Because I had a busy work week, I had an essay on craft all queued-up and ready to launch this week.
But when I learned about the terrorist attack in New Zealand, I decided to instead to direct you to an essay that I have read again and again and again: George Orwell’s essay, Why I Write.
It’s one I return to whenever I am trying to grapple with great violence or injustice in the world, when I’m asking myself why it is I do what I do. I can’t remember who first brought it to my attention because I have talked about it with so many people, and because so many people have shared their reverence for it with me.
In the piece, he details his original intention of writing “naturalistic books” full of “purple prose.”
“In a peaceful age I might have written ornate or merely descriptive books,” he writes, “and might have remained almost unaware of my political loyalties.”
He then shares a poem which begins,
“A happy vicar I might have been
Two hundred years ago,
To preach upon eternal doom
And watch my walnuts grow
But born, alas, in an evil time,
I missed that pleasant haven,
For the hair has grown on my upper lip
And the clergy are all clean-shaven”
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I feel such kinship with Orwell. I am, at heart, a sensitive and spiritual soul who would love nothing more than to write lush poems about love and nature and God and sexy vampires. To honor my soul, I do write about these things.
But I, too, was born in an evil time, and so I must continually challenge myself to engage with the world around me, to continually create work that stands in opposition to the white supremacy and racist rhetoric and violence that the president of the United States is normalizing at every turn.
Sadly, I don’t yet write as eloquently about politics as I do about, say, how I felt the first time I heard a Depeche Mode song. My strength is writing about the world within, not the one without. But I do agree with Orwell’s statement, “No book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.”
And so I challenge myself to stay engaged with the world and to use the small platform I have to try to make this world a safer place for people of all faiths and backgrounds.
I’m still figuring out how to do that, I’m still learning how someone suited to be a happy vicar can make an impact in an evil time, but I won’t ever stop trying.