Trail of crumbs: AL Daily pointed me to a fine New York Review of Books essay by Simon Leys on George Orwell, and a passage that put me in mind of Lisa Fullam's recent post on blogging, and the despair some feel at the way we often treat each other in our virtual world. To wit:

Even in the heat of battle [Leys writes], and precisely because he distrusted ideologyideology killsOrwell remained always acutely aware of the primacy that must be given to human individuals over all the smelly little orthodoxies. His exchange of letters (and subsequent friendship) with Stephen Spender provides a splendid example of this. Orwell had lampooned Spender (parlour Bolshevik, pansy poet); then they met: the encounter was actually pleasant, which puzzled Spender, who wrote to Orwell on this very subject. Orwell, who later became a friend of Spenders, replied:

"You ask how it is that I attacked you not having met you, & on the other hand changed my mind after meeting you. [Formerly] I was willing to use you as a symbol of the parlour Bolshie because a. your versedid not mean very much to me, b. I looked upon you as a sort of fashionable successful person, also a Communist or Communist sympathiser, & I have been very hostile to the C.P. since about 1935, and c. because not having met you I could regard you as a type & also an abstraction. Even if, when I met you, I had happened not to like you, I should still have been bound to change my attitude, because when you meet someone in the flesh you realise immediately that he is a human being and not a sort of caricature embodying certain ideas. It is partly for this reason that I dont mix much in literary circles, because I know from experience that once I have met & spoken with anyone I shall never again be able to show any intellectual brutality towards him, even when I feel that I ought to, like the Labour M.P.s who get patted on the back by dukes & are lost forever more."

Which immediately calls back to mind a remarkable passage of Homage to Catalonia: Orwell described how, fighting on the front line during the Spanish civil war, he saw a man jumping out of the enemy trench, half-dressed and holding his trousers with both hands as he ran:"I did not shoot partly because of that detail about the trousers. I had come here to shoot at 'Fascists'; but a man who is holding up his trousers isnt a 'Fascist,' he is visibly a fellow creature, similar to yourself, and you dont feel like shooting at him."

Perhaps a good image to keep in mind for those in the blogging trenches?