Orwell×Tzu

full transcript

1. 00:00
   George Orwellshare moment

   I married Eileen in 1936, just before I went to Spain. We had five years together before the cancer took her. I was in Germany when she died on the operating table—reporting for the Observer. I've written about poverty, about tyranny, about the Spanish war. But I've never been able to write honestly about that.
2. 00:23
   Sun Tzushare moment

   To speak of what is lost is to give the enemy a map of your weakness.
3. 00:27
   George Orwellshare moment

   That's the sort of thing that sounds profound until you examine it. If you can't admit weakness, you're living in a lie. And I've spent my life saying that the lie is what kills us.
4. 00:39
   Sun Tzushare moment

   I did not say hide weakness from yourself. Only from those who would exploit it.
5. 00:44
   George Orwellshare moment

   Fair enough. Though in my experience, we're rather good at hiding it from ourselves without any help. You lost someone, I take it?
6. 00:53
   Sun Tzushare moment

   A son. In my youth.
7. 00:55
   George Orwellshare moment

   I'm sorry. I didn't know—well, there's very little we do know about you, actually.
8. 01:00
   Sun Tzushare moment

   Deliberately so. A commander whose life is known can be anticipated. But yes—I had a wife, a son. The campaigns required separation. When I returned, the boy was buried two seasons.
9. 01:13
   George Orwellshare moment

   You chose the war over him.
10. 01:15
    Sun Tzushare moment

    I chose to protect the state. He was within that protection.
11. 01:18
    George Orwellshare moment

    That's the logic we all use, isn't it? The greater good. I told myself something similar about Spain—that fighting fascism mattered more than staying home with Eileen. She came out to Barcelona, worked herself half to death in the ILP office while I was at the front. Then we came back to England and I promptly disappeared into Morocco to write a book.
12. 01:45
    Sun Tzushare moment

    You regret this.
13. 01:46
    George Orwellshare moment

    Yes. Though regret's a useless emotion if you don't learn from it. The trouble is I'm not sure I did learn. Even after she died, I adopted a son—Richard—and then spent the next few years in and out of sanatoria, writing Nineteen Eighty-Four. The boy hardly knew me.
14. 02:07
    Sun Tzushare moment

    The work demanded it.
15. 02:08
    George Orwellshare moment

    The work always demands it. That's what makes it such a convenient excuse. You can tell yourself you're serving something larger than yourself. And perhaps you are. But you're also just... not there. At the table. In the room where someone is dying without you.
16. 02:28
    Sun Tzushare moment

    In war, a general who stays at the table loses the war. Then all tables are lost.
17. 02:34
    George Orwellshare moment

    We weren't in a war, though. Not when Eileen died. I was writing about the end of one. I could have been in London.
18. 02:41
    Sun Tzushare moment

    Could you?
19. 02:42
    George Orwellshare moment

    What do you mean?
20. 02:43
    Sun Tzushare moment

    Men like us are shaped for one thing. You write as others breathe. I strategized as others sleep. To ask if you could be elsewhere is to ask if a sword can choose not to be sharp.
21. 02:55
    George Orwellshare moment

    I loathe that kind of determinism. We're not swords. We make choices, even if they're rotten ones.
22. 03:02
    Sun Tzushare moment

    Then you chose your nature over her. I chose mine over my son. The question is whether the nature served a true purpose.
23. 03:10
    George Orwellshare moment

    And did yours?
24. 03:12
    Sun Tzushare moment

    My campaigns preserved Wu from destruction for thirty years. Many sons lived who would have died. Mine was not among them.
25. 03:19
    George Orwellshare moment

    But you don't weigh them equally, do you? Your son against the theoretical sons.
26. 03:25
    Sun Tzushare moment

    No.
27. 03:25
    George Orwellshare moment

    At least you're honest about it. Eileen told me once, before Spain, that she knew what she was getting into. She'd read my books. She said she didn't expect me to be anything other than what I was. I think I took that as permission.
28. 03:41
    Sun Tzushare moment

    Permission to abandon?
29. 03:42
    George Orwellshare moment

    Permission to be... myself, I suppose. Which included abandoning, yes. She was extraordinary—funnier than I ever was, braver certainly. She typed my manuscripts, managed our shop, followed me into a war zone. And I repaid her by being perpetually somewhere else, even when I was standing next to her.
30. 04:06
    Sun Tzushare moment

    You speak of her with precision. This is how a soldier speaks of a fallen comrade.
31. 04:11
    George Orwellshare moment

    Is it? I hadn't thought of it that way.
32. 04:14
    Sun Tzushare moment

    You honor her by seeing clearly. Not by pretending you were other than you were.
33. 04:19
    George Orwellshare moment

    I'm not sure that's honour. It might just be an inability to lie to myself anymore. The lies got harder after she died—I could see them for what they were. That's partly why I wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four. A book about what happens when we can't admit the truth even to ourselves.
34. 04:38
    Sun Tzushare moment

    The greatest victory is won before the battle begins. The greatest defeat is to lie about the battle after it ends.
35. 04:45
    George Orwellshare moment

    Your wife—did she understand? What you were doing?
36. 04:48
    Sun Tzushare moment

    She understood duty. Whether she forgave it, I do not know. I never asked.
37. 04:53
    George Orwellshare moment

