Life Imitates Art

 

By Ed Qauttrocchi

 

Read at the dinner of the Chicago Literary Club at the Fortnightly Club on October 6, 2008

 

It is an honor to inaugurate the 135th year of the Chicago Literary Club. The Literary Club, like the Fortnightly Club, has a long and proud tradition. I thank the Fortnightly Club officers and members for encouraging our relationship and inviting us to share this commodious home for several of our joint meetings every year.  Our clubs are two of the oldest in Chicago, dedicated to the tradition of free and open discussion of literature and culture. This spirit goes back to the founders of our clubs and to the founders of our country and beyond that to the democracy of Athens, Greece. One of the most significant works of philosophy written at the height of the civilization of Greece is Plato’s Republic. About 40 years ago I worked daily in the Newberry Library on my dissertation for my PhD at Loyola on Plato’s Republic and Thomas More’s Utopia. I used Paul Shorey’s translation of the Republic in the Loeb Classical edition as my source, and I used Edward Surtz’s translation of the Utopia. Father Surtz, a Jesuit priest, who taught at Loyola was the editor of the Yale edition of the Utopia, and he was my thesis advisor. 

It has only been in recent years that I realized that when Paul Shorey was translating the Republic, he was a member of the Chicago Literary Club and a member of the classics department at the University of Chicago. He was born in Davenport, Iowa in 1857 and died in Chicago in 1934. After graduating from Harvard in 1878 he studied in Europe at Leipzig, Bonn, Athens, and Munich, where he received his Ph.D. in 1884. He was a professor at several institutions from 1885 onward, principally at the University of Chicago. He was a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters and managing editor of Classical Philology. He published numerous books and articles, among them The Idea of Good in Plato's Republic and The Unity of Plato's Thought in addition to Horace's Odes. After his death, one of many articles published about him asserted that he knew all 12,000 lines of Homer’s Iliad by heart. As a member of the Literary Club for almost 40 years until his death in 1934, he presented 22 papers on a variety of subjects in the humanities, especially Plato’s works. I would have been proud to have studied with Professor Shorey, as I was to study with Father Surtz, but I was only three years old when professor Shorey died.  I present this paper in homage to Paul Shorey and Edward Surtz in recognition of their devotion to the humanities, to Plato and to Thomas More.

In my paper I hope to connect one of the enduring metaphors of western literature to George Orwell’s 1984. In the fading days of the Greek democracy in 399 BC, the council of Athens tried Socrates and condemned him to death for crimes against the state. Plato recorded this trial in his Apology. It was reading The Apology that sparked my interest in literature and in the humanities. Later as my reading interest widened, I came to understand Alfred North Whitehead’s comment that "all Western Civilization is a footnote to Plato."

Poets and philosophers have imbibed ideas and images from Plato's works from his time to our own. Even if you have not read the Republic, you may be familiar with the  "Parable of the Cave." It has been a template for innumerable poets and philosophers to imagine their own conceptions of an ideal state.  Socrates relates it to give a concrete example of why the philosopher/king must know the form of the good in order to rule the state justly.  He explains the origin and nature of an ideal state--a picture of order and harmony with three classes: rulers, guardians, and workers, each performing his or her own function. His student Glaucon admits that such a state would be desirable but asks how it could ever come into existence. Only if philosophers become kings Socrates answers. The philosopher can know justice only if he comprehends the form of the good.  Socrates admits that he cannot define "the good" precisely, but it is that which every person strives for; the source of the knowledge of justice, truth and beauty.

 

            Because these abstractions bewilder Glaucon, Socrates tells the parable.  Imagine prisoners chained deep inside a cave with their arms, legs and heads immovable so that they gaze fixedly on a wall. Behind the prisoners an enormous fire projects images of shadows of plants and animals on the wall in the front of the cave. On a road behind the cave, people are walking and talking. The prisoners believe that the shadows are talking, and they engage in what appears to be a game, naming the shapes as they pass by. They judge the quality of one another by their skill in quickly naming the shapes. Suppose a prisoner breaks his chains and climbs out of the cave.  The sun would instantly blind him. After his eyes become accustomed to the light he will realize that the shadows on the wall differ from the objects being projected from the rear of the cave. In time, he would learn to see the sun as the object that provides the seasons of the year, presides over all things in the visible region, and is in some way the cause of all these things. As I will presently explain, this is the condition of Winston Smith, the hero in George Orwell’s 1984.

