Like Leaves in Autumn by Carlo Pirozzi et al sampler

when there is evidence of support for Fascism. In a perfect world, the
ruling principle might be George Orwell’s contention that ‘the impulse
of every writer is to keep out of politics. What he [sic] wants is to be
left alone so that he can go on writing books in peace.’ However, as
information technology improved through the last century, and people,
in the developed world at least, became more aware of the astonishing
levels of corruption and injustice that surrounded them on all sides, it
was to become more and more obvious, to Orwell and to others, ‘that
this ideal is no more practical than that of the petty shop-keeper who
hopes to preserve his independence in the teeth of the chain-stores…
It is not possible for any thinking person to live in such a society as our
own without wanting to change it.’ In the 20th century, and especially
after the First World War, writers from a wider range of social and
cultural backgrounds than ever before felt the need to call, not just for
thought, but for action. Wyndham Lewis worried about this tendency:
‘With all the energy at their disposal,’ he said, ‘a majority of the modern
intellectuals have striven to excite to passionate action – not to exhort
to reflection or moderation, not applied to the reason, but always to
the emotions: they have pointed passionately to the battlefield, the
barricade, the place of execution, not to the life of reason, to what is
harmonious and beautifully ordered. This is in fact the betrayal.’
However, if there is one thing we can learn from history it is that all
kinds of betrayal are possible. Those writers who remain alone in order
to ‘go on writing books in peace’ are more likely to be well-regarded
than either the revolutionary who calls for immediate action to change
a corrupt world, or the kind of arch-conservative that Lewis eventually
became (for what he presented as good reasons – reasons he shared, in
many ways, with many of the more highly respected writers – T.S. Eliot,
say – who lived through the first half of the last century: ‘Darwin,
Voltaire, Newton, Raphael, Dante, Epictetus, Aristotle, Sophocles,
Plato, Pythagoras: all shedding their light upon the same wide, well-lit
Greco-Roman highway, with the same kind of sane and steady ray –
one need only mention these to recognise that it was at least excusable
to be concerned about the threat of extinction to that tradition.’) Yet
are not those stay-at-home writers to whom Orwell refers in danger of
betraying an essential part of their humanity, if they simply make
books, while the corrupt and the unjust carry on business as usual?
14 like leaves in autumn