> I would very much like to know what it was that gave Orwell that degree of insight. Orwell said it himself, in Why I Write: he believed he has a "power of fa

> I would very much like to know what it was that gave Orwell that degree of insight. Orwell said it himself, in Why I Write: he believed he has a "power of facing unpleasant facts". By all accounts that sometimes made him difficult company. This focus on negativity probably contributed to his bouts of melancholy. But this power, I believe, came from always putting people first. Unlike most intellectuals he never fell in love with his own intellect, or with the admiration of "honorable" people. Maybe he romanticized the common people a little too much, especially early in his career, but for him it was never an abstraction. I am not sure if there can be any explanation for this. That's just the way he was. He never stayed inside the lines drawn for him, not the traditional ones of class, nor the ones that one might draw around "radical" intellectuals. So as a policeman in Burma, he got to know the locals and began to understand the horrors of imperialism. Later in life, he traveled to Catalonia to participate in the anarchist revolution as a common soldier, and saw what was beautiful, and ugly, about that. And Orwell saw firsthand how Stalin was engaged in pragmatic and brutal geopolitics, and was not the center of some worldwide proletarian movement. Anyway, as you can see I'm kind of a fan.