Ethics, Values, & Sustainability
Environmental Strategy & Sustainability
Systems Thinking & Sustainable Businesses
Last Updated 01/14/2006
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in a n effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him.
The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. At one end of it a colored poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked to the wall. It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a meter wide: the face of a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black mustache and ruggedly handsome features. Winston made for the stairs. It was no use trying the lift. Even at the best of times it was seldom working, and at present the electric current was cut off during daylight hours. It was part of the economy drive in preparation for Hate Week. The flat was seven flights up, and Winston, who was thirty-nine, had a varicose ulcer above his right ankle, went slowly, resting several times on the way. On each landing, opposite the lift shaft, the poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran.
Inside the flat a fruity voice was reading out a list of figures which had something to do with the production of pig iron. The voice came from an oblong metal plaque like a dulled mirror which formed part of the surface of the right-hand wall. Winston turned a switch and the voice sank somewhat, though the words were still distinguishable. The instrument (the telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely. He moved over to the window: a smallish, frail figure, the meagerness of his body merely emphasized by the blue overalls which were the uniform of the Party. His hair was very fair, his face naturally sanguine, his skin roughened by coarse soap and blunt razor blades and the cold of the winter that had just ended.
Outside, even through the shut window pane, the world looked cold. Down in the street little eddies of wind were whirling dust and torn paper into spirals, and though the sun was shining and the sky a harsh blue, there seemed to be no color in anything except the posters that were plastered everywhere. The black-mustachio’d face gazed down from every commanding corner. There was one on the house front immediately opposite. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption said, while the dark eyes looked deep into Winston’s own. Down at street level another poster, torn at one corner, flapped fitfully in the wind, alternately covering and uncovering the single word INGSOC. In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down between the roofs, hovered for an instant like a blue-bottle, and darted away again with a curving flight. It was the Police Patrol, snooping into people’s windows. The patrols did not matter, however. Only the Thought Police mattered.
Behind Winston’s back the voice from the telescreen was still babbling away about pig iron and the overfull-fillment of the Ninth Three-Year Plan. The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it; moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all he time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live – did live, from habit that became instinct – in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.
Winston kept his back turned to the telescreen. It was safer; though, as he well knew, even a back can be revealing. A kilometer away the Ministry of Truth, his place of work, towered vast and white above the grimy landscape. This, he thought with a sort of vague distaste – this was London. … He tried to squeeze out some childhood memory that should tell him whether London had always been quite like this. Were there always these vistas of rotting nineteenth-century houses, their sides shored up with balks of timber, their windows patched with cardboard and their roofs with corrugated iron, their crazy garden walls sagging in all directions? And the bombed sites where the plaster dust swirled in the air and the willow herb straggled over the heaps of rubble; and the places where the bombs had cleared a larger path and there had sprung up sordid colonies of wooden dwellings like chicken houses? But it was no use, he could not remember: nothing remained of his childhood except a series of bright-lit tableaux, occurring against no background and mostly unintelligible.
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.
"Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had."
He didn't say any more but we've always been unusually communicative in a reserved way and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence I'm inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought -- frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon -- for the intimate revelations of young men or at least the terms in which they express them are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parceled out unequally at birth.
And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes but after a certain point I don't care what it's founded on. When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction -- Gatsby who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the "creative temperament" -- it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No -- Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.
My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this middle-western city for three generations. The Carraways are something of a clan and we have a tradition that we're descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the actual founder of my line was my grandfather's brother who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War and started the wholesale hardware business that my father carries on today.
…
I lived at West Egg, the -- well, the less fashionable of the two [cities], though this is a most superficial tag to express the bizarre and not a little sinister contrast between them. My house was at the very tip of the egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season. The one on my right was a colossal affair by any standard -- it was a factual imitation of some Hôtel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool and more than forty acres of lawn and garden. It was Gatsby's mansion. Or rather, as I didn't know Mr. Gatsby it was a mansion inhabited by a gentleman of that name. My own house was an eye-sore, but it was a small eye-sore and it had been overlooked, so I had a view of the water, a partial view of my neighbor's lawn and the consoling proximity of millionaires -- all for eighty dollars a month.