 

Socrates continues with the parable. Once enlightened, the freed prisoner would not want to return to his chains, but he would be compelled to do so. Returning into the cave would require him once again to adjust his eyes to identify shapes on the wall. His eyes would be disoriented by the darkness, and he would take time to become acclimated. He might stumble, Socrates explains, and the prisoners would conclude that his experience had ruined him. He would not be able to identify the shapes as well as the other prisoners. It would seem to them that being taken to the surface completely ruined his eyesight.

 

            So what is the significance of the parable? I suggest three:  First the philosopher who grasps the true forms of good, truth, justice, and freedom knows best how to rule the state, but he is, paradoxically, least willing to rule it himself. Secondly, the philosopher who tells truth will meet with disbelief, ridicule, rejection, persecution, and even death. Thirdly, a state can only be just if the leader is committed to the pursuit of an ideal above the state itself, such as “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

 

            It is remarkable how often this parable recurs in works of literature and how often the lives of heroic individuals throughout history imitate the parable. Socrates himself is the most obvious example. In the Apology Plato dramatizes how the Senate of Athens indicts and condemns Socrates to death for teaching falsehoods. The trial of Socrates imitates the metaphor of the parable. His enemies, in effect, accuse Socrates of seeing shadows instead of truth. Ironically one of them charges him with the crime of teaching that the sun and the moon are stones and not gods.

 

I could cite other works influenced by Plato’s Republic and the parable.  Cicero’s On the Republic, St. Augustine’s City of God, Dante’s Divine Comedy to name only the most famous in classical and medieval literature. In 1516, at the beginning of the Renaissance, Thomas More, in his Utopia, consciously imitates the Republic. Like the Republic, the Utopia is presented in the form of a dialogue among friends after a religious service. King Henry VIII of England had sent Thomas More on a diplomatic mission to Flanders to negotiate a trade agreement with Prince Charles of Castile. In Antwerp, after Mass, he meets an old friend, Peter Giles in front of the Cathedral. There they meet Raphael Hythlodaeus, a Portuguese sea captain, who has recently returned from his fourth voyage with Amerigo Vespucci to the New World. The three men retire to Peter Giles’ garden where they engage in a discussion about justice and politics.

 

The narrative in the Republic also occurs after a religious service.  Socrates and Glaucon are returning from paying their devotions to the goddess when they meet Polemarchus and his friends. They retire to the garden of Cephulus, the father of Polemarchus, where they spend the afternoon discussing the origin and nature of justice.  Socrates has much in common with the ship captain.  Raphael is no ordinary ship captain.  "For his sailing," as Peter Giles explains, "has not been like that of Palinaurus but that of Ulysses, or rather of Plato." As the dialogue progresses, we learn that Raphael is a self-taught philosopher who has returned to Europe after five years in the new world where he purports to have visited the island of Utopia. On his voyage with Vespucci he takes with him a virtual library of classical works, most notably the works of Plato. Before Raphael can describe Utopia, however, Thomas More and Peter Giles, urge Raphael to offer his services to a king as a councilor. But Raphael persistently resists their arguments.  In the middle of their debate Thomas More appeals to the philosopher's sense of duty by citing the famous passage from the Republic. "Your favorite author, Plato, says that commonwealths will be happy only if either philosophers become kings or kings turn to philosophy.  “There is no hope if philosophers will not impart their consul to kings." Raphael responds with his own citation of Plato. He says, "But doubtless, Plato was right in foreseeing that if kings themselves did not turn to philosophy, they would never approve of the advice of real philosophers." That both men quote Plato to support opposing arguments reveals that neither will accept the full implications of Socrates' parable.  Raphael, in refusing to enter into European politics, reflects the natural inclination of a philosopher who has ascended from the cave; that is, those who are most qualified to rule are most reluctant.

