I was very taken by David Brown's 'Orwell's Last Neighborhood' published in Longreads, April 2019. David Brown and his wife Judy were traveling through Scotland and took a trip to the desolate, grey and magnificent Isle of Jura in Scotland.
They visited the northern end of Jura where Barnhill sits on Ardlussa estate. Barnhill is the rented house that was the home to English journalist, novelist and essayist Eric Arthur Blair (otherwise known famously as 'George Orwell') his remaining good years (from 1946 to 1948 before he entered a sanatorium in England in September 1948) before he succumbed to tuberculosis in January 1950, and it was in this landscape that he imagined and wrote 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' in 1949.
The writer and his wife met the grandson of Orwell's landlords- Andrew Fletcher, and his wife Claire and their four daughters. They've re-settled in Jura from Edinburgh, believing that they could make a living from a new identity in revitalizing the land with new businesses. In 2016, Claire, Alicia Macinnes and Georgina Kitching got together to produce Lussa gin, a properly artisanal botanical dry gin that is quite a hit. It's a little more floral than how I prefer gin, but it's a good one.
To stay in a place so isolated, you must have a sense of destiny. Or so believes Alicia MacInnes, a 40-year-old Australian transplant and one of Lussa Gin’s partners. She remembers the evening when she arrived long ago. “It was absolutely pelting rain. The woman picking me up, from the Jura Hotel, had backed the car down to the ferry. The boot was up. I could see her smiling face,” she told us one evening. After a pause, she switched to the second person, as if she were describing someone no longer herself. “You’ve been on a long journey. The car’s warm. Soon you’re traveling along single-track roads, exactly where you wanted to be.” Her memory might be called Orwellian, in a pre-Nineteen Eighty-Four sense of the word.
While reading this essay, I'm having a wee tipple of Jura's 19y.o. The Paps. It was very fitting to be sipping a single malt and reading about the writer's trip to Jura, and George Orwell's sojourn. I'm inclined to think that the harsh beauty of Jura lent George Orwell loads of inspiration to create the world in the book. I visited Isle of Jura (and Scotland), obviously for the single malts, but I was fairly sober through the day and did a helluva distance trekking through its gorgeous landscapes.
Judy and I passed that spot in the road as we walked back from Barnhill on our endless June afternoon. I have no idea where it was exactly. At this point, probably nobody does. But it’s there someplace, a symbol of love and optimism, which are just two of the things defeated by the end of Nineteen Eighty-Four.
David Brown wrote that while he wasn't on a literary pilgrimage, and "Barnhill is not open to the public, and no one among the island’s 235 residents remembers Orwell. // Nevertheless, it’s hard not to think of him here." I like George Orwell's writing and vision. It was fascinating to wonder what his mind was like in those years on Jura. He was dying of tuberculosis and he still made what he could of his time. Was he afraid? What did he see that prompted him to write 'Nineteen Eighty-Four'?
'Animal Farm' (1945) didn't make me depressed. I was never convinced about the arguments in 'the nature of man as inherently good' or of mankind's innate shining morality of goodness and love, even with the beacon of religion as the moral authority. Organized religion back then (and now), was extremely frightening and political. 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' was, and is, thoroughly upsetting. George Orwell's dystopian novel is so famous till one would have read it at some point, especially as an adult. 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' is so bleak and bitter that when I read it as a compulsory literature text as a teenager, I was horrified. Then when the book was read again as a young adult in university out of my own free will, I was chilled to the bones.
The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. His heart sank as he thought of the enormous power arrayed against him, the ease with which any Party intellectual would overthrow him in debate, the subtle arguments which he would not be able to understand, much less answer. And yet he was in the right! They were wrong, and he was right. The obvious, the silly, and the true had got to be defeated. Truisms are true, hold on to that! The solid world exists, its laws do not change. Stones are hard, water is wet, objects unsupported fall towards the earth's centre. With the feeling that he was speaking to O'Brien, and also that he was setting forth an important axiom, he wrote,
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If this is granted, all else follows.
~ 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' by George Orwell
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