Social
Outcasts
Page 136 'The Road to Wigan Pier'
«It
was in this way that my thoughts turned towards the English working class. It
was the first time that I had ever been really aware of the working class, and
to begin with it was only because they supplied an analogy. They were the
simbolic victims of injustice, playing the same part in England as the Burmese
played in Burma. In Burma the issue had been quite simple. The whites were up
and the blacks were down, and therefore as a matter of course one´s sympathy
was with the blacks. I know realized that there was no need to go as far as
Burma to find tyranny and exploitation.»
Sorry for not giving you a
background, my dear chum, but without realizing it I´ve reached chapter IX of
'The Road to Wigan Pier' and I think I´ve discovered the pearl of this book, at least until what I´ve read.
(This, while apparently there´re
already more than 90,000 deaths on each side of the war in Ukraine, and the
joys and sorrows only come from the footballers of Qatar, that country that
trades with the rights of people based on money. It´s clear that morality is
like a seasonal garment: when you´re interested, you wear it; if you´re not
interested, don´t use it)
Page 137
«Therefore
my mind turned immediately towards the extreme cases, the social outcasts:
tramps, beggars, criminals, prostitutes. These were ‘the lowest of the low’,
and these were the people with whom I wanted to get in contact.»
In these paragraphs of this chapter
we find the germ of Orwell's best-known works: Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.
From my Borstal.
LDR
Orwell, G.- The Road to Wigan Pier. Collins Classics. London, 2021