 

Virtually every character Raphael meets on his return from Utopia demonstrates the second concept inherent in Socrates' parable--that the philosopher who returns to the cave will be met with skepticism and disbelief. Raphael argues that corrupt councilors in all the courts of 16th century Europe pervert justice, but his argument falls on deaf ears. Thomas More and Peter Giles, respond like men in the cave. After Raphael has graphically illustrated the sorry conditions of European politics, Peter Giles fatuously responds, "You can’t convince me that a better ordered people can be found in that new world than the one we have here.” But Raphael is undaunted; he proceeds to tell about the island of Utopia, where justice reigns supreme.  At the end of their conversation Raphael gives an impassioned peroration on the contrast between the injustice in Europe and the justice in Utopia. But Thomas More also responds with skepticism, "I cannot agree with all that he said.  But I admit that many features in the Utopian commonwealth would be good, but they could hardly be realized." In the text of the Utopia, Thomas More cites Plato more frequently than any other source except the Scriptures.

 

The title of my paper is “Life Imitates Art.”  This title is a conscious inversion of the classic definition of poetry as an art of imitation.” As Socrates’ own life imitates the parable of the cave, so too does Thomas More’s life imitate the fiction of his Utopia. The debate between Raphael, the philosopher, and the fictional character, Thomas More, is an ironic imitation of the internal debate Thomas More was having with himself at that time about whether to become a councilor to King Henry VIII.

 

More wrote the Utopia in two time frames, which divide the work into Book I and Book II. He began writing the second book before he completed the first, during a recess in the diplomatic negotiations he had undertaken on behalf of the King.  When he returned to England, Cardinal Wolsey, King Henry's Lord Chancellor, pressed him to enter the king's service as a councilor before he had finished the first book. In the narrative the debate remains unresolved, but undoubtedly the irresolution reflects the author More's own indecision. Although he personally inclined to follow a way of life that would allow him more time with his family and for study and contemplation, he relented to the pressures of Cardinal Wolsey and entered the service of King Henry.

 

For the next 15 years More advanced as one of Henry’s most trusted councilors, eventually becoming Lord Chancellor, the highest post ever held by a commoner. Those were turbulent years in the lives of Thomas More and King Henry, and in the whole of politics of Europe. In 1521 Pope Leo X proclaimed King Henry “Defender of the Faith” for his treatise in defense of the papacy against the attacks of Martin Luther. "Defender of the Faith" has been one of the subsidiary titles of the English monarchs ever since.  The Pope conferred the title in recognition of Henry's book, In Defense of the Seven Sacraments, which was seen as an important opposition to the early stages of the Protestant Reformation, especially the ideas of Martin Luther. Ironically Thomas More probably wrote this treatise.

More became involved with the politics of Henry’s attempt to defend the papacy against the attacks of Luther. But then in 1530 he found himself between a rock and a hard place. Henry had a prolonged dispute with Pope Clement VII over his attempt to annul his marriage to Queen Catherine after 20 years of marriage. Catherine had failed to produce a male heir to the throne, and Henry wanted to marry Anne Boleyn. Henry decided to break with Rome in 1530 and establish himself as head of the Church of England, for which he was excommunicated. More’s divided loyalties to the King of England and to the Pope came to a head in 1533. More had long been a loyal subject and friend of Queen Catherine, and he refused to attend the coronation of Anne Boleyn. After that snub More was asked to appear before a commission and swear his allegiance to the parliamentary Act of Succession. He refused to take the oath because of an anti-papal preface to the Act asserting Parliament's authority to legislate in matters of religion by denying the authority of the Pope, which More would not accept. For this refusal Henry ordered More beheaded.

More’s problems with Henry are much more complicated than I have time to describe here, but they are brilliantly portrayed in Robert Bolt’s play, “A Man for All Seasons,” made into the academy award winning movie with Paul Schofield playing Thomas More and Orson Wells playing Cardinal Wolsey. Robert Bolt was an agnostic with no allegiance to the Catholic Church or any religion. His title reflects Bolt’s portrayal of More as the ultimate man of conscience. As one who remains true to himself and his beliefs under all circumstances and at all times, despite external pressure or influence. Bolt borrowed the title from Robert Whittington, a contemporary of More, who wrote of him: "More is a man of an angel's wit and singular learning. I know not his fellow. For where is the man of that gentleness, lowliness and affability? a man of marvelous mirth and pastimes, and sometime of sad gravity. A man for all seasons." Coincidentally I read in the Theater and Arts section of yesterday’s New York Times a preview of a revival on Broadway of “The Man for All Seasons,” which will open on Thursday. Patrick Page, the Shakespearean actor who plays Henry VIII, is described as “an enthusiastic researcher, who pored over biographies of Henry VIII and Thomas More for his current role. He says “A Man for All Seasons” has something like Shakespearean scope, and Doug Hughes, the director, called it “a meditation on the travesty of unchecked executive power.” So Thomas More defied the most powerful monarch England had ever known, and like Socrates, was executed for adhering to what he believed to be a higher truth than that which Henry dictated.

