Fade Out Again

George Orwell

This is not the story of a man predicting the future. This is the story of a man intentionally Living On The Edge to document what people refuse to see, until it is too late. He lives through imperial collapse, class entrenchment, revolution betrayed and ideologies turned inward like knives.

This week, our Madman of Art comes into the world already caught between identities: Anglo-Indian in the colonial sense of empire by birth, lower-upper-middle-class by inheritance, restless by nature. What he will become begins outside of rebellion with a series of quiet refusals—first of privilege, then of illusion, then of the system in its entirety.

Rather than to offer warning, George Orwell writes about what is already happening. There is no burst of revolution, only a constant, applied pressure transforming him.

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He is born into the fiction of empire.

Cracked eggs, dead birds / scream as they fight for life¹

Eric Arthur Blair, born June 25, 1903, in Motihari, British India, enters the world as a subject and symbol of British dominion.² While not an inherently aristocratic English and Scottish surname, Blair carries connotations of respectable middle to upper-middle-class standing, particularly in early 20th-century Britain, aligning with conventional Empire-serving professional classes of the time.³

His father, Richard Blair, works in the Indian Civil Service, posted to the Opium Department in Bengal—a branch responsible for overseeing the cultivation, regulation, and export of opium, much of it destined for China under British trade agreements. It is a system built not on moral authority but on economic control, and one of the most visible engines of imperial extraction. Richard comes from a West Country family with roots in Dorset, aligned with the modest ranks of the British gentry. His position is respectable, but not distinguished. He is a quiet man, loyal to the duties of empire, seemingly content with the narrow parameters of service. For the young Eric, the paternal example is one of obedience to system: Precise, unquestioned, emotionally distant.⁴

His mother, born Ida Mabel Limouzin, returns to England with her infant son in 1904, leaving her husband Richard behind in India. The decision is not dramatic, but quietly resolute. Like many colonial wives of her time, she believes England offers a better environment for a young child—healthier air, familiar culture, proper schooling. Yet it is not only for the child’s sake. Ida, raised in a cultivated Franco-English household, finds little to anchor her in the isolated routines of British India. She prefers the intellectual and domestic rhythm of England. The marriage does not break, but it stretches across years and oceans. Richard remains in India until his retirement in 1912. During these years, Eric is raised in a house absent of a father, where money is limited and the sense of class obligation presses in.⁵

The return to England sets the tone for his childhood as formally British, emotionally distant and shaped more by restraint than security. He is raised into a form of genteel poverty with his family clinging to rank without resources to match. The result is a boy acutely aware of status, class and exclusion.⁶

He is not a loud child. He watches.

Rows of houses, all bearing down on me / I can feel their blue hands touching me

From an early age, Eric spends much of his time alone, reading, scribbling in notebooks, or wandering outdoors. He is drawn to animals, fields and the quiet boundaries of gardens and hedgerows. At the margins of group activity, he listens more than he speaks. His favorite pastimes are reading and walking alone. Nature provides a refuge and an arena for watching beetles, birds and weather with the attentiveness of someone seeking order in a world rarely offering it.⁷

On scholarship, he attends St. Cyprian’s preparatory school, learning quickly social position determines comfort. Where the other boys come from wealth, he does not and is often mocked for his worn clothes and lack of pocket money. What he does have is an immense imagination. Eric retreats inward, inventing stories in his head which are often elaborate, dark. Inspired, he writes poems and fables as he voraciously reads Rudyard Kipling, H.G. Wells, Jonathan Swift, John Milton, G.K. Chesterton and whatever else he can get.⁸

As a teenager at Eton, Eric has no shine in class, never quite fitting in. Again, he studies on scholarship, this time surrounded by the sons of wealth and power. Teachers remember him as fiercely intelligent and unusually independent. Seeing privilege from the inside with the eye of an outsider, he contributes satirical pieces to school publications. Spending more time thinking than socializing, Eric can be found walking the countryside rather than attending formal functions. With a mind moving quickly and constantly, he is rarely relaxed, always questioning through his keen awareness of hierarchy, discomfort and hypocrisy.⁹ Friendships are few, yet intense. Most importantly, his distrust of institutions is growing, though he has not yet found the words on how to say why.¹⁰

Comfort does not seduce him, it provokes him.

