1890s and getting to read this now when we have the foresight to connect it to the entire 60s counterculture movement through the beatniks!! I mean COME ON!!!!