I now seem to have a thing about books that come in multiple volumes. proust, gibbon, etc. and all this from someone who prefers short books. right now i’m two volumes through george orwell’s “collected essays, journalism and letters”. recommended to all. there are many good things about it.
today i read his diary entries from the war. he continually hypothesises and predicts. at one point he thinks churchill has to go, that there has to be a mass uprising if britain is to stave off an invasion. and there are lots of small details, too.
anyway, from my reading on the 18.36 london bridge to sydenham:
14th june 1940 -
Always, as I walk through the underground stations. sickened by the advertisements, the silly staring faces and strident colours, the general frantic struggle to induce people to waste labour and material by consuming useless luxuries or harmful drugs. How much rubbish this war will sweep away, if only we can hang on throughout the summer. War is simply a reversal of civilised life, it’s motto is ‘Evil be thou my good’, and so much of the good of modern life is actually evil that it is questionable whether on balance war does harm.
15th june 1940 -
It has just occured to me to wonder whether the fall of Paris means the end of the Albatross Library, as I suppose it does. If so, I am £30 to the bad.
20th june 1940 -
The police are the very people who would go over to Hitler once they were certain he had won. Well, if only we can hold out for a few months, in a year’s time we shall see red militia billeted in the Ritz, and it would not particularly surprise me to see Churchill or Lloyd George at the head of them. . . .
. . . According to R.H. a woman who rented an island in the Hebrides in order to avoid air raids was the first air-raid casualty of the war, the R.A.F. dropping a bomb there by mistake. Good if true.