This machine will not communicate / The thoughts and the strain I am under

Choosing not to attend university, Eric takes a break from his peers to join the Indian Imperial Police in Burma in 1922. At nineteen years of age, he finds himself enforcing colonial law in a country never asking for his presence. For five years, he observes and comes to despise the machinery of empire and everything it represents: Bureaucratic cruelties, boredom and deep moral contradictions. Later, he will call himself “a sort of sahib turned anarchist,” a reversal with its beginnings in Burma.¹¹

When Eric returns to England in 1927, he does not come back to comfort. He walks away from the empire with no fortune, no patron, and no plan. His only determination is to write, even if he has to do it broke. For nearly a decade, he lives on the margins staying with family in Southwold when funds run dry. He teaches, tutors and shelves books in secondhand shops. Most of the time, he writes. When he is not writing, he puts himself in places worth writing about.¹²

In 1928, Eric leaves England for Paris, chasing something he cannot quite name. Authenticity? Or perhaps anonymity? No, credibility is what he seeks. Without clear plan, he carries this vague idea: To become a writer one must first live as one. Paris, in the moment, is the city where transformation seems possible. It is cheap, foreign, and already half-mythical with the names of others who went there to starve and sharpen their sentences. He settles in the Latin Quarter, taking lodging in a slum hotel and finding work in restaurant kitchens with long shifts, little pay, plenty to observe. He watches men buckle under exhaustion and pride, learns what hunger does to a person, keeping notes through it all.¹³

The living is the work. Although Eric is not yet writing at this time, he is also not playing at poverty from a distance. He submits himself to the conditions he wants to understand: Exhaustion, dependency, invisibility. Scraping pans in hotel basements, he earns just enough to eat and spends nights in rooms without heat. Each moment is raw, but none of it is wasted. What matters is not the suffering, but the proximity. To write truthfully about class and inequality, Eric believes he must first be there—inside it and unprotected. The hardship is not a phase toward escape. It is the material. This is where every sentence in his journals will begin to weave the first half of Down and Out in Paris and London.

When he does return to London in late 1929, Eric continues his self-imposed descent into poverty, now with more intent to document it. During this period, he does not hold a conventional job, instead immersing himself into the lives of the urban poor, moving through the world of tramps, beggars and casual laborers. Eric sleeps in doss-houses and watches men barter for tea and shelter. He travels with tramps, sharing their meals, their silences, and their long walks between relief stations. Dressing in worn clothes to avoid suspicion, he carefully conceals his education and class. His gift is to listen more than speak, watching how dignity clings or slips away. In his notebook, he records it all—conversations, routines, passing faces. The only formal work during this time is writing articles and essays, most of which remain unpublished.¹⁴

What he is building is not a career but a record. This phase, lived rather than reported, becomes the London half of Down and Out in Paris and London, which he begins drafting in 1930 from his parents’ home in Southwold. For Eric, there is no living to be earned more valuable than collecting the truth polite society refuses to see and almost never writes down. The resulting book is unafraid to record poverty with clear eyes. This is Eric’s first published work under the name George Orwell. The pseudonym sounds English and ordinary, chosen like a tool, not a mask.¹⁵

Next comes Burmese Days (1934), a novel in which he empties out the colonial world he once inhabited. There is no glory in it, only decay, cowardice and racial contempt dressed as duty. It unsettles readers, and the newly ordained Orwell is fine with that. The empire had once been his employer. Now it is his subject. A year later, he writes A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935), this one a quieter novel, set in the English provinces. It follows a woman crushed by expectation, religion and repetition.¹⁶ Orwell is experimenting, shifting form, shifting perspective, always returning to the same question: What happens when freedom shrinks to nothing?

In 1935, something else shifts. He meets Eileen O’Shaughnessy, a sharp and imaginative Oxford graduate. They marry the next year. She becomes a grounding force, one of the few people he trusts to read his work in draft, to ask the real questions. In the same year, he publishes Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), this one a novel about failure, money and quiet revolt. It draws heavily from his own years working in a bookshop, caught between literary ambition and economic dead ends.¹⁷ His characters dream and lash out, as does he. Orwell is nowhere near finished yet.