…
Already it was deep summer on roadhouse roofs and in front of wayside garages where new red gas-pumps sat out in pools of light, and when I reached my estate at West Egg I ran the car under its shed and sat for a while on an abandoned grass roller in the yard. The wind had blown off, leaving a loud bright night with wings beating in the trees and a persistent organ sound as the full bellows of the earth blew the frogs full of life. The silhouette of a moving cat wavered across the moonlight and turning my head to watch it I saw that I was not alone -- fifty feet away a figure had emerged from the shadow of my neighbor's mansion and was standing with his hands in his pockets regarding the silver pepper of the stars. Something in his leisurely movements and the secure position of his feet upon the lawn suggested that it was Mr. Gatsby himself, come out to determine what share was his of our local heavens.
I decided to call to him. Miss Baker had mentioned him at dinner, and that would do for an introduction. But I didn't call to him for he gave a sudden intimation that he was content to be alone -- he stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and far as I was from him I could have sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I glanced seaward -- and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock. When I looked once more for Gatsby he had vanished, and I was alone again in the unquiet darkness.
The family huddled on the platforms, silent and fretful. The water was six inches
deep in the car before the flood spread evenly over the embankment and moved into
the cotton field on the other side. During that day and night the men slept suddenly,
side by side on the boxcar door. And Ma lay close to Rose of Sharon. Sometimes
Ma whispered to her and sometimes sat up quietly, her face brooding. Under the
blanket she hoarded the remains of the store bread.
The rain had become intermittent now--little wet squalls
and quiet times. On the morning of the second day Pa splashed through the camp
and came back with ten potatoes in his pockets. Ma watched him sullenly while
he chopped out part of the inner wall of the car, built a fire, and scooped water
into a pan. The family ate the steaming boiled potatoes with their fingers. And
when this last food was gone, they stared at the gray water; and in the night
they did not lie down for a long time.
When the morning came they awakened nervously. Rose of
Sharon whispered to Ma.
Ma nodded her head. "Yes," she said. "It's time for it."
And then she turned to the car door, where the men lay. "We're a-gettin' outa
here," she said savagely, "gettin' to higher groun'. An' you're coming' or you
ain't comin', but I'm takin' Rosasharn an' the little fellas outa here."
"We can't!" Pa said weakly.
…
Ma smiled. "... come on, Rosasharn. We're going' to a dry place."
Pa slipped into the water and stood waiting. Ma helped
Rose of Sharon down from the platform and steadied her across the car. Pa took
her in his arms, held her as high as he could, and pushed his way carefully through
the deep water, around the car and to the highway. He set her down on her feet
and held onto her. Uncle John carried Ruthie and followed. Ma slid down into the
water, and for a moment her skirts billowed out around her.
…
They stood on the highway and looked back over the sheet of water, the dark red
blocks of the cars, the trucks and automobiles deep in the slowly moving water.
And as they stood, a little misting rain began to fall.
…
Pa complained, "now we're a-goin', where' we going'?"
"I dunno. come on, give your han' to Rosasharn." Ma took
the girl's right arm to steady her, and Pa her left. "goin' someplace where it's
dry. Got to. You fellas ain't had dry clothes on for two days." They moved slowly
along the highway. They could hear the rushing of the water in the stream beside
the road. Ruthie and Winfeild marched together, splashing their feet against the
road. They went slowly along the road. The sky grew darker and the rain thickened.
No traffic moved along the highway.
"We got to hurry," Ma said. "if this here girl gits good
an' wet--I don't know what'll happen to her."
"You aint' said wher-at we're a-hurryin' to," Pa reminded
her sarcastically.
