Китай вчера и сегодня (1949)
Nov. 19th, 2011 02:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
a_kleberGeorge Orwell, In Front of Your Nose 1945-1950 / 167. Extracts from a Manuscript Note-book:
«Probably there was some truth in Petain's remark, at the time when he became ruler of France, that the French defeat was due partly to the low birthrate. Where families are small, the civilian population cannot regard the killing of their sons with indifference, & the soldier's own attitude is probably affected by his having learned to think of himself as more of an individual, & more important, than if he had had to scramble for survival in a hungry peasant family of five or ten children.
One great difference between the Victorians & ourselves was that they looked on the adult as more important than the child. In a family often or twelve it was almost inevitable that one or two should die in infancy, & though these deaths were sad, of course, they were soon forgotten, as there were always more children coming along. In St John's Church, near Lord's, there are many memorial tablets of East India nabobs, etc with the usual column of lies in praise of the dead man, then a line or two abt "Sarah, relict of the above", and then perhaps another line saying that one male & two female children, or words to that effect, are buried in the same vault. No names given, & in one case the inscription reads two or three children. By the time the stone was put up, it had been forgotten how many had died.
Nowadays the death of a child is the worst thing that most people are able to imagine. If one has only one child, to recover from losing it would be almost impossible. It would darken the universe, permanently. Even two generations ago I doubt whether people had this feeling. Cf in Jude the Obscure, in the preposterous incident where the eldest child hangs the two younger ones & then hangs itself. Jude & Sue are, of course, distressed, but they do not seem to feel that after such an event their own lives must cease. Sue (I think Hardy realises that she is an intolerable character, but I don't think he is being ironical in this place) says after a while that she sees why the children had to die: it was to make her a better woman & help her to begin her life anew. It does not occur to her that the children were more important creatures than herself & that in comparison with their death, nothing that can now happen to her is of much significance.
I read recently in the newspaper that in Shanghai (now full of refugees) abandoned children are becoming so common on the pavement that one no longer notices them. In the end, I suppose, the body of a dying child becomes simply a piece of refuse to be stepped over. Yet all these children started out with the expectation of being loved & protected & with the conviction which one can see even in a very young child that the world is a splendid place & there are plenty of good times ahead.
Qy. are you the same again if you have walked home stepping over the bodies of abandoned children, & not succouring even one of them? (Even to take care not to tread on them is a sort of hypocrisy.) M.M [Malcolm Muggeridge] says that anyone who has lived in Asia has in effect done this kind of thing already. Perhaps not quite true, insomuch that when he & I lived in Asia we were young men who wd hardly notice babies.»
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сегодня там то же самое
«Probably there was some truth in Petain's remark, at the time when he became ruler of France, that the French defeat was due partly to the low birthrate. Where families are small, the civilian population cannot regard the killing of their sons with indifference, & the soldier's own attitude is probably affected by his having learned to think of himself as more of an individual, & more important, than if he had had to scramble for survival in a hungry peasant family of five or ten children.
One great difference between the Victorians & ourselves was that they looked on the adult as more important than the child. In a family often or twelve it was almost inevitable that one or two should die in infancy, & though these deaths were sad, of course, they were soon forgotten, as there were always more children coming along. In St John's Church, near Lord's, there are many memorial tablets of East India nabobs, etc with the usual column of lies in praise of the dead man, then a line or two abt "Sarah, relict of the above", and then perhaps another line saying that one male & two female children, or words to that effect, are buried in the same vault. No names given, & in one case the inscription reads two or three children. By the time the stone was put up, it had been forgotten how many had died.
Nowadays the death of a child is the worst thing that most people are able to imagine. If one has only one child, to recover from losing it would be almost impossible. It would darken the universe, permanently. Even two generations ago I doubt whether people had this feeling. Cf in Jude the Obscure, in the preposterous incident where the eldest child hangs the two younger ones & then hangs itself. Jude & Sue are, of course, distressed, but they do not seem to feel that after such an event their own lives must cease. Sue (I think Hardy realises that she is an intolerable character, but I don't think he is being ironical in this place) says after a while that she sees why the children had to die: it was to make her a better woman & help her to begin her life anew. It does not occur to her that the children were more important creatures than herself & that in comparison with their death, nothing that can now happen to her is of much significance.
I read recently in the newspaper that in Shanghai (now full of refugees) abandoned children are becoming so common on the pavement that one no longer notices them. In the end, I suppose, the body of a dying child becomes simply a piece of refuse to be stepped over. Yet all these children started out with the expectation of being loved & protected & with the conviction which one can see even in a very young child that the world is a splendid place & there are plenty of good times ahead.
Qy. are you the same again if you have walked home stepping over the bodies of abandoned children, & not succouring even one of them? (Even to take care not to tread on them is a sort of hypocrisy.) M.M [Malcolm Muggeridge] says that anyone who has lived in Asia has in effect done this kind of thing already. Perhaps not quite true, insomuch that when he & I lived in Asia we were young men who wd hardly notice babies.»
-------
сегодня там то же самое