Now Orwell’s attention moves north. With support from Victor Gollancz’s Left Book Club,¹⁸ he travels to Wigan, documenting life among coal miners and unemployed laborers. He lives in boarding houses and records everything. The result is The Road to Wigan Pier (1937)—half documentary, half indictment. The second half is no less personal for being polemical: He writes about socialism’s weaknesses, its snobbery, its detachment. Orwell wants revolution, but not one forgetting the people it claims to speak for.¹⁹

In each instance, the books follow the life; the life shapes the books. Each year, another confrontation, another exposure, another line drawn in his notebook, then crossed.

By 1936, Orwell has seen the poor of two capitals, the collapse of colonial authority and the brittleness of English idealism. Yet, he has never held a gun or been on a battlefield. Then comes news from Spain. A war begins, it feels different from all the others. This one still has meaning. Fascism has a face now. So does its resistance. Orwell goes, rather than as a journalist, as a volunteer. He and Eileen agree: It is time to act.

He packs a coat, a notebook, and crosses into Catalonia.

Too raw, too specific, too soon.

All these things into position / All these things we'll one day swallow whole

The decision to go to Spain in 1936 is not made lightly. By then, Orwell has published several books. He is making a name for himself as a political writer, skeptical of both fascism and the complacent British left. Something about the Spanish Civil War cuts through theory. This is not a war of slogans but of survival, principle, and bodies.²⁰

He joins the POUM militia, a small Marxist faction fighting against Franco’s fascists—but also against the Stalinist controlled communists who begin to purge their own allies. Orwell sees this firsthand in Barcelona. Comrades are arrested, tortured, disappeared as truth is distorted by both sides. He is shot through the throat, barely surviving. This is the crucible. What Orwell learns in Spain will never leave him.²¹

Upon return to England, George has no certainty, only a clarity of the dangerous kind. He now knows totalitarianism wears many faces. Truth is not safe in any ideology. The future will not be saved by slogans. It must be watched carefully, documented precisely. Again, he begins to write. This time not from imagination or immersion, but from what he experienced in Spain. It was not simply war—it was the complete destruction of trust. He had gone to fight fascism but had ended up hunted by communists. Men he had served beside vanished overnight. Alliances collapsed under slogans. Truth, he saw, had become a tool—not a standard. With all this pouring forth, Homage to Catalonia is published in 1938. Few read it. It does not flatter any side and is too raw, too specific, too soon.²²

It does not matter. Orwell is no longer writing to be accepted. He writes to bear witness as he is growing ill. Following his serious wound, tuberculosis has set in. Although it may be attempting to take his voice, his sentences are sharper than ever. Watching Nazi Germany rise, and behind it, Soviet Russia mirror their method, the world is dividing again.²³ Instead of choosing sides, this time when war comes George champions clarity.

During the Second World War, he works for the BBC Eastern Service, producing cultural broadcasts to counter Nazi propaganda in India. He hates the bureaucracy, hates the soft censorship, but stays with it long enough to understand something deeper: Language is power. He has learned the distance between what is said, and what is permitted to be said; what is printed, and what is forgotten. He leaves the BBC in 1943, disillusioned but observant.²⁴

In the same year, Animal Farm is completed. It is a fable with real targets: Stalin, state propaganda, the corruption of revolutionary ideals. Publishers hesitate. The Soviet Union is still Britain’s wartime ally. Orwell watches the manuscript sit on desks, unread, avoided. Finally, in 1945, it is released. Quietly at first, then with force. As the war ends, people begin to see what he has been trying to say all along.²⁵

The world is celebrating victory. Orwell watches as it drifts back toward comfort, toward forgetfulness. By this time, his lungs are failing. He loses Eileen suddenly to surgery in 1945. Alone now, he is left raising her nephew and decides to retreat from London. He moves to the island of Jura, in Scotland, where the weather is brutal and the air crystal clear.²⁶ It is here in isolation, George begins to write his final act through this hard won clarity.