The road curved along beside the stream. ma searched the
land and the flooded fields. Far off the road, on the left, on a slight rolling
hill a rain-blackened bard stood. "Look!" Ma said. "Look there! I bet it's dry
in that barn. Let's go there till the rain stops."
Pa sighed. "Prob'ly get run out by the fella owns it."
…
From the right of the road there came a sharp swishing.
Ma cried, "Hurry up. They's a big rain. Le's go through the fence here. It's shorter.
Come on, now! Bear on, Rosasharn" They half dragged the girl across the ditch,
helped her through the fence. And then the storm struck them. Sheets of rain feel
on them. They plowed through the mud and up the little incline. The black barn
was nearly obscured by the rain. It hissed and splashed, and the growing wind
drove it along. Rose of Sharon's feet slipped and she dragged between her supporters.
…
"Lay down, Rosasharn," Ma said. "Lay down an' res'. I'll try to figger some way
to dry you off."
Winfield said, "Ma!" and the rain roaring on the roof drowned
his voice. "Ma!"
"What is it? What you want?"
"Look! In the corner."
The family huddled on the platforms, silent and fretful
Serene was a word you could put to Brooklyn, New York. Especially in the summer of 1912. Somber, as a word, was better. But it did not apply to Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Prairie was lovely and Shenandoah had a beautiful sound, but you couldn’t fit those words into Brooklyn. Serene was the only word for it; especially on a Saturday afternoon in summer.
Late in the afternoon the sun slanted down into the mossy yard belonging to Francie Nolan’s house, and warmed the worn wooden fence. Looking at the shafted sun, Francie had that same fine feeling that came when she recalled the poem they recited in school.
This is the forest primeval. The murmuring
pines and the hemlocks,
Bearded with moss, and in garments green,
indistinct in the twilight,
Stand like Druids of eld.
The one tree in Francie’s yard was neither a pine nor a hemlock. It had pointed leaves which grew along green switches which radiated from the bough and made a tree which looked like a lot of opened green umbrellas. Some people called it the Tree of Heaven. No matter where its seed fell, it made a tree which struggled to reach the sky. It grew in boarded-up lots and out of neglected rubbish heaps and it was the only tree that grew out of cement. It grew lushly, but only in the tenements districts.
You took a walk on a Sunday afternoon and came to a nice neighborhood, very refined. You saw a small one of these trees through the iron gate leading to someone’s yard and you knew that soon that section of Brooklyn would get to be a tenement district. The tree knew. It came there first. Afterward, poor foreigners seeped in and the quiet old brownstone houses were hacked up into flats, feather beds were pushed out on the window sills to air and the Tree of Heaven flourished. That was the kind of tree it was. It liked poor people.
That was the kind of tree in Francie’s yard. Its umbrellas curled over, around and under her third-floor fire-escape. An eleven-year-old girl sitting on this fire-escape could imagine that she was living in a tree. That’s what Francie imagined every Saturday afternoon in summer.
Oh, what a wonderful day was Saturday in Brooklyn. Oh, how wonderful anywhere! People were paid on Saturday and it was a holiday without the rigidness of a Sunday. People had money to go out and buy things. They ate well for once, got drunk, had dates, made love and stayed up until all hours; singing, playing music, fighting and dancing because the morrow was their own free day. They could sleep late – until mass anyhow.
On Sunday, most people crowded into the eleven o’clock mass. Well, some people, a few, went to early six o’clock mass. They were given credit for this but they deserved none for they were the ones who had stayed out so late that it was morning when they got home. So they went to this early mass, got it over with and went home and slept all day with a free conscience.
