I am struck more and more by the Doublethink of adoption deformers. The ability to speak out of both sides of their mouths proclaiming “truths”to reputuate at will, and back again. I’m not going to write an essay here post a quote from 1984:
The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them….To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies — all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth.
…Orwell, George (1949). Nineteen Eighty-Four. Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd, London, part 1, chapter 3, pp 32
Give me something to call my own
You sold something inside of me
Give me something to call my own
Totally right on, BD! Doublethink is alive and well in adopto-land.
Alive and well in the world too along Wall Street in the offices of BP and in adoptionland where it hurts as badly.
“Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth.”
One can only suppose Orwell knew whereof he spoke. Regarding his adopted son Richard, he wrote:
“One final, intriguing question hanging over Richard’s childhood is the identity of his true parents. On his copy of the adoption certificate their names have been burnt away with a cigarette, leaving a brown-edged hole, as if Orwell wanted to destroy any evidence that his boy was not his.”
However, “Despite this dissuasion, Richard decided, fairly recently, to track down his birth mother, only to find that she had died, and that his surviving halfsister had no idea her mother had ever given a child up for adoption. “She took her secret to the grave,” she told Richard, and she made it clear that she wanted her mother’s secret kept. So he has vowed to keep it silent.”
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_
and_entertainment/books/non-fiction/article5889541.ece
Friday, June 11, 2010 7:59:02 PM EDT
Oops. I meant, “John Carey (who interviewed Richard Blair) wrote”.
An essay by Richard Blair: http://www.theorwellprize.co.uk/the-award/works/richardblair1.aspx
It sheds a kinder light on Orwell, who comes across as bereft, beleaguered and devoted.
“There is no doubt that he was profoundly moved by her death, but kept a stiff upper lip, as was the norm for ‘people of a certain class’ at that time. However, it left him with the problem of deciding what to do for my future. Some of his friends suggested that, as he had adopted me, he should ‘unadopt’ me. He would not even consider this. Beneath that intellectual exterior beat a heart of deep paternal warmth and he was determined to continue to bring me up as his son. “
Orwell’s sister, Richard’s Aunt Av sounds sterling, and Richard himself is clearly a good and gracious man. Orwell would have been proud :- )
This too: http://www.netcharles.com/orwell/ctc/docs/
onlyheir.htm
“”He didn’t want me to know and maybe didn’t want to know himself,” Blair says. “He wanted to consider me his very own.”
Quotes are so much fun!
… The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function–Fitzgerald
Quotes are best when they are put in context so that they can be understood as the originator intended.
“The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.”
William Shakespeare.
The Merchant of Venice, Act I. Scene III.