Confession time: I’ve never read 1984.
Sure, it was assigned in high school, as were Crime and Punishment, Madame Bovary, and Great Expectations. I didn’t read those either (though, for some strange reason, I finished Animal Dreams in an inspired flashlight-under-the-covers session the night after the test). Like many others, I bullshitted, handing in paper after paper filled with wisdom gleaned from the Internet, and flushed out with words that looked literary to me as I thumbed through my thesaurus.
My attitude toward reading remained the same throughout college. It was only after graduation, when suddenly no one was telling me what to read, that I picked up a few books that looked interesting, and – for lack of a better word (or a nearby thesaurus) – crushed them. I’d always listed reading as one of my hobbies or interests simply because I thought I was supposed to. Post-college, it became somewhat of an obsession. I read whatever the hell I wanted to read, and I was oh-so inspired.
Phase two of my career as an actual reader began when I discovered how helpful it was to read about things that were topical to what I myself was experiencing. So when my girlfriend and I recently spent six months backpacking through Southern Asia, I read book after book about adventures and stories set in the places I was visiting, and was amazed to find how much they enriched my experience of those places.
Still, I was hesitant to pick up Orwell’s Burmese Days. I retain a mild aversion to any author who was ever assigned in school, perhaps fearing that I’ll revert to my old ways, roll my eyes, and end up reading the Cliffs Notes. But sometime around Siem Reap, Cambodia, I’d run out of books and found a poorly photocopied version of Burmese Days for cheap in a used bookstore.
I didn’t know much about the book. I assumed that it involved Burma, and perhaps took place over the course of multiple days. I’d heard that Orwell had lived in Burma back in the day. I thought, perhaps, that it was nonfiction, a diary of sorts. I later learned that Orwell spent five years during the 1920’s as a police officer in the Indian Imperial Police force in Burma. His book, it turns out, is entirely fiction, but no doubt inspired by his experiences there. Not bad material for a traveler and writer looking for inspiration, both literary and worldly.
Burmese Days is a fictional account of John Flory, a timber merchant at a remote British outpost in Burma. Flory is tired; of being lonely, of the racist attitudes of his fellow expats at the European Club, of the mosquitos and the heat. But when Elizabeth Lackersteen arrives in tow–a young, recently orphaned British girl whose uncle is the manager of a timber firm–he regains hope. He begins to court her and, though Flory and Elizabeth are not quite right for each other, they each view the other as their saving grace, and stumble toward a future together.
As I traveled I kept a journal of topical quotes from the books I was reading. I’d put each quote under a heading, such as “Booze, Empire” or “Nepal, Religion.” Orwell is the only author who achieved a heading of “Just Good Writing,” for this passage on the moonlight: “The light lay thick, as though palpable, on everything, crusting the earth and the rough bark of the trees like some dazzling salt, and every leaf seemed to bear a freight of solid light, like snow.”
And as our trip progressed, Burmese Days began to mark the stages of our journey, and Orwell became an unlikely friend who could relate. I started the book while on a moto trip in Northwestern Thailand, very close to the Burmese border. I continued the book in the Phillipines. As Jay-Z’s “Empire State of Mind” came on in a club in Manila, I thought of the passage where Orwell writes, “The gramaphone was playing ‘Show Me the Way to Go Home,’ which was then going round the world like a pestilence and had got as far as Burma.” As my girlfriend and I clutched one another through numerous strange and unforgettable experiences, I though of Flory’s impassioned speech to Elizabeth: “Have you got some picture of the life we live here? The foreigness, the solitude, the melancholy! Foreign trees, foreign flowers, foreign landscapes, foreign faces. It’s all as alien as a different planet. But do you see–and it’s this that I so want you to understand–do you see, it mightn’t be so bad living on a different planet, it might even be the most interesting thing imaginable, if you had even one person to share it with. One person who could see it with eyes something like your own.”
We met up with friends in the Phillipines, and I finished the book while we were all together in the small beach town of Don Sol. My friends were all playing Monopoly Deal, but I sat enraptured, reading the final, climactic pages at a frenzied pace, for fear that they would finish the game and come interrupt me. Which is exactly what happened. As I made it to the last paragraph, reeling from what had just occurred in the plot, my friends moseyed over and began to discuss the evening plans. I rudely ignored everyone, ignored the sun setting majestically over the Phillipine Sea, stared down at the blurred, photocopied words and re-read the last paragraph multiple times, wanting to process the ending in a way that went beyond simply reading the words. I wanted to ingest them, digest them, and make them somehow last beyond the turning of the final page.
Which, in a way, is what happened. I am familiar with the pleasant buzz of a few beers, but I’ve never quite recieved a buzz from reading like the one I had as I put down Burmese Days and rejoined a world that seemed somehow more alive, palpable, and intense for what I’d read. We went to dinner and I squawked excitedly about the book as my friends humored me. The buzz, like all buzzes, eventually faded, and was replaced by the buzz of a couple San Miguel’s, the buzz of travel, the buzz of life on the road. Our path took us on to India and Nepal, but the feeling that Orwell was an unlikely companion through it all never left – “it might even be the most interesting thing imaginable, if you had even one person to share it with. One person who could see it with eyes something like your own.”