For France, Saturday started with the trip to the junkie. She and her brother, Neelely, like other Brooklyn kids, collected rages, paper, metal, rubber, and other junk and hoarded it in locked cellar bins or in boxes hidden under the bed. All week Francie walked home slowly from school with her eyes in the gutter looking for tin foil from cigarette packages or chewing gum wrappers. This was melted in the lid of a jar. The junkie wouldn’t take an unmelted ball of foil because too many kids put iron washers in the middle to make it weigh heavier. Sometimes Neeley found a seltzer bottle. Francie helped him break the top off and melt it down for lead. The junkie wouldn’t buy a complete top because he’d get into trouble with the soda water people. A seltzer bottle top was fin. Melted, it was worth a nickel.
Francie and Neeley went down into the cellar each evening and emptied the dumbwaiter shelves of the day’s accumulated trash. They owned this privilege because Francie’s mother was the janitress. They looted the shelves of paper, rags and deposit bottles. Paper wasn’t worth much. They got only a penny for ten pounds. Rags brought two cents a pound and iron, four. Copper was good – ten cents a pound. Sometimes France came across a bonanza: the bottom of a discarded wash boiler. She got it off with a can opener, folded it, pounded it, folded it and pounded it again.
Soon after nine o’clock of a Saturday morning, kids began spraying out of all the side streets on to Manhattan Avenue, the main thoroughfare. They made their slow way up the Avenue to Scholes Street. Some carried their junk in their arms. Others had wagons made of a wooden soap box with solid wooden wheels. A few pushed loaded baby buggies
Francie and Neeley put all their junk into a burlap bag and each grabbed an end and dragged it along the street; up Manhattan Avenue, past Maujer, Ten Eyck, Stagg to Scholes Street. Beautiful names for ugly streets. From each side street hordes of little ragamuffins emerged to swell the main tide. On the way to Carney’s, they met other kids coming back empty-handed. They had sold their junk already squandered the pennies. Now, swaggering back, they jeered at the other kids.
“Rag picker! Rag picker!”
Francie’s face burned at the name. No comfort knowing that the taunters were rag pickers too. No matter that her brother would straggle back empty-handed with his gang and taunt later comers the same way. France felt ashamed.
Serene was a word you could put to Brooklyn, New York.
My suffering left me sad and gloomy.
Academic study and the steady, mindful practice of religion slowly brought
me back to life. I have remained a faithful Hindu, Christian and Muslim. I decided
to stay in Toronto. After one year of high school, I attended the University of
Toronto and took a double-major Bachelor's degree. My majors were religious studies
and zoology. My fourth-year thesis for religious studies concerned certain aspects
of the cosmogony theory of Isaac Luria, the great sixteenth-century Kabbalist
from Safed. My zoology thesis was a functional analysis of the thyroid gland of
the three-toed sloth. I chose the sloth because its demeanor--calm, quiet and
introspective--did something to soothe my shattered self.
There are two-toed sloths and there are three-toed sloths, the case being determined
by the forepaws of the animals, since all sloths have three claws on their hind
paws. I had the great luck one summer of studying the three-toed sloth in situ
in the equatorial jungles of Brazil. It is a highly intriguing creature. Its only
real habit is indolence. It sleeps or rests on average twenty hours a day. Our
team tested the sleep habits of five wild three-toed sloths by placing on their
heads, in the early evening after they had fallen asleep, bright red plastic dishes
filled with water. We found them still in place late the next morning, the water
of the dishes swarming with insects. The sloth is at its busiest at sunset, using
the word busy here in a most relaxed sense. It moves along the bough of a tree
in its characteristic upside-down position at the speed of roughly 400 metres
an hour. On the ground, it crawls to its next tree at the rate of 250 metres an
hour, when motivated, which is 440 times slower than a motivated cheetah. Unmotivated,
it covers four to five metres in an hour.