The Utopia was the progenitor of a new genre. Within 100 years utopian works in three languages were published. All of these works reveal the influence of both The Republic and the Utopia. From the 17th through the 19th century works of utopian literature proliferated and became extremely popular, influencing political and social movements. The most famous of these written in the United States was Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backwards, published in 1888. Erich Fromm, in his forward to a modern edition, says it is "one of the most remarkable books ever published in America." It was the third largest bestseller of its time, after Uncle Tom's Cabin and Ben Hur. In "Looking Backward" Julian West, an upper class man in Boston in 1887, awakens in the year 2000 from a hypnotic trance to find himself in a socialist utopia. Looking Backwards influenced a large number of intellectuals, and appears by title in many of the major Marxist writings of the day. It is one of the few books ever published that created almost immediately on its appearance a political mass movement.  Several Bellamy clubs sprang up all over the United States to discuss and propagate the book’s ideas. It also inspired several utopian communities that flourished in the 19th century. Likewise the Utopia had a profound influence on Marxist ideology. Thomas More holds the unique distinction of being hailed as a prophet in the former Soviet Union and canonized a saint in the Roman Catholic Church.

The horrors of the 20th century, however, brought about a reaction to the 19th century Marxist and socialist idea of progress. The optimistic fantasies of utopian literature gave way to the pessimistic view of dystopian literature. Huxley’s Brave New World, and Orwell’s 1984 became 20th century classics. The precursor of these works is a Russian futuristic dystopian satire,  Zamiatin’s We, generally considered to be the grandfather of the genre. Orwell began Nineteen Eighty-Four some eight months after he read We in a French translation and wrote a review of it.

Paradoxically the DNA of these dystopian novels, as well as others such as William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, can be discerned in Plato’s Republic. In what time remains I will attempt to explain how Socrates’ “Parable of the Cave” is a template for Orwell’s 1984. As I mentioned at the beginning of this paper, Winston Smith, the hero of the novel, is the epitome of Socrates’ man in the cave. The cave in the analogy is the totalitarian society of Oceania where the action in the novel takes place. Although Oceania, is a far different regime from that depicted, as the ideal state in Plato’s Republic, the story of Winston Smith’s struggle to free himself from the iron grip of Big Brother is an ironic parody of Socrates’ parable. Orwell’s novel has become such an icon in the 20th century that even those who do not know the plot recognize the image of Big Brother as a symbol of the ever-present control of the totalitarian state. The role of Big Brother is to condition the members of the perverted society to believe that shadows are reality. Ironically Big Brother does not actually exist but is a fabrication of the Inner Party. The guiding slogans plastered on every available space in the city, “War is Peace; Freedom is Slavery; and Ignorance is Strength,” epitomize the perversion of the regime.

Like the ideal state described by Socrates, with three classes of philosophers, guardians and workers, Oceania is divided into three classes:--the Inner Party, the Outer Party, and the Proles. In the republic the Philosopher attains the highest level after a lifetime of a rigorous curriculum of gymnastics, arithmetic, logic, rhetoric and dialectic. The educational system aims to imbue the philosophers with a love and knowledge of truth, beauty, freedom and justice. The result is that the Philosopher/King embodies the virtues of the state he administers--wisdom, courage, temperance and justice. Inner Party members occupy the highest place in Oceania in roughly the same proportional numbers, but how they attain this high perch is a mystery. The portrait of Big Brother, with eyes contrived to be looking at the viewer, with the caption, “Big Brother is Watching” adorns every public building as well as the hallways of the decrepit tenement buildings where Outer Party members, like Winston Smith, dwell in apartments. Ubiquitous telescreens in every public as well as private space in the city reinforce this warning. The aim of the Inner Party is not truth or justice but power.

