Returning to the Earth

Hello Writers,

I want to share some words about the work of writing from a writer I admire. I stumbled across the below quote(s) while reading a book about George Orwell by Rebecca Solnit. Orwell’s Roses by Rebecca Solnit

Every quote below is a piece of the same longer quote. The paragraph resonated with me and I reread it a few times. I offer it to you now, separated into chunks, with an image of roses between each so that you can slow down and enjoy these truths about writing work. The ideas aren’t new to me, and they may not be new to you either, but one of the things I love about Solnit’s writing is the exquisite job she does of drawing our attention to what we already know.

Writing is a murky business: you are never entirely sure what you are doing or when it will be finished and whether you got it right and how it will be received months or years or decades after you finish.

What it does, if it does anything, is a largely imperceptible business that takes place in the minds of people you will mostly never see and never hear from (unless they want to argue with you.)

As a writer, you withdraw and disconnect yourself from the world in order to connect to it in the far-reaching way that is other people elsewhere reading the words that came together in this contemplative state.

Orwell’s Roses is not a book about writing, and it is not a biography of Orwell either, though it does relate quite a bit about his life. Orwell is best known as a political writer whether through his essays, memoirs, or novels like 1984 and Animal Farm, which is what his biographers have focused on. His preoccupataion with political ideas is not surprising considering his lifespan covered both World Wars (he lived in London during the Blitz) and the Russian Revolution, and the Spanish Civil War (which he documented as a journalist and volunteered in combat as well), and the Irish war of independence, and the cold war, (actually, Orwell was the first to call it the ‘cold war’). But Solnit was moved to write this new book exploring Orwell’s love of the land after an unexpected encounter. She took a trip to England a few years ago with a documentary filmmaker friend, and they made an impromptu stop at the countryside cottage where Orwell had lived. The current resident gave her a tour of the backyard and she found herself in the physical presence of roses that Orwell himself had planted an age ago in 1936. Rebecca Solnit decided to write this book to explore the side of the famous author that was so taken with the natural world and with cultivating growing things up out of the ground.

That’s a little background on the book so I can share the writing quite with you one more time. But first I will share the preceding paragraph from the book to provide a little more context.

In 1940, he offered this biographical sketch of himself in answer to an author questionnaire: “Outside my work the thing I care most about is gardening, especially vegetable gardening.” The measure of how much it mattered to him is in the attention he paid to it, and the considerable labor he put into it, from his 1933 allotment garden to the last garden he exerted himself to bring to life as he was dying. And it’s in something less measurable and more significant: the pleasure he took, and the meaning he found. He wanted a garden, and wanted to work in it, to produce his own food and more intangible things. He wanted flowers, fruit trees, vegetables, chickens, goats. he wanted to watch birds and skies and the seasons change. He clearly, as he said in that credo, loved the surface of the earth. He was curious about daffodils and hedgehogs and slugs; he spent a lot of time observing flora and fauna and weather.

Pursuits like that can bring you back to Earth from the ether and the abstractions. They could be imagined as the opposite of writing. Writing is a murky business: you are never entirely sure what you are doing or when it will be finished and whether you got it right and how it will be received months or years or decades after you finish. What it does, if it does anything, is a largely imperceptible business that takes place in the minds of people you will mostly never see and never hear from (unless they want to argue with you). As a writer, you withdraw and disconnect yourself from the world in order to connect to it in the far-reaching way that is other people elsewhere reading the words that came together in this contemplative state.”

-Rebecca Solnit, Orwell’s Roses

That’s all I wanted to share with you today, writer. I encourage you to take time thinking about what your version of Orwell’s garden is. What activity in your life is so concretely opposite to the ephemeral work of writing that it creates a kind of anchor to the Earth for you?