What emerges is not a book of despair. It is a book of warning. Orwell calls it 1984.

Why is it never the end?

Be a world child, form a circle / Before we all go under

George Orwell’s life has been a slow tightening of the lens. Each move narrowed his vision, sharpening it, until finally he sees everything clearly—all too clearly.

From one fracture to the next another work rises. The Spanish Civil War broke something permanent in him beyond hope, it renegotiated his ability to trust. As a result? Homage to Catalonia. From the wreckage of idealism and Joseph Stalin, Animal Farm. From the edge of death, 1984. In the brief life of one man who lived on the edge, pushing to know the limits of human strength, weakness, resilience, frailty… his writing is a tour de force of an entire century’s cycle. We sit here today back where we began. Orwell’s truths have become our reality once again.

On the island of Jura, Orwell writes himself toward an end. He is forty-four, wracked with tuberculosis, losing weight, coughing blood. Still, he pushes. The sentences come slowly. They weave the tapestry of his lives, his love and partnership, his role as not only witness, but participant. He types sitting up in bed, hunched against cold wind and rising fever. What emerges is not simply a novel, but a record of what happens when language is stripped of meaning, when memory becomes policy, when freedom is engineered into obedience, when humanity is nullified. 1984 is published in 1949. The world reads it as a prophecy.²⁷ In truth, it is nothing of the kind. It is diagnosis.

George Orwell, a man very different than the Eric Blair he was born as, dies six months later on January 21, 1950, in a London hospital.²⁸ There is no dramatic ending, no grand farewell. Just a body worn out from warning us.

Orwell does not vanish. He haunts us. His words remain etched in both literature and vocabulary: Big Brother, doublethink, thoughtcrime. These are not only ideas anymore. They are symptoms. He showed us what to look for and pointed to where it leads with unmistakable diagnosis, every step of the way.

So why is it never the end? Because the machine he saw never really stopped. It changed names, it may even have changed shape, but the goals of power always remain: The logic of erasure, of comfort over truth, of power repackaged as safety. Orwell did not write to be right, he wrote with urgency to be heard at a time he thought we still had the chance over seventy five years ago.

Here, we sit at the edge again, as part of the same circle.
How many more times must we complete it before we break it?
How many more prophets must we bury before we listen?

Orwell gave us the pattern in full—the slide from truth to convenience, from memory to manipulation, from resistance to silence. He lived through it. He wrote through it. He died naming it.

All these things we'll one day swallow whole / And fade out again

Lyrics from Radiohead Street Spirit (Fade Out) lead each section.

Excellent music video of Radiohead as well.

Why We Still Read Orwell’s Book of Prophesy excellent article (unfortunately no one’s been paying attention) source of Thumbnail image Photograph from Ullstein Bild / Getty

Prior Posts of the Living On The Edge series:

Introduction

Knowing Picasso

Kafka’s Mirror

Aldous Huxley Comfortably Numb

If you have enjoyed this Madmen of Art: Living On The Edge consider fueling the next!

Bibliography—

Bowker, Gordon. George Orwell. London: Little, Brown, 2003.

Crick, Bernard. George Orwell: A Life. London: Secker & Warburg, 1980.

Lewis, Peter. George Orwell: The Road to 1984. London: Heinemann, 1981.

Newsinger, John. Orwell's Politics. London: Macmillan Press, 1999.

Orwell, George. Down and Out in Paris and London. London: Victor Gollancz, 1933.

———. Burmese Days. London: Harper & Brothers, 1934.

———. A Clergyman’s Daughter. London: Victor Gollancz, 1935.

———. Keep the Aspidistra Flying. London: Victor Gollancz, 1936.

———. The Road to Wigan Pier. London: Left Book Club/Victor Gollancz, 1937.

———. Homage to Catalonia. London: Secker & Warburg, 1938.

———. Animal Farm: A Fairy Story. London: Secker & Warburg, 1945.

———. Nineteen Eighty-Four. London: Secker & Warburg, 1949.

Shelden, Michael. Orwell: The Authorized Biography. New York: HarperCollins, 1991.

Taylor, D. J. Orwell: The Life. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2003.

