2025-03-16 23:44 Note Type: ongoing Tags: art, politics, writing

This is something that I have always questioned. May be I already know the answer, but I keep reading about it. May be I just keep searching for better words to articulate my thoughts. Here is a line I found from an article by George Orwell, titled "Why I write?". There he talks about how no book is genuinely free from political bias. He adds, =="The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude."==

Quoting the last paragraph of the article which was so vulnerable and hard hitting.

Looking back through the last page or two, I see that I have made it appear as though my motives in writing were wholly public-spirited. I don’t want to leave that as the final impression. All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist or understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane. I cannot say with certainty which of my motives are the strongest, but I know which of them deserve to be followed.

==And looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.==

References

The highlighted portion is from an article by George Orwell. Here is the link.