Coming Up for Air

I didn’t know 1984 had a prequel There he is again, or first, the british middle aged fatty. A man unable to move because of the live he is living, but not quite dead, as he calls it, yet, as he is able to think and reflect on him selfe. But before he was captured by Stalinistik visions he was chained to the ground by mortgages, relationships, fear and external validation. Locus stayed the same, the feelings staid the same, just the multiplier of the consequences was turned up for 1984.

Beyond pacifism

There are many interesting aspects of the book, but I would like to talk about the perception of war this book tries to convey as it is quite different from many other stories and a paper I have recently read for no reason.

Context: Beyond pacifism

Some random website once in a while sends me some papers that were published on their website about pacifism. Most of the time I don’t read them, but I was bored on my way to somewhere, so I read it. It was quite short, about 8. pages and it discussed how war is portrayed. This paper hypothesis is that anti war literature, portraits fighting and death as an indescribable horrible. That is changes, even the toughest in a never reversible way, that could only be experienced in just circumstances. By doing so, they create a new kind of heroism, the one of the self reflected soldier that saw, but could never tell, the true horrors of war. This paper states that this could convey the feeling that to truly be a pacifist you would have to have fought in a war.

Boredom and nihilism

The main character never uses statements that would give the impression that I would not understand how war feels. (I am not saying I would know by reading this book, but he makes nothing special about it) He talks about how, after months sitting in the trenches there was nothing more boring than to live, how the Nihilism, and the absurdity caught you and how there was not even the slightest bit of motivation left. As he said, the germans seem more friendly to him than the french. There was no hait in the trenches, just the feeling of being caught in the war machine.

Homage to Catalonia

Reading this, nearly back to back with Homage to Catalonia, this paints a really different picture to this political motivated war, that was the spanish civil war and how the Anarchistic troops stood at the worst lines with no support and nothing holding them back from running away other than their pure belief in their duty.

Lost in bureaucracy

This is probably the pinnacle of this criticism of the war: the war machine, that only served a very small minority, but was so complicatedly set up and left so little room, that it was able to lose whole troops, not to bombs, but to bureaucracy. He was just lost at a random beach, and there was even another person somewhere in england that knew of his existence, but either had not motivation or the freedom to make him to something useful.

Conclusion

Overall a very interesting book to read, as it gives you a sense of you to watch out not to die and how the world changed from the 19th to the 20th century, but I would not just recommend it to someone.