Starting today, a portion of Orwell's diary, from August 9, 1938, through October 1942, will be published online, a day at a time, on the website of The Orwell Prize.

Orwell's brilliance and versatility as a writer are undisputed.  But it's his humanity that makes him such a towering figure.  I went back and read 1984 a couple of years ago, and found it as fresh as ever. I personally prefer his more autobiographical works (Down and Out in Paris and London and "Such, Such Were the Joys" for starters), so full of true observations rendered without a trace of pretension.  Here is a conscience fully formed in a voice fully realized, and up to the task of imparting Truth. 

I finished Coming Up For Air recently.  His prose is as crisp, his themes as relevant, his humor and pathos as admirable and sharp as ever.  The novel is often praised as prescient, as many of Orwell's works are.  Passages like this have that Orwellian ring to it...

It's all going to happen. All the things you've got at the back of your mind, the things you're terrified of, the things that you tell yourself are just a nightmare or only happen in foreign countries. The bombs, the food-queues, the rubber truncheons, the barbed wire, the coloured shirts, the slogans, the enormous faces, the machine-guns squirting out of bedroom windows. It's all going to happen. I know it—at any rate, I knew it then. There's no escape. Fight against it if you like, or look the other way and pretend not to notice, or grab your spanner and rush out to do a bit of face-smashing along with the others. But there's no way out. It's just something that's got to happen.

But Orwell didn't have a crystal ball.  He simply understood human nature.  Coming Up For Air opens with its overweight, chronically underwhelmed narrator seeing the world with new eyes on account of his new set of false teeth.  What follows is a gritty, pathetic, wryly comical meditation on past and future, both personal and political.  "It's a queer experience to go over a bit of country you haven't seen in twenty years," our narrator says towards the end. "You remember it in great detail, and you remember it all wrong."

Orwell's writing about childhood is among the best I've ever read.  He's as unsentimental as Roald Dahl, but more matter-of-fact, less sardonic.  He has his narrator in Coming Up For Air recall: "We used to catch toads, ram the nozzle of a bicycle pump up their backsides, and blow them up till they burst. That's what boys are like, I don't know why."

Well, it's the truth, innit?

As a diarist, myself, I'm always interested in other diarists, and reading his diary day-by-day is an approach that I think will yield special insights. What people who don't keep a diary don't understand or appreciate is that it's precisely the banality of daily existence that yields its extraordinary insights. You can't judge diaries by literary standards.

Orwell's entry for this day in 1938:

Caught a large snake in the herbaceous border beside the drive. About 2’ 6” long, grey colour, black markings on belly but none on back except, on the neck, a mark resembling an arrow head all down the back. Did not care to handle it too recklessly, so only picked it up by extreme tip of tail. Held thus it could nearly turn far enough to bite my hand, but not quite. Marx [Orwell's dog] interested at first, but after smelling it was frightened & ran away. The people here normally kill all snakes. As usual, the tongue referred to as “fangs”.

To me, the entry exemplifies what diaries are about: compiling the facts of day-to-day existence.  That, in itself, as any diarist knows, is a daunting task.  I'm looking forward to seeing Orwell tackle it daily.