更新时间:2013-07-21
Cheshire cat • 英国史:The Two Winstons最后的话
When we think of “1984”, most of us think of the tyranny of drabness and mass obedience ruled by Big Brother, an upside-down world of doublespeak, where war is peace and lies are truth. But Orwell’s last masterpiece is most powerful when it describes Winston’s resistance to dictatorship, a guerrilla action fought not with guns and barricades, but by literally taking liberties, reclaiming the ordinary pleasure of humanity, a walk in the country, an act of love, the singing of old nursery rhyme, Winston Smith did all this forbidden things, prompted by a dim memory of a time when they are all absolutely normal. The last refuge of freedom against Big Brother is memory. The greatest horror of “1984” is the dictator’s attempt to wipe out history.
Churchill and Orwell share this romantic devotion to the past, the belief that it was the treasure house of freedom in an age dictated to by bureaucrats and boardrooms .It was what made the aristocrat and socialist, on the face of such an impossible couple, the most unlikely allies.
George Orwell died in 1950, he was 46. The very last thing he wrote for publication was about Winston Churchill, a review of his war memoir. “Their finest hour”.Though you’d expect him to repelled by Churchill’s warrior heroics, he bestows on the book the greatest compliment he could think of, that it read like a work of a human being, not a public figure .And it was a verdict shared by the thousands who lined the streets of London when Churchill finally died in 1965.
When it counted, neither Churchill nor Orwell did the predictable thing, toed the party line. More important was their common belief that if Britain must have a distinctive future in the age of super states, it’d better keep faith with the best tradition in his long history, the history that tied together social justice with bloody-minded liberty.
But history ought never to be confused with nostalgia. It’s written, not to reverse the dead, but to inspire the living. It’s our cultural bloodstream, the secret of who we are, telling us to let go the past even as we honor it, to lament what ought to be lamented, to celebrate what should be celebrated. And if in the end that history turns out to reveal itself as a patriot. Then I think that neither Churchill nor Orwell would have minded that very much, and, as a matter of fact, neither do I.
Churchill and Orwell share this romantic devotion to the past, the belief that it was the treasure house of freedom in an age dictated to by bureaucrats and boardrooms .It was what made the aristocrat and socialist, on the face of such an impossible couple, the most unlikely allies.
George Orwell died in 1950, he was 46. The very last thing he wrote for publication was about Winston Churchill, a review of his war memoir. “Their finest hour”.Though you’d expect him to repelled by Churchill’s warrior heroics, he bestows on the book the greatest compliment he could think of, that it read like a work of a human being, not a public figure .And it was a verdict shared by the thousands who lined the streets of London when Churchill finally died in 1965.
When it counted, neither Churchill nor Orwell did the predictable thing, toed the party line. More important was their common belief that if Britain must have a distinctive future in the age of super states, it’d better keep faith with the best tradition in his long history, the history that tied together social justice with bloody-minded liberty.
But history ought never to be confused with nostalgia. It’s written, not to reverse the dead, but to inspire the living. It’s our cultural bloodstream, the secret of who we are, telling us to let go the past even as we honor it, to lament what ought to be lamented, to celebrate what should be celebrated. And if in the end that history turns out to reveal itself as a patriot. Then I think that neither Churchill nor Orwell would have minded that very much, and, as a matter of fact, neither do I.
