Orwell

In some ways, adoption seems like a huge Orwellian scheme to mess with people, primarily adoptees. I should mention that Orwell was an AP who didn't want his son to know his natural family, and burned their names off his son's adoption papers. And for that, I am unimpressed.

I am a big fan of George Orwell the writer, however, and the way he thought. He was brilliant (although I don't always agree with him), and I have read with pleasure everything from his novels to his accounts of living with elephants in Burma to the "charms" of English food.

His diaries, edited by people I admire, have just been published in one volume, and I look forward to reading them in toto. A review published in the New York Times last Friday cited Orwell, with his usual wit and exactitude, summing up the way the world was heading:

"If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face--forever."

I would wish that we could change this stark, brutal image, but given the inability of many people to value education, to think, or to have compassion for those different from themselves, I don't have much hope.

You can read parts of Orwell's diaries, serialized in blog form, here.