I love spring

I love spring. It is a wonder to behold Allah's Creation coming to life again. I remember before I had converted, but was reading about and contemplating Islam, it was spring time. I sat in the park next to my work and watched the pigeons chasing each other in circles. This was one of the things that convinced me of God, and that all of creation has not occurred by some random accident.

Which is why the following article somewhat perplexes me. George Orwell was a man of great intelligence and foresight, a man who spent a lot more of his time and effort in deep thought than most of us will ever hope to do. He was a man who quite clearly also shared in my joy at the 'signs' of Allah (swt). Yet, he was a committed atheist. It is true than only Allah (swt) guides, but it is still very strange to think that this man couldn't see the Truth. Still, it is a lovely article all the same. Please take your time to read it.

[quote=George Orwell]Before the swallow, before the daffodil, and not much later than the

snowdrop, the common toad salutes the coming of spring after his own

fashion, which is to emerge from a hole in the ground, where he has lain

buried since the previous autumn, and crawl as rapidly as possible

towards the nearest suitable patch of water. Something--some kind of

shudder in the earth, or perhaps merely a rise of a few degrees in the

temperature--has told him that it is time to wake up: though a few toads

appear to sleep the clock round and miss out a year from time to time--

at any rate, I have more than once dug them up, alive and apparently

well, in the middle of the summer.

At this period, after his long fast, the toad has a very spiritual look,

like a strict Anglo-Catholic towards the end of Lent. His movements are

languid but purposeful, his body is shrunken, and by contrast his eyes

look abnormally large. This allows one to notice, what one might not at

another time, that a toad has about the most beautiful eye of any living

creature. It is like gold, or more exactly it is like the golden-coloured

semi-precious stone which one sometimes sees in signet-rings, and which I

think is called a chrysoberyl.

For a few days after getting into the water the toad concentrates on

building up his strength by eating small insects. Presently he has

swollen to his normal size again, and then he hoes through a phase of

intense sexiness. All he knows, at least if he is a male toad, is that he

wants to get his arms round something, and if you offer him a stick, or

even your finger, he will cling to it with surprising strength and take a

long time to discover that it is not a female toad. Frequently one comes

upon shapeless masses of ten or twenty toads rolling over and over in the

water, one clinging to another without distinction of sex. By degrees,

however, they sort themselves out into couples, with the male duly

sitting on the female's back. You can now distinguish males from females,

because the male is smaller, darker and sits on top, with his arms

tightly clasped round the female's neck. After a day or two the spawn is

laid in long strings which wind themselves in and out of the reeds and

soon become invisible. A few more weeks, and the water is alive with

masses of tiny tadpoles which rapidly grow larger, sprout hind-legs, then

forelegs, then shed their tails: and finally, about the middle of the

summer, the new generation of toads, smaller than one's thumb-nail but

perfect in every particular, crawl out of the water to begin the game

anew.

I mention the spawning of the toads because it is one of the phenomena of

spring which most deeply appeal to me, and because the toad, unlike the

skylark and the primrose, has never had much of a boost from poets. But I

am aware that many people do not like reptiles or amphibians, and I am

not suggesting that in order to enjoy the spring you have to take an

interest in toads. There are also the crocus, the missel-thrush, the

cuckoo, the blackthorn, etc. The point is that the pleasures of spring

are available to everybody, and cost nothing. Even in the most sordid

street the coming of spring will register itself by some sign or other,

if it is only a brighter blue between the chimney pots or the vivid green

of an elder sprouting on a blitzed site. Indeed it is remarkable how

Nature goes on existing unofficially, as it were, in the very heart of

London. I have seen a kestrel flying over the Deptford gasworks, and I

have heard a first-rate performance by a blackbird in the Euston Road.

There must be some hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of birds

living inside the four-mile radius, and it is rather a pleasing thought

that none of them pays a halfpenny of rent.

