By the end of October, I discovered a serialization promoted by The Orwell Foundation. It was about Down and Out in Paris and London. The idea is to read a bit a day from excerpts dropped daily conveniently to your email inbox. I am a challenge addict, or at least I considered it a challenge. I decided to join in it at once.
There is more to the likes of George Orwell than Nineteen Eight-Four or Animal Farm. This realization is refreshing. There is so much more to discover about his work. You gain peace of mind knowing you can explore obscure titles. These are works you haven’t read yet from that particular author if you ever run out of good material.
One thing that I was curious about was the meaning of the expression “down and out”. For me, that I am not a native English speaker, sometimes otherwise mundane expressions have only the literal meaning. And it is always rewarding when you casually stumble over the elucidation of that enigma. It happened to me when I read this paragraph:
And there is another feeling that is a great consolation in poverty. I believe everyone who has been hard up has experienced it. It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out. You have talked so often of going to the dogs — and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it. It takes off a lot of anxiety.
Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell, chapter 3
When you think of it, it also exemplifies why people such as him are great authors. They have life experience. They are talking about something that they know about firsthand. As I later came to know, the book is autobiographical. It describes not only his own hardships but also those of many others. He had contact with waiters, former soldiers, prostitutes, immigrants and refugees, and street artists. All of them were plagued by the same condition: poverty in a big and prosperous city. Would that be relevant for our own days?
I am on track to finish the reading by Christmas when the serialization ends. This will be one of the last books I will be reading this year. I feel lucky that this was it.