The three-toed sloth is not well informed about the outside world. On a scale
of 2 to 10, where 2 represents unusual dullness and 10 extreme acuity, Beebe (1926)
gave the sloth's senses of taste, touch, sight and hearing a rating of 2, and
its sense of smell a rating of 3. If you come upon a sleeping three-toed sloth
in the wild, two or three nudges should suffice to awaken it; it will then look
sleepily in every direction but yours. Why it should look about is uncertain since
the sloth sees everything in a Magoo-like blur. As for hearing, the sloth is not
so much deaf as uninterested in sound. Beebe reported that firing guns next to
sleeping or feeding sloths elicited little reaction. And the sloth's slightly
better sense of smell should not be overestimated. They are said to be able to
sniff and avoid decayed branches, but Bullock (1968) reported that sloths fall
to the ground clinging to decayed branches "often".
How does it survive, you might ask.
Precisely by being so slow. Sleepiness and slothfulness keep it out of harm's
way, away from the notice of jaguars, ocelots, harpy eagles and anacondas. A sloth's
hairs shelter an algae that is brown during the dry season and green during the
wet season, so the animal blends in with the surrounding moss and foliage and
looks like a nest of white ants or of squirrels, or like nothing at all but part
of a tree.
The three-toed sloth lives a peaceful, vegetarian life in perfect harmony with
its environment. "A good-natured smile is forever on its lips," reported Tirler
(1966). I have seen that smile with my own eyes. I am not one given to projecting
human traits and emotions onto animals, but many a time during that month in Brazil,
looking up at sloths in repose, I felt I was in the presence of upside-down yogis
deep in meditation or hermits deep in prayer, wise beings whose intense imaginative
lives were beyond the reach of my scientific probing.
Sometimes I got my majors mixed up. A number of my fellow religious-studies students--muddled
agnostics who didn't know which way was up, in the thrall of reason, that fool's
gold for the bright--reminded me of the three-toed sloth; and the three-toed sloth,
such a beautiful example of the miracle of life, reminded me of God.
I never had problems with my fellow scientists. Scientists are a friendly, atheistic,
hard-working, beer-drinking lot whose minds are preoccupied with sex, chess and
baseball when they are not preoccupied with science.
I was a very good student, if I may say so myself. I was tops at St. Michael's
College four years in a row. I got every possible student award from the Department
of Zoology. If I got none from the Department of Religious Studies, it is simply
because there are no student awards in this department (the rewards of religious
study are not in mortal hands, we all know that). I would have received the Governor
General's Academic Medal, the University of Toronto's highest undergraduate award,
of which no small number of illustrious Canadians have been recipients, were it
not for a beef-eating pink boy with a neck like a tree trunk and a temperament
of unbearable good cheer.
I still smart a little at the slight. When you've suffered a great deal in life,
each additional pain is both unbearable and trifling. My life is like a memento
mori painting from European art: there is always a grinning skull at my side to
remind me of the folly of human ambition. I mock this skull. I look at it and
I say, "You've got the wrong fellow. You may not believe in life, but I don't
believe in death. Move on!" The skull snickers and moves ever closer, but that
doesn't surprise me. The reason death sticks so closely to life isn't biological
necessity--it's envy. Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with
it, a jealous, possessive love that grabs at what it can. But life leaps over
oblivion lightly, losing only a thing or two of no importance, and gloom is but
the passing shadow of a cloud. The pink boy also got the nod from the Rhodes Scholarship
committee. I love him and I hope his time at Oxford was a rich experience. If
Lakshmi, goddess of wealth, one day favors me bountifully, Oxford is fifth on
the list of cities I would like to visit before I pass on, after Mecca, Varanasi,
Jerusalem and Paris.
I have nothing to say of my working life, only that a tie is a noose, and inverted
though it is, it will hang a man nonetheless if he's not careful.
I love Canada. I miss the heat of India, the food, the house lizards on the walls,
the musicals on the silver screen, the cows wandering the streets, the crows cawing,
even the talk of cricket matches, but I love Canada. It is a great country much
too cold for good sense, inhabited by compassionate, intelligent people with bad
hairdos. Anyway, I have nothing to go home to in Pondicherry.
