## Metadata - Author: [[Rebecca Solnit]] - Full Title: Orwell's Roses - Category: #books ## Highlights - Oxenhandler and Lusseyran suggest that you might prepare for your central mission in life by doing other things that may seem entirely unrelated, and how necessary this may be. ([Location 470](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08WZXMYT4&location=470)) - What is it that makes it possible to do the work that is of highest value to others and one’s central purpose in life? It may appear—to others, sometimes even to oneself—trivial, irrelevant, indulgent, pointless, distracted, or any of those other pejoratives with which the quantifiable beats down the unquantifiable. ([Location 474](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08WZXMYT4&location=474)) - Each book also shifts into a more passionate and vivid prose when describing immediate experience, particularly of the natural world. They seem like ingredients that haven’t stewed together long enough, these chunks of dubious plot, dismal lives, furious tirade, and lavish evocation. ([Location 638](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08WZXMYT4&location=638)) - The lives he invented are miseries studded with epiphanies. Orwell did not believe in permanent happiness or the politics that tried to realize it, but he did believe devoutly in moments of delight, even rapture, and he wrote about them often, from these early books to Nineteen Eighty-Four. ([Location 648](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08WZXMYT4&location=648)) - Orwell is renowned for what he wrote against—authoritarianism and totalitarianism, the corruption of language and politics by lies and propaganda (and sloppiness), the erosion of the privacy that underlies liberty. From those forces, it’s possible to determine what he was for: equality and democracy, clarity of language and honesty of intentions, private life and all its pleasures and joys, the freedom and liberty that also depend to some extent on privacy from supervision and intrusion, and the pleasures of immediate experience. ([Location 787](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08WZXMYT4&location=787)) - The people of 1936 had a confidence so deep it was like an unexcavated strata in their consciousness: that the world was big enough and resilient enough to absorb our harm, that the damage was always going to be local, that whatever we did to the parts would not undermine the whole, that there would always be more. Human beings behaved like a child who believes his mother is immortal no matter what, but the child had grown huge and powerful with powers beyond the human in his tools, machines, and chemical inventions, and he was striking blows that were damaging and changing the system itself. It was a war, and when we woke up to it, making peace with what the plants had done became the task. That sometimes took the form of reforestation, protecting existing forests, grasslands, topsoil, and otherwise joining the side of the plants, as well as drawing back from the project of throwing long-buried carbon into the sky. • ([Location 1041](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08WZXMYT4&location=1041)) - The Vermeer paintings have nothing, of course, to say directly about war or justice or the law or how you fix your society; they tell no news and propagandize no cause. ([Location 1278](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08WZXMYT4&location=1278)) - Art that is not about the politics of this very moment may reinforce a sense of self and society, of values and commitments, or even a capacity to pay attention, that equip a person to meet the crises of the day. Politics is the pragmatic expression of beliefs and commitments shaped by culture. Works of art can and do help construct the self that engages in politics, and the mere exhortation to engage or tirades about what’s wrong do not necessarily produce the empathic imagination, the insights, principles, orientations, collective memories that engagement requires. ([Location 1287](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08WZXMYT4&location=1287)) - A Vermeer painting makes the case for stillness or looking at canals or the color blue or the value of the domestic lives of the Dutch bourgeoisie or just for paying close attention. Close attention itself can be a kind of sustenance. ([Location 1301](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08WZXMYT4&location=1301)) - They are the wildlands of the psyche, the unexploited portion, preserving the diversity, the complexity, the systems of renewal, ([Location 1308](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08WZXMYT4&location=1308)) - Orwell defended both the literal green spaces of the countryside and the garden in which he spent so much time and the metaphysics of free thought and unpoliced creation. ([Location 1309](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08WZXMYT4&location=1309)) - Elsewhere Orwell mounted arguments against perfectionists too. In that context, perfectibility was a dangerous thing, and so was utopia when it meant imposing ideals determined by people convinced they could use that destruction of rights called violence and that destruction of facts called lies to produce and protect it. ([Location 1336](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08WZXMYT4&location=1336)) - Desire and its fulfillment are not happiness, when happiness means a steady-state emotion, a placated heart and mind; they are closer to joy, which erupts and subsides unpredictably and can appear amid danger and difficulty. Permanence—the idea of stabilizing something, which is usually predicated on controlling a lot of other things—is part of what he objects to. ([Location 1353](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08WZXMYT4&location=1353))