The coolest!

To The End

A very good experience overall. I really enjoyed this book. Kurt Vonnegut has such a unique writing style that I am drawn to. His way of conveying themes and ideas through his characters and the world around them is pretty damn good. The last portion of this book wrapped up nicely and I will miss reading it. So it goes. 

Start to page 90

To page 172 

Example:

As a kid, I constantly lived in fear of damaging shit in my parent's house. The walls. The floors (especially the floors. The wood was beautiful. Shiny. But so easy to scratch). The cabinets.

As a sixteen-year-old, I once took my car to the dealership after work and paid a very dear sum of $250 ($10/hr cashier salary) to fix a slight scratch in the paint because I knew if my father saw it there would be hell to pay. It didn't matter that I parked far out, like I'd been taught, and someone scratched it anyway. It was my fault. I failed in my duties as a steward of my vehicle.

Every time I scratched a rim on a curb while parallel parking or got a door ding or, god forbid, didn't wash and vacuum that car every weekend, it was treated like some sort of moral failing.

Last year, when my husband and I first moved into our house, he scraped the side of our car when parking in our (Very Narrow) garage. When he told me, my first instinct was to be afraid for him. Like something terrible was going to happen to him because of this mistake. I urgently reassured him that it was okay, it was an accident, I wasn't mad. Baffled, he was like, "Yeah? I know? Like, thank you for the reassurance, but I'm only a little annoyed, I'm not upset. It's just a car." And I had to take several minutes to process that. It's...just a car.

We keep the car tidy. We maintain it. But we wash it maybe 4x a year. We only vacuum it after dirty road trips or when the dog hair starts to get annoying. It has scrapes and dings and the leather seats have stains. But that's ok. Because it's just a car.

This morning, I realized that a small rock had gotten embedded in the felt foot on one of our bar stools. Neither of us had noticed. There are now scratches on our beautiful hardwood floor. My immediate response was fear accompanied by a heavy measure of paralyzing guilt. "I'm so sorry," I told my husband, "I should have noticed. I'll figure out how to fix it, I swear. I can probably sand down that section and match the stain and--"

"Whoa, hey," he said. "It was an accident. And it's fine. Floors are going to get damaged. They're floors. We live here. There was damage in places before we even bought the house, remember? It's not a big deal. It's just a floor." Right. It's just a floor. Right.

My husband's mom is visiting and this afternoon, as I was sitting in the kitchen looking at the scratches on the floor, I offhandedly asked her if my husband had ever broken or damaged anything as a kid. "Of course," she said. Household items. A TV. A wrecked car during his teen years. I asked how she punished him.

"Why would I punish him for things like that?" she said. "They were all accidents."

Chapter 9 to End

Orwell has a way of making even the most mundane seem interesting. I was savoring every word the whole way through. He had a fantastic quote that I think deserves to be highlighted. “I have no particular love for the idealized ‘worker’ as he appears in the bourgeois Communist’s mind, but when I see an actual flesh-and-blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do not have to ask myself which side I am on.” That is a feeling I believe should resonate with every member of the proletariat. The intricacies of the political struggle within the Spanish government while actively fighting in a war against a fascist coup is very interesting and is worth looking into, personally this is a blind spot for me that I will be looking into and I am excited to learn more about this period of Spanish history.

There is a moment while reading this book that you can tell Orwell decided to write Animal Farm, it is a bit of a lightbulb moment. After what he and many of his comrades went through at the hands of Stalinists it makes sense he would write a book warning of authoritarianism. There is also a moment where he describes the feeling of being shot and the thoughts that follow that experience. It is a very powerful moment, especially seeing the lack of malice with which he regards his shooter and the rational way he thinks about having been injured. 

Chapter 8

A very interesting chapter recounting Orwell’s time on leave from the militia front. Traveling through a number of cities that were affected differently by the war and associated social changes. He speaks of returning to Barcelona, the “Revolutionary City” and the shock of it being considerably less so upon his arrival. The city had started to return to its regular class society, with the rich enjoying life while the poor struggle. A black market had emerged and the shops stopped catering towards the militia fighters. Orwell being a well paid militia man indulged in all the pleasures he had the money to buy (not quite the model revolutionary) but I can’t blame him. In his shoes I’m sure I’d do the same. Having spent months on the front lines eating whatever they had on hand and rationing water I’d go buy a big ass steak, fine wine, and black market American cigarettes too! There was a political struggle between the various leading ideological parties that had come to blows in his time away. The C.N.T. (Anarchists) and the U.G.T. (Socialists) were finding themselves at odds, street fights cropped up and at times their scuffles ended in killings. Orwell does note that it was possible agent provocateurs were behind the unrest seeing as the media and western powers were not particularly happy about such left wing parties holding power. (My conspiratorial mind likes to think that this is probably some plot cooked up by a cabal of various capitalists looking to maintain the status quo but idk man I wasn't there) They had planned a joint May Day parade to show solidarity but it was called off at the last minute, no display of unity there. Just goes to show that infighting is a leftist tradition and not just some new fangled way to pass time invented by bored commies on Twitter.