As for spring, not even the narrow and gloomy streets round the Bank of

England are quite able to exclude it. It comes seeping in everywhere,

like one of those new poison gases which pass through all filters. The

spring is commonly referred to as "a miracle", and during the past five

or six years this worn-out figure of speech has taken on a new lease of

life. After the sorts of winters we have had to endure recently, the

spring does seem miraculous, because it has become gradually harder and

harder to believe that it is actually going to happen. Every February

since 1940 I have found myself thinking that this time winter is going to

be permanent. But Persephone, like the toads, always rises from the dead

at about the same moment. Suddenly, towards the end of March, the miracle

happens and the decaying slum in which I live is transfigured. Down in

the square the sooty privets have turned bright green, the leaves are

thickening on the chestnut trees, the daffodils are out, the wallflowers

are budding, the policeman's tunic looks positively a pleasant shade of

blue, the fishmonger greets his customers with a smile, and even the

sparrows are quite a different colour, having felt the balminess of the

air and nerved themselves to take a bath, their first since last

September.

Is it wicked to take a pleasure in spring and other seasonal changes? To

put it more precisely, is it politically reprehensible, while we are all

groaning, or at any rate ought to be groaning, under the shackles of the

capitalist system, to point out that life is frequently more worth living

because of a blackbird's song, a yellow elm tree in October, or some

other natural phenomenon which does not cost money and does not have what

the editors of left-wing newspapers call a class angle? There is not

doubt that many people think so. I know by experience that a favourable

reference to "Nature" in one of my articles is liable to bring me abusive

letters, and though the key-word in these letters is usually

"sentimental", two ideas seem to be mixed up in them. One is that any

pleasure in the actual process of life encourages a sort of political

quietism. People, so the thought runs, ought to be discontented, and it

is our job to multiply our wants and not simply to increase our enjoyment

of the things we have already. The other idea is that this is the age of

machines and that to dislike the machine, or even to want to limit its

domination, is backward-looking, reactionary and slightly ridiculous.

This is often backed up by the statement that a love of Nature is a

foible of urbanized people who have no notion what Nature is really like.

Those who really have to deal with the soil, so it is argued, do not love

the soil, and do not take the faintest interest in birds or flowers,

except from a strictly utilitarian point of view. To love the country one

must live in the town, merely taking an occasional week-end ramble at the

warmer times of year.

This last idea is demonstrably false. Medieval literature, for instance,

including the popular ballads, is full of an almost Georgian enthusiasm

for Nature, and the art of agricultural peoples such as the Chinese and

Japanese centre always round trees, birds, flowers, rivers, mountains.

The other idea seems to me to be wrong in a subtler way. Certainly we

ought to be discontented, we ought not simply to find out ways of making

the best of a bad job, and yet if we kill all pleasure in the actual

process of life, what sort of future are we preparing for ourselves? If a

man cannot enjoy the return of spring, why should he be happy in a

labour-saving Utopia? What will he do with the leisure that the machine

will give him? I have always suspected that if our economic and political

problems are ever really solved, life will become simpler instead of more

complex, and that the sort of pleasure one gets from finding the first

primrose will loom larger than the sort of pleasure one gets from eating

an ice to the tune of a Wurlitzer. I think that by retaining one's

childhood love of such things as trees, fishes, butterflies and--to

return to my first instance--toads, one makes a peaceful and decent

future a little more probable, and that by preaching the doctrine that

nothing is to be admired except steel and concrete, one merely makes it a

little surer that human beings will have no outlet for their surplus

energy except in hatred and leader worship.

At any rate, spring is here, even in London N.1, and they can't stop you

enjoying it. This is a satisfying reflection. How many a time have I

stood watching the toads mating, or a pair of hares having a boxing match

in the young corn, and thought of all the important persons who as you

are not actually ill, hungry, frightened or immured in a prison or a

holiday camp, spring is still spring. The atom bombs are piling up in the

factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are

streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the

sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they

disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it.[/quote]