The first segment of the plot portrays the self-education of Winston’s attempt to see and understand reality and escape from the cave. He is an outer party member and works in the records department of the Ministry of Truth, rewriting and altering records. This ministry is euphemistically labeled Minitrue in the Newspeak dictionary, the official language of Oceania. It is so named, to disguise its real function to distort truth. Similarly the names of the other three controlling ministries are euphemistically abbreviated; Minipax, conducts wars; Miniluv, enforces order with a policy of torture to exact confessions from those accused of Thought Crimes; and Miniplenty, rations  consumer goods. Winston has become bothered by his realization that his main function as a party hack is to alter the historical record so that Big Brother can maintain complete control. He comes home at midday for lunch for the express purpose of making an entry in his diary, which he has purchased illegally in a Prole section of the city. This act is a thought crime punishable by death.

The first two-sentence paragraph hits the ironic keynote of the theme of the entire novel. “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him.”  This image disorients the reader.  Since Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and before, a cold bright windy day is not the weather associated with the spring of the year in England. The clock striking 13 conveys an eerie feeling that something is out of kilter. The first name of the hero evokes an association with Winston Churchill, but his last name, Smith, is the most common surname in the English language. This is an ironically appropriate name for the main character, an everyman, destroyed after a heroic struggle with the forces of evil. It is pathetically ironic that Winston should struggle to keep out the gritty dust from entering with him in the tenement building with the grandiose name of Victory Mansions.

            The Inner Party maintains control by the contrived device of convincing the masses that the lies they encounter in every aspect of their daily activities are true. The Inner Party’s manipulation of reality, especially manipulation of language and propaganda through Newspeak, thwarts Winston’s search for meaning in this world of shadows. "Newspeak" is the new totalitarian language, which replaces "Old English." The aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought so that an individual could not even think critical or subversive thoughts. Potentially critical terms like "freedom" are formally defined into their conceptual opposites ("freedom is slavery"), or are simply eliminated from the dictionary and everyday language. In this manner, critical language would wither away as the number of words, which allow differentiation and critique, was increasingly reduced. "Doublethink" for Orwell was the mental activity of simultaneously knowing and not knowing, denoting an ability to be conscious of the truth while telling lies, so that one could hold two contradictory views at once and manipulate language to meet the exigencies of the moment. Its control is so absolute that Winston cannot even be sure of the present date. When he sits down to make his first entry in his diary. “He dipped the pen into the ink and then faltered for just a second. A tremor had gone through his bowels. To mark the paper was the decisive act. In small clumsy letters he wrote: 

April 4th, 1984. 

He sat back. A sense of complete helplessness had descended upon him. To begin with, he did not know with any certainty that this was 1984. It must be round about that date, since he was fairly sure that his age was thirty-nine, and he believed that he had been born in 1944 or 1945; but it was never possible nowadays to pin down any date within a year or two.”

 

As he continues in his self-education, he has an epiphany and comes to realize that freedom and truth are inextricably related. He writes in his diary, “Freedom is the freedom to say that 2+2=4. If that is granted all else follows.” But the irony is that while he believes that he is thinking and acting freely, the Inner Party has him under surveillance. O’Brian, the Inner Party member with most control, coerces Winston to love Big Brother with an electric device to torture him to believe in slogans and fabrications that distort reality, such as 2+2=5. Winston comes to realize that he is being manipulated, but he cannot understand the motive of the Inner Party. O’Brian explains that the object is not truth, justice and least of all freedom but simply power. O’Brian convinces Winston to reject his old fashioned ideas by indoctrinating him as a religious teacher might use a catechism. He asks Winston if he now understands the motives of the Party for which he has been searching. Winston answers:  'You are ruling over us for our own good,' he said feebly. 'You believe that human beings are not fit to govern themselves, and therefore --' 

He started and almost cried out. A pang of pain had shot through his body. O'Brian had pushed the lever of the dial up to thirty-five. 

'That was stupid, Winston, stupid!' he said. 'You should know better than to say a thing like that.' 

He pulled the lever back and continued: 

'Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power.”

1984 is a tragedy, structured like Thomas More’s Utopia on the template of Plato’s parable. That is, the hero, Winston Smith, is analogous to the man in the cave who recognizes that the shadows on the wall are not reality. Likewise Winston comes to recognize that Big Brother and the whole regime is a fiction woven out of a tissue of lies. When he attempts to tell this truth to his fellow human beings through the device of his diary he is reduced to a bumbling alcoholic who loves Big Brother, a shadow on the wall.

