It is finals week for most college students right now, including myself. Painfully frantic and unceasingly busy. Appropriate
for the occasion, I present to you a snippet of a letter from George Orwell to a friend:
“…the music is the most important ingredient. Its function is to prevent thought and real conversation, and to shut out any natural sound, such as the song of birds or the whistling of the wind, that might otherwise intrude. The radio and television (just a new form of canned music, more encompassing and with imagery) are already consciously used for this purpose by most people. In very many homes these instruments are literally never turned off, though they are manipulated from time to time so as to make sure that only light hearted music will come out of them. I know people who will keep this music playing all through a meal and at the same time continue talking just loudly enough for the voices and the music to cancel out. This is done with a definite purpose. The music prevents the conversation from becoming serious or even coherent, while the chatter of voices stops one from listening attentively to the music and thus prevents the onset of that dreaded thing, thought. For:
The lights must never go out.
The music must always play,
Lest we should see where we are;
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the dark
Who have never been happy or good.
It is difficult not to feel that the unconscious aim in the most typical modern context is a return to the womb. For there, too, one was never alone, one never saw daylight, the temperature was always regulated, and one’s thoughts, if any, were drowned by a continuous rhythmic throbbing.
When one looks at Coleridge’s old concept of a “pleasure-spot,” one sees it revolves partly around gardens and partly around caverns, rivers, forests and mountains with “deep romantic chasms”–in short, round what is called Nature. But the whole notion of admiring Nature, and feeling a sort of religious awe in the presence of glaciers, deserts or waterfalls, is bound up with the sense of man’s littleness and weakness against the power of the universe. The moon is beautiful partly because we cannot reach it, the sea is impressive because one can never be sure of crossing it safely. Even the pleasure one takes in a flower–and this is true even of a botanist who knows all there is to be known about the flower–is dependent partly on the sense of mystery. But meanwhile man’s power over Nature is steadily increasing. With the aid of the atomic bomb we could literally move mountains; we could even, so it is said, alter the climate of the earth. Isn’t there, therefore, something sentimental and obscurantist, something nostalgic (a term we vainly use to block healthy criticism of progress), in preferring bird-song to swing music and in wanting to leave a few patches of wildness here and there instead of covering the whole surface of the earth in a network of Autobahnen flooded by artificial light?
The question only arises because in exploring the physical universe man has made no attempt to explore himself. Much of what goes by the name of pleasure is simply an effort to destroy consciousness. If one started by asking, “what is man? what are his needs? how can he best express himself and in what way most essentially?” one would discover that merely having the power to avoid real work and live one’s life from birth to death in electric light and to the tune of tinned music is not a reason for doing so. Man needs warmth, society, leisure, comfort and security; he also needs solitude, creative work, the sense of wonder and embrace of the inevitable realities of danger and death. If he recognized this he could use the products of science and industrialism eclectically, applying always the same test: “does this make me more human or less human?” He would then learn that the highest happiness does not lie in relaxing, resting, playing poker, drinking and making love simultaneously and endlessly. And the instinctive horror which all sensitive people feel at the progressive mechanization of life would be seen not to be a mere sentimental archaism, but to be fully justified. For man only stays human by preserving large patches of simplicity and beauty in his life, while the tendency of many modern inventions–in particular the film, the radio and the airplane–is to weaken his consciousness, dull his curiosity, and, in general, drive him nearer to the animals.
— George Orwell, on October 15, 1946
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