Andrew Orchard lives near the northeastern coast of Tasmania, in the same ramshackle farmhouse that his great-grandparents, the first generation of his English family to be born on the Australian island, built in 1906. When I visited Orchard there, in March, he led me past stacks of cardboard boxes filled with bones, skulls, and scat, and then rooted around for a photo album, the kind you’d expect to hold family snapshots. Instead, it contained pictures of the bloody carcasses of Tasmania’s native animals: a wombat with its intestines pulled out, a kangaroo missing its face. “A tiger will always eat the jowls and eyes,” Orchard explained. “All the good organs.” The photos were part of Orchard’s arsenal of evidence against a skeptical world—proof of his fervent belief, shared with many in Tasmania, that the island’s apex predator, an animal most famous for being extinct, is still alive. The Tasmanian tiger, known to science as the thylacine, was the only member of its genus of marsupial carnivores to live to modern times. It could grow to six feet long, if you counted its tail, which was stiff and thick at the base, a bit like a kangaroo’s, and it raised its young in a pouch. When Orchard was growing up, his father would tell him stories of having snared one, on his property, many years after the last confirmed animal died, in the nineteen-thirties. Orchard says that he saw his first tiger when he was eighteen, while duck hunting, and since then so many that he’s lost count. Long before the invention of digital trail cameras, Orchard was out in the bush rigging film cameras to motion sensors, hoping to get a picture of a tiger. He showed me some of the most striking images he’d collected over the decades, sometimes describing teeth and tails and stripes while pointing at what, to my eye, could very well have been shadows or stems. (Another thylacine searcher told me that finding tigers hidden in the grass in camera-trap photos is “a bit like seeing the Virgin Mary in burnt toast.”) Orchard estimates that he spends five thousand dollars a year just on batteries for his trail cams. The larger costs of his fascination are harder to calculate. “That’s why my wife left me,” he offered at one point, while discussing the habitats tigers like best.
That might seem obvious, given the pervasively political valence of “Orwellian” discourse and the politically charged touchstones of Orwell’s famous novels, the Bolshevik revolution in Animal Farm and totalitarian thought control in Nineteen Eighty-Four. But the degree to which Orwell was steeped in the crosscurrents of radical politics has been routinely underestimated. So much has been said about Orwell’s legendarily plain speech and his free-thinking worldview that he now figures, for many, as an icon of non-doctrinaire and even anti-doctrinaire thought.
George Orwell, whose most celebrated novel features a thirty-page tract by a fiery Trotsky-like ideologue on “the theory and practice of oligarchical collectivism,” is often treated as a quixotic naïf whose socialism was moral rather than theoretical, intuitive rather than intellectual. The truth is more complex.
Orwell was an iconoclast, but within the socialist tradition, not outside it. His satires of ideological excesses rang true because he knew those excesses intimately — ideologically, culturally, and theoretically.
Though our sense of self is constantly shifting, there are nonetheless moments when we perceive ourselves as more explicitly serous. At such moments, these fluctuations feel more pronounced and emphatic, their effects more immediate and their ramifications more long term. Often, they compel us to consider afresh our position in the world.
In literature, this compulsion evidences itself in various ways.
We can’t live without sleep, and yet it is our most powerful metaphor for death.
Setting non-English words in italics is a standard practice for American English style guides (including Quartz’s). But some multilingual writers are pointing out that hitting command + i is no longer simply a neutral expression of style.
The format is meant to be used for clarity, to indicate to a reader that she hasn’t come across a typo or an English word she doesn’t know. But the practice reinforces a monolinguistic culture of othering, some writers believe, and it simply doesn’t sound natural. For the world’s bilingual population—by some estimates, more than half—it’s not the way people really talk.
Since I quit writing about quitting things, I’ve had so much more time to do healthy stuff, such as exercising and exploring the outdoors—even though, when I’m hiking or camping, I always have to reckon with my essay “Birds Are Actually Not Very Interesting: Why I Quit Birding.”
Since I kicked my personal-essay-about-kicking-habits habit, I’ve also picked up a couple of hobbies, such as writing personal essays about starting things—and not just so that I can quit them, though I often do. I wrote an essay recently about starting a cult. I also mentored many of my followers as they wrote personal essays about leaving my cult. Then, after control of the cult was wrested from me, I quit the cult myself and didn’t even write about it. Aren’t you proud of me?
But so many minor moments of quotidian grace and wit also filter through “The Cost of Living” — while she is discussing melons or plumbing or garden writing sheds — that it is always a pleasure to consume.
She isn’t collecting her thoughts here so much as she is purposefully discollecting them. Calm and order, she suggests, are vastly overrated.