He grasped, as though it were a new discovery, that you do not escape from money merely by being moneyless. The first effect of poverty is that it kills thought. Moreover, in those seven months he wrote practically nothing. He learned what it means to live for weeks on end on bread and margarine, to try to ‘write’ when you are half starved, to pawn your clothes, to sneak trembling up the stairs when you owe three weeks’ rent and your landlady is listening for you. They scared him and almost broke his spirit. The poet starving in a garret-but starving, somehow, not uncomfortably-that was his vision of himself. He forgot that the birds of the air don’t pay room-rent.
He had a feeling that if you genuinely despise money you can keep going somehow, like the birds of the air. Vaguely he looked forward to some kind of moneyless, anchorite existence. To get out of the money-world-that was what he wanted. “But still, it was not the desire to ‘write’ that was his real motive. ― George Orwell, quote from Keep the Aspidistra Flying The aspidistra is the tree of life, he thought suddenly.” They begot children, which is what the saints and the soul-savers never by any chance do. They were bound up in the bundle of life. They ‘kept themselves respectable’- kept the aspidistra flying. They had their standards, their inviolable points of honour.
The money-code as they interpreted it was not merely cynical and hoggish. The lower-middle-class people in there, behind their lace curtains, with their children and their scraps of furniture and their aspidistras - they lived by the money-code, sure enough, and yet they contrived to keep their decency. Our civilization is founded on greed and fear, but in the lives of common men the greed and fear are mysteriously transmuted into something nobler. It mightn’t be a bad thing, if you could manage it, to feel yourself one of them, one of the ruck of men.
And if they did, what would they care? They were too busy being born, being married, begetting, working, dying. Did they know that they were only puppets dancing when money pulled the strings? You bet they didn’t. They would be, for example, small clerks, shop-assistants, commercial travellers, insurance touts, tram conductors. “He wondered about the people in houses like those.
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