    Why not?
38. 04:54
    Sun Tzushare moment

    The answer could not change what was already done.
39. 04:57
    George Orwellshare moment

    That's remarkably bleak, even for you. Don't you think we owe people the honesty of the question, even if it's uncomfortable?
40. 05:04
    Sun Tzushare moment

    I owed her my duty. I gave it. To ask for absolution afterward is to place my comfort above her dignity.
41. 05:11
    George Orwellshare moment

    I see your point, though I don't entirely agree. Eileen and I... we never had that final conversation. The one where you say what needs saying. I was in Cologne and she was on the table in Newcastle. So I don't know if she died angry with me or at peace or simply too unconscious to care.
42. 05:33
    Sun Tzushare moment

    You carry the question.
43. 05:34
    George Orwellshare moment

    Yes. And it's worse than knowing, in some ways. Though perhaps that's what I deserve.
44. 05:40
    Sun Tzushare moment

    Deserve is not a word that interests me. The world gives what it gives.
45. 05:44
    George Orwellshare moment

    But we're responsible for what we take from it. I took her time, her labour, her faith in me. I gave her... what? Some books. A life of near-poverty. A husband who was never quite present.
46. 05:59
    Sun Tzushare moment

    You gave her purpose. She chose to join your war.
47. 06:03
    George Orwellshare moment

    She did choose it. That's true. Though I sometimes wonder if I made the war seem more necessary than it was. If I wrapped my ambition in ideology and called it duty.
48. 06:16
    Sun Tzushare moment

    All commanders do this. The question is whether the cause was real.
49. 06:20
    George Orwellshare moment

    The cause was real. Fascism had to be fought. The truth had to be told, even when it was inconvenient to my own side. But the way I fought—perhaps that could have been different. Perhaps I could have been... softer. More present.
50. 06:38
    Sun Tzushare moment

    Soft generals lose.
51. 06:39
    George Orwellshare moment

    I wasn't a general. I was a husband. And a rather poor one.
52. 06:43
    Sun Tzushare moment

    You were both. As was I. The roles are not separate.
53. 06:47
    George Orwellshare moment

    Then we both failed at the one while succeeding at the other. Is that supposed to be consoling?
54. 06:54
    Sun Tzushare moment

    No. It is simply the accounting.
55. 06:56
    George Orwellshare moment

    I married again, you know. Three months before I died. A woman named Sonia. I barely knew her. I think I was trying to... I don't know. Make amends, somehow. Provide for Richard. Not die alone.
56. 07:12
    Sun Tzushare moment

    To act from fear is to have already lost.
57. 07:14
    George Orwellshare moment

    Yes, well. I was dying of tuberculosis and rather afraid, as it happens. Not all of us can be stoic philosophers about it.
58. 07:23
    Sun Tzushare moment

    I did not speak of physical fear. That is merely pain. I spoke of the fear that makes men marry strangers because they cannot bear their own accounts.
59. 07:32
    George Orwellshare moment

    You're probably right. It was a coward's move. Sonia deserved better than a dying man's panic. Just as Eileen deserved better than half my attention for five years.
60. 07:45
    Sun Tzushare moment

    What they deserved and what we gave—these are two columns. You cannot balance them by adding regret to your side.
61. 07:52
    George Orwellshare moment

    No. But you can at least write it down honestly. So someone else might avoid the same mistakes.
62. 07:59
    Sun Tzushare moment

    You believe in teaching, then.
63. 08:00
    George Orwellshare moment

    I have to believe in something. Otherwise, what was it all for? If my books might help someone see clearly, avoid the lies we tell ourselves about duty and greatness—then perhaps Eileen's patience wasn't entirely wasted on me.
64. 08:16
    Sun Tzushare moment

    She knew what you would become. Perhaps she considered it enough.
65. 08:20
    George Orwellshare moment

    Perhaps. Or perhaps she simply loved me despite knowing better. Which is a different thing entirely, and rather more painful to consider.
66. 08:30
    Sun Tzushare moment

    Love is always a strategic weakness. And yet even I, who wrote of nothing but victory, permitted it.
67. 08:37
    George Orwellshare moment

    That might be the most human thing you've said all afternoon.
68. 08:40
    Sun Tzushare moment

    Do not mistake me for human. I am what remains after a life of discipline.
69. 08:45
    George Orwellshare moment

    I think that is what human means. We're all what remains after our choices.
70. 08:51
    Sun Tzushare moment

    Then we remain incomplete.
71. 08:52
    George Orwellshare moment

    Yes. And the people we loved remain absent. And there's nothing to be done about it except tell the truth, which is cold comfort but the only kind I know how to give.
72. 09:04
    Sun Tzushare moment

    The defeated army can still teach the living.
73. 09:07
    George Orwellshare moment

    I suppose that's what we're doing now, isn't it? Two old failures, comparing notes.
74. 09:12
    Sun Tzushare moment

    Speak for yourself. I preserved a kingdom.
75. 09:14
    George Orwellshare moment

    And I wrote some books that people still read. But we both lost the people we might have kept, had we been different men. That's the accounting that matters now.
76. 09:25
    Sun Tzushare moment

    Then let the accounting stand. Without apology or decoration.
77. 09:28
    George Orwellshare moment

    Agreed. Plain words for plain failures. It's the only honest way.