![]() “But still, it was not the desire to ‘write’ that was his real motive. ― George Orwell, quote from Keep the Aspidistra Flying The aspidistra is the tree of life, he thought suddenly.” They begot children, which is what the saints and the soul-savers never by any chance do. They were bound up in the bundle of life. They ‘kept themselves respectable’- kept the aspidistra flying. They had their standards, their inviolable points of honour. The money-code as they interpreted it was not merely cynical and hoggish. The lower-middle-class people in there, behind their lace curtains, with their children and their scraps of furniture and their aspidistras - they lived by the money-code, sure enough, and yet they contrived to keep their decency. Our civilization is founded on greed and fear, but in the lives of common men the greed and fear are mysteriously transmuted into something nobler. ![]() It mightn’t be a bad thing, if you could manage it, to feel yourself one of them, one of the ruck of men. ![]() ![]() And if they did, what would they care? They were too busy being born, being married, begetting, working, dying. Did they know that they were only puppets dancing when money pulled the strings? You bet they didn’t. ![]() They would be, for example, small clerks, shop-assistants, commercial travellers, insurance touts, tram conductors. “He wondered about the people in houses like those. ![]()
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