Lively Thought

I’ve been reading Orwell’s diaries, thanks to a terrific project from The Orwell Prize that sends out his entries exactly seventy years after the day they were originally written. This is a great way to read a diary and it gives you an intimate sense of the writer’s life.

Entries are currently being published from the fall of 1938. Orwell is in Morocco where he was recovering from a near-fatal lung haemorrhage.

The entry from the 28th of October, 1938 is particularly spare and beautiful and reads as a piece of found poetry. I’ve reproduced it here. The line breaks are my own:

One egg. Many black beetles
squashed in the road. Inside they are
brilliant vermillion.

Men ploughing with teams of oxen
after the rain. Wretched ploughs,
with no wheel, which only stir the soil.