My subject is too large to cover in forty minutes, but let me conclude by suggesting that the sad moral of the fictional works I have mentioned is that history has shown that Socrates, Antigone, Jesus, Thomas More, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King are only the most obvious who come to my mind who were executed for speaking and acting on the truth. 1984 when it was published in 1949 made an immediate impact. At the time its evocation of a fictional totalitarian state recalled the recently defeated tyrants of Germany and Russia, Hitler and Stalin. It served as a warning to those in the free world of what is at stake. It wasn’t too many years after that during the tumultuous days of the 1960s, I was teaching a course in utopian literature at Ohio University. My students and I did not have to search beyond the daily newscasts to perceive how life in the 1960s imitated George Orwell’s art in 1984.

During the Vietnam war we imbibed examples of Doublethink as readily as the citizens of Oceana imbibed the slogans, “War is Peace,” and “Freedom is Slavery.” The destruction of villages was labeled a "pacification program," the village refugees were called "ambient non-combat personnel," and the concentration camps in which they were housed were termed "pacified hamlets." Doublethink prevailed in the inflated body counts and deflated estimates of enemy troop strength, and new forms of Newspeak appeared frequently: bombing one's own troops was called "accidental deliverance of ordinance equipment," while getting killed by one's own forces was referred to as falling prey to "friendly fire." Unprovoked aggression against an innocent village was named a "pre-emptive defensive strike," while the invasion of Cambodia was an "incursion." Periodically rigged elections allowed corrupt military dictatorships in Vietnam to be labeled "democratic.” After the war Newspeak and Doublethink proliferated to such an extent that in the symbolic year of 1984 the National Council of Teachers of English provided Doublespeak awards to Pentagon descriptions of peace as "permanent pre-hostility," for calling combat "violence processing," and for referring to civilian causalities in nuclear war as "collateral damage."

            Since then, in my opinion, the lies and the perversion of language have not abated. Never did I expect that our government would enact a policy of torture to exact confessions from recalcitrant enemy combatants. This is called extraordinary rendition. When I first read this description of how prisoners at Guantanamo were being processed, I had to remind my self of the definition of “rendition” by looking it up, and I was assured that my understanding of the word was the one cited in the American Heritage Dictionary. .Four definitions are cited:  1. The act of rendering. 2. An interpretation of a musical score or a dramatic piece. 3. A performance of a musical or dramatic work, and 4. A translation, often interpretive. But when I looked up the combination “Extraordinary rendition,” it is defined as the extrajudicial transfer of a person from one state to another, particularly with regard to the alleged transfer of suspected terrorists to countries known to torture prisoners or to employ harsh interrogation techniques that may rise to the level of torture. Now that sounds to me like the kind of redefining words that was the objective of  the Ministry of Truth.

 

When I used Orwell’s 1984 in my course in utopian literature, I used Orwell’s essay, “Politics and the English Language,” in my courses in composition. It is the best commentary written in the 20th century on English style that I know of. In it Orwell laments the low state of writing in the political propaganda regularly published in the media. He says, “modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug.”  He is not very optimistic that the state of English usage will improve without conscious effort by those who should know better, and he advises them,  “Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one's meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations. Afterward one can choose — not simply accept — the phrases that will best cover the meaning, and then switch round and decide what impressions one's words are likely to make on another person. This last effort of the mind cuts out all stale or mixed images, all prefabricated phrases, needless repetitions, and humbug and vagueness generally. But one can often be in doubt about the effect of a word or a phrase, and one needs rules that one can rely on when instinct fails. I think the following rules will cover most cases:

        Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

        Never use a long word where a short one will do.

        If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

        Never use the passive where you can use the active.

        Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

        Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

These rules sound elementary, and so they are, but they demand a deep change of attitude in anyone who has grown used to writing in the style now fashionable.”

           

            In this frenzied election year we have only a month to go to see how far the spin meisters and swift boaters can think up new ways to make the worst appear the better cause, to convince us to mistake shadows for reality. It remains the task of poets, philosophers and prophets to remind us that the truth will make us free. As I grow older I become more convinced that western civilization is a footnote to Plato.