Door too valuable for comfort

Where are they now?

Somerset Maugham paid $35 dollars for a door painted by

Paul Gauguin

Paul Gauguin. Maugham hung it on his wall, but years later was forced to sell it for millions because it became too valuable for comfort. Meanwhile Gauguin, shown in 1891, had painted the door of his cabin because he could no longer afford canvas. Gauguin died in 1903 at 53 and Maugham at 91 in 1965. We really never own anything. We control it perhaps for a short spell, then it is all quickly over and soon reduced to images on someone's blog. 

Joseph Conrad

 Joseph Conrad was famous for his sea stories. One of the first "crossover" writers from my earliest reading years as I left Tarzan, Clemens and Stevenson etc, behind. 

From Down and Out in England

To Down and Out in Paris

At the moment I am fixed on George Orwell. Not sure entirely why. There are writers who are good at writing, I am thinking of Maugham. He can make the mundane seem secretive and mysterious. There is Hemingway who can make flesh and blood seem alive as the smell and sounds of crunchy gravel on a rainy wet morning walk. But when it comes to the sweep of life in the deepest spirit, Orwell can pinpoint in a small single moment of time into the widest and greatest ideas in humorous detail. 

One of favorite examples of this would be in Animal Farm when the pigs are confronted with the fact they are living in the deposed farmer's house while the other animals are still in the barn. It never gets old for me to read when the pigs say yes of course we are all equal it is just that some of us are more equal than others. 

Notice the heart of it? Anyone's inexact rendition catches the truth of the original words Orwell used. Anyway you put it, the idea works whatever way you say it. I can think of others. Like putting black shoe polish on his heel to cover up the hole in his black sox in, was it Aspidistra?