Book Thoughts: Keep the Aspidistra Flying
I recently wrote a complaint-post about my inability to read books lately. My curse has been broken at last!
I was in a local bookshop when my eyes fell on a reduced-price copy of George Orwell's Keep the Aspidistra Flying, and my highschool memories of 1984 and Animal farm compelled me to pick it up for $5 without much research. I had some time to burn over the long weekend and read the damn thing cover-to-cover laying on my porch furniture in the almost-comfortable-but-still-chilly spring sun.
As previously mentioned it's been a hot minute since I've picked up a work by Orwell, and I really need to emphasize how much I appreciate his writing style. It's to-the-point, clean, and doesn't go heavy on prose while still feeling extremely well-written. Just a solid writer all 'round.
The book itself was thoroughly interesting -- it follows Gordon Comstock, an almost-30 poet in 1930's London who has sworn off bowing before the "money god", and insists on living a life on minimal wages, dashing his family's hopes, squandering his education, and defying his own ability to hold down a "good job". Despite his resolve, he rails against how his own lack of money destroys his life -- in fact it consumes him entirely as he bemoans his miserable life page after page.
A shocking amount of Gordon's pains echo through to modern times -- how easily could this book have been written about a modern day "incel" and their views on life and women!
Interestingly, I believe if I had picked this book up in my youth, I would have been squarely on the side of Gordon. Not his terrible views on women, but his attempt at self sabotaging for his principals. Fuck the money-god and all that.
Reading it as a working adult, his follies are as obvious as they are painful, and his eventual "growing up" felt inevitable. I still joke about dying poor and principled instead of selling my soul, yet I've managed to sell enough of it to afford patio furniture to read books on in the sun.
I know this book is a satirical critique of the middle class, but much of it rings true. Gordon ultimately fails in his rebellion and falls into the inevitability of the middle class life, "making good" and ultimately becoming somewhat boring and mundane -- but happy, perhaps, at least, in the middle.
The most poignant line in the book to me comes from Gordon's well-off publishing friend Ravelston -- a character I somewhat ashamedly can related to much closer than Gordon despite being firmly in the middle-class myself. It was to the tune of "You cannot expect to live in a corrupt society without becoming at least a little corrupt yourself," one must either leave society all together or sell some part of themselves. If not dignity, then time.
In the middle class, one must ironically find the balance that they can live with. Figure out how much of their soul they're willing to sell that they're left with a satisfactory share and enough capital to live a good life. 90 years later, every word of Orwell's view of capitalism and the middle class ring true.
Keep that aspidistra flying. All hail the money-god.