My favourite poem, in that selection, is Emily Dickinson¡¯s ¡®Frigate¡¯, because she expresses the joys of reading, a theme I can identify with, using a very well-chosen metaphor of a ship.
Yesterday, I read ¡®Such, Such were the Joys¡¦¡¯, an essay by George Orwell about his school days. He went to schools very similar to the ones I had attended in England, and so I could just picture him in his school, Crossgates, because I knew exactly what he meant in his account. In fact, in matching his descriptions of his school with that of mine, I found myself transported to the musty front hall of Mount House, my old school before Harrow, once again, and I could literally see all its details; the brown grand piano with its stiff keys, the sundial just outside the Victorian window, the white walls and the milk-tea-coloured carpet. And all this for free, without having to purchase a ticket to England (though, of course, it¡¯s nowhere near as good as actually being there).
I empathised with the young Eric Blair because he, like me, had to win a scholarship to a public school (in Britain that means a private school, as opposed to state schools) and I know what a terrible pressure it is to bear for a twelve-year old. Being probably the poorest person in his school, he couldn¡¯t afford things everyone else had; during my whole time at Harrow, I bought pizza with my own money on only two occasions, while everyone else had it weekly (or even daily in some instances). Fortunately, my experience of English boarding schools has been much more humane than that of Orwell¡¯s and I still respect Mr. Price, the headmaster of Mount House during my time, very much as an educator.
While I am on the subject, I shall give you my foremost reason, apart from his crisp and accessible style of writing, for which I hold him almost as my role model. He is a leftist, educated in the most conservative school in England. In schools like Eton and Harrow some people play at being communists but really they are only poking fun - not every year these schools produce a true socialist. Since the students there are richer than the vast majority of the population, they regard leftism as a blight. Even I was carried away for a short while in that Harrovian trend of rampant rightism and disdain towards the working class. Orwell is the one person whose vision has not been obscured by his schooling and has written about ideologies seriously.