English
Blue and golden relay
My father used to take my brother and me to the CU stadium when we were kids. I never felt a strong attachment for the Pumas and that was long before I studied in the University, but going to the stadium was an intimate adventure between the three of us, sharing the football language and rituals. From those days I remember the amazing goals of Luis García, Jorge Campos, and the clever phrases from the Pumas supporters that suddenly broke the crowd’s hustle after a silence that hoovered any other noise. …
Why I Write. George Orwell
Source: Political Writings of George Orwell
From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. Between the ages of about seventeen and twenty-four I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner or later I should have to settle down and write books.
I was the middle child of three, but there was a gap of five years on either side, and I barely saw my father before I was eight. For this and other reasons I was somewhat lonely, and I soon developed disagreeable mannerisms which made me unpopular throughout my schooldays. I had the lonely child’s habit of making up stories and holding conversations with imaginary persons, and I think from the very start my literary ambitions were mixed up with the feeling of being isolated and undervalued. I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that this created a sort of private world in which I could get my own back for my failure in everyday life. Nevertheless the volume of serious — i.e. seriously intended — writing which I produced all through my childhood and boyhood would not amount to half a dozen pages. I wrote my first poem at the age of four or five, my mother taking it down to dictation. I cannot remember anything about it except that it was about a tiger and the tiger had “chair-like teeth” — a good enough phrase, but I fancy the poem was a plagiarism of Blake’s “Tiger, Tiger.” At eleven, when the war or 1914–18 broke out, I wrote a patriotic poem which was printed in the local newspaper, as was another, two years later, on the death of Kitchener. From time to time, when I was a bit older, I wrote bad and usually unfinished “nature poems” in the Georgian style. I also attempted a short story which was a ghastly failure. That was the total of the would-be serious work that I actually set down on paper during all those years. …
Tyteres
Collage: Javier Armas. Photos by Ensie & Matthias, Rick Harrison, Daniel Iglesias, Mor, NYCArthur.