Williams, Raymond. George Orwell. Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1971.

Wykes, Alan. George Orwell. London: Hamlyn, 1973.

1. All lyrics are copyright Radiohead, Street Spirit (Fade Out), track 12 on The Bends, produced by John Leckie, released March 13, 1995, on Parlophone and Capitol Records, CD.

2. Anglo-Indian by the colonial definition of the time is a British child born into the administrative machinery of empire, raised to serve it, yet destined to expose it. See D.J. Taylor, Orwell: The Life (London: Chatto & Windus, 2003), 3–5; Gordon Bowker, George Orwell (London: Little, Brown, 2003), 2–4; Peter Stansky and William Abrahams, The Unknown Orwell (London: Constable, 1972), 18–19.

3. Ibid., 3–6; Ibid., 1–4; Ibid, 17–20.

4. Ibid., 2–5; Ibid., 17–20.

5. Ibid., 3–6; Ibid., 20–23.

6. Ibid., 6–9; Ibid., 24–27.

7. Ibid., 9–11; Ibid., 28–30.

8. Ibid., 12–16; Ibid., 31–35.

9. George Orwell, Such, Such Were the Joys, in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, vol. 1, An Age Like This: 1920–1940, eds. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968), 361–389. In this essay, Orwell presents a scathing account of his years at St. Cyprian’s preparatory school, describing it as a place governed by cruelty, class bias, and hypocrisy. He recalls the experience as one of fear and humiliation, writing that the institution “succeeded in implanting a lifelong horror of the upper class.” [Thank you

Lia

]

10. D.J. Taylor, Orwell: The Life (London: Chatto & Windus, 2003), 18–22; Gordon Bowker, George Orwell (London: Little, Brown, 2003), 17–21; Peter Stansky and William Abrahams, The Unknown Orwell (London: Constable, 1972), 36–41.

11. Ibid., 24–30; Ibid., 22–29; Ibid., 45–52.

12. Ibid., 30–38; Ibid., 55–62.

13. D.J. Taylor, Orwell: The Life (London: Chatto & Windus, 2003), 41–46; Gordon Bowker, George Orwell (London: Little, Brown, 2003), 39–45; Peter Stansky and William Abrahams, The Unknown Orwell (London: Constable, 1972), 63–68.

14. Ibid., 47–52; Ibid., 46–50; Ibid., 69–74.

15. Ibid., 53–58; Ibid., 51–55; Ibid., 75–80.

16. Ibid., 59–65; Ibid., 56–62; Ibid., 81–88.

17. Ibid., 66–73; Ibid., 63–70; Ibid., 89–95.

18. Victor Gollancz was a prominent British publisher and socialist intellectual who played a significant role in left-wing political culture in the 1930s and 1940s. He founded the Left Book Club in 1936, a publishing and political education initiative aimed at promoting progressive and anti-fascist literature to a mass audience. See Ruth Dudley Edwards, Victor Gollancz: A Biography (London: Gollancz, 1987), 115–139.

19. George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1937).

20. George Orwell, Why I Joined the Militia, in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell: Volume 2 – My Country Right or Left 1940–1943, eds. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968), 394.

21. George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (London: Secker & Warburg, 1938).

22. Ibid.; D.J. Taylor, Orwell: The Life (New York: Henry Holt, 2003), 215–220.

23. Ibid.; Ibid., 241–260.

24. George Orwell, The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, vol. 3, As I Please, 1943–1945, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (London: Secker and Warburg, 1968), 152–164; D. J. Taylor, Orwell: The Life (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2003), 278–292.

25. George Orwell, Animal Farm: A Fairy Story (London: Secker and Warburg, 1945); D. J. Taylor, Orwell: The Life (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2003), 327–342. For background on the publication challenges and political climate, see Peter Davison, The Lost Orwell (London: Timewell Press, 2006), 49–66.

26. D. J. Taylor, Orwell: The Life (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2003), 350–369. See also Michael Shelden, Orwell: The Authorized Biography (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 410–427.

27. Ibid., 403–427. Ibid., 439–458.

28. Ibid., 427–429. Ibid., 458–460.