We cleaned out the garage recently. We have to make room. This was a first pass at the garage. The goal: more floor space.

Of course, we did throw a lot of things away. A lot of VHS tapes, for example.

But I found some books I had begun to read and had not finished.

One in particular I have been wanting to finish: George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia.

I picked it up on the cheap somewhere, and therefore it lacked the finish line that my library book have. I have a deadline to complete the book, or abandon it as a dud. Because I owned this one, I mislaid it without consequences.

First of all, Orwell is an incredible writer. I love him. 1984 is good in a freaky sci-fi kinda way, and Animal Farm is cute and creepy. But it wasn’t until I read Down and Out in London and Paris that I saw him as the keen observer.

Homage to Catalonia is another  story about his experiences. I really want to read it. However, this one takes some homework.

In the course of human events, some events loom huge and then shrink to nothing. I mean, try to tell a teenager today what it felt like to worry about nuclear war. It seems a million miles away to them, and they have to think really hard about it.

Or how about that nasty bout of the flu that hit the western world right after the First World War? Didn’t know about that? Well, it killed more people than the war. Can you imagine the devastation and the wailing? but…it doesn’t gt that much press any more.

That is what Homage to Catalonia is writing about. About this fork, this super-important at the time, and really for forever after moment in time, about the Spanish Civil war.

Coincidentaly, Chris got a book for Christmas
The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939

He is always the smart history-book reading kinda guy. I asked him to tell me about it, because I could see he started reading it. His answer “It’s kinda hard to explain.”

My husband can explain anything. This shows what a MESS that war was, and how utterly incomprehensible it is to our modern mind.

Another book in this chain
Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning

Okay, back to Orwell. One of the reasons I put it down (although the prose was very engaging) is that I realized I had no idea what he was talking about. He went to Spain? Why? What were they fghting for? WHAT WAS GOING ON?!?

Thing is, at that time, when he wrote the book, it was timelier than your wristwatch. Everyone knew what he was talking about, and everyone had a picture of what it was about.

At least, anyone who had any interest in idealistic politics.

Here is what the introduction says (written in 1952)
 

 In a politics presumed to be available to everyone, ideas and ideals play a great part. And those of who set store by ideas and ideals have never been quite able to learn that just because they do have power nowadays, there is a direct connection between between their power and another kind of power, the old unabashed, cynical power of force. We are always being surprised by this. Communism’s record of the use of unregenerate force was perfectly clear years ago, but many of us found it impossible to admit this because Communism spoke boldly to our love of ideas and ideals. We tried as hard as we could to believe that politics might be an idyl, only to discover that what we took to be a political pastoral was really a grim military campaign–or that what we insisted on calling agrarianism was in actuality a new imperialism. And in the personal life what was undertaken by many good people as a moral commitment of the most disinterested kind turned out to be an engagement to an ultimate immorality.

That brings us back to liberal fascism. So much of the 20th century had to do with the idealists and those with a will to power working out the theories of Marx & friends.

The spanish civil was was a petrie dish for the axis and the allies…send the red ants against the black ants (the brute neighbors). Mussolini and Hitler were socialists. There were trying the ideas of Marx for themselves, and bucking the Mecca of Moscow. Remember? Nazi meant “National Socialism”–meaning their own nation, not Russia.

…which leads me to think a lot about what that guy said…”those of who set store by ideas and
ideals have never been quite able to learn that just because they do
have power nowadays, there is a direct connection between between their
power and another kind of power, the old unabashed“.

Tread carefully…that kool-aid party had a sign up “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it”…advice they obviously didn’t take…

It seems to be that remembering the past is not good enough. We need to understand it.

I have a lot of reading to do.

It was today, 8 years ago that I professed interest in my future husband. We’d been hanging out–very friendly–for two months. We were having fun, but I just couldn’t tell. I couldnt’ tell if he liked me that way.

And if I had learned anything from my time online, I had learned that it was  very slippery slope to obsession. I had to nip this in the bud, and it had to be fast. Because if I let my feeling grow without knowing they were reciprocated, then that was just asking for heartache.

I had been nerving myself up to find out whether he felt that way about me. For at least a week, maybe two.

So when I had the day off, I made plans to go watch a movie with him. It had to be..I had to do it..It had to be now.

I did not know I would MARRY this guy. I didn’t know what to expect.

Funny how things work out.