Fritz Haber and the twentieth century

"A German Jewish scientist, his invention with his brother-in-law Carl Bosch of the Haber-Bosch process, to make ammonia fertiliser, enriched the whole world. Estimates of the number of people who are alive today on account of his invention are in the hundreds of millions, and even in the billions. What a great benevolence to mankind, you might say, what a saviour of lives! But the same man was also responsible for the invention of chemical warfare. He not only invented chlorine gas but personally supervised its use against English and French troops at Ypres in 1915. His creation of nitric acid for explosives and his ammonia fertilisers were said by Max Planck to have prolonged the First World War by a full year. His life story is thus one of the most conflicted you could ever possibly come across. He hoped by his contributions to the war effort to prove himself a German patriot despite being a Jew; but his wife, who was also a scientist, was so distressed by his work on chemical warfare (not to mention his disregard of her career) that she shot herself on the day he was promoted to the rank of captain. Worse was to follow. After the First World War, Haber led the team that invented the cyanide-based insecticide Zyklon B. It was this chemical that was used to murder vast numbers of Jews in the Nazi death camps during the Second World War. It seems fitting that as we draw to the end of this chapter, we face a final war-related irony: that the man who saved more lives than anyone else was also responsible for millions of deaths."

Ian Mortimer in Centuries of Change:
Which Century Saw the Most Change and Why it Matters to Us (2014)
[review here]

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"A principios de aquel ano, Tomas y Fermin Romero de Torres decidieron unir sus respectivos ingenios en un nuevo proyecto que, segun ellos, habria de librarnos de hacer el servicio militar a mi amigo y a mi. Fermin, particularmente, no compartia el entusiasmo del senor Aguilar por la experiencia castrense.

- El servicio militar solo sirve para descubrir el porcentaje de cafres que cotiza en el censo -opinaba el-. Y eso se descubre en las dos primeras semanas, no hacen falta dos anos. Ejercito, matrimonio, Iglesia y banca: los cuatro jinetes del Apocalipsis. Si, si, riase usted."

Carlos Ruiz Zafón, La Sombra del Viento (2001)

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"A una vuelta de muñeca, el mecanismo chasqueó como las entrañas de un autómata y vi las palancas e los fulcros deslizarse en un ballet mecánico asombroso hasta trabar el portón con una araña de barras de acero que se hundió en una estrella de orifícios en los muros de piedra.

 - Ni el Banco de España - comenté impresionado -. Parece algo sacado de Julio Verne.

 - Kafka - matizó Isaac, recuperando el candil y encaminándose hacia las profundidades del edifício -. El día que comprenda usted que el negocio de los libros es miseria y compañia y decida aprender a robar un banco, o a crear uno, que viene a ser lo mismo, venga a verme y le explicaré cuatro cosas sobre cerrojos.

Lo seguí a través de los corredores que recordaba con frescos de ángeles y quimeras, Isaac sostenía el candil en alto, proyectando una burbuja intermitente de luz rojza u evanescente. Cojeava vagamente, y el abrigo de franela deshilachado que vestía semejaba un manto fúnebre. Se me ocurrió que aquel individuo, a medio camino entre Caronte y ek bibliotecario de Alejandría, se sentiría a gusto en las páginas de Julián Carax."

Carlos Ruiz Zafón, La Sombra del Viento (2001)

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"Me crié entre libros, haciendo amigos invisibles en páginas que se deshacían en polvo y cuyo olor aún conservo en las manos. De niño aprendí a conciliar el sueño mientras le explicaba a mi madre en la penumbra de mi habitación las incidencias de la jornada, mis andanzas en el colegio, lo que había aprendido aquel día... No podía oír su voz o sentir su tacto, pero su luz y su calor ardían en cada rincón de aquella casa y yo, con la fe de los que todavía pueden contar sus años con los dedos de las manos, creía que si cerraba los ojos y le hablaba, ella podría oírme desde donde estuviese. A veces, mi padre me escuchaba desde el comedor y lloraba a escondidas."

Carlos Ruiz Zafón, La Sombra del Viento (2001)

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«“Well that ain’t so. You get babies from each other. But there’s this man, too — he has all these babies just waitin’ to wake up, he breathes life into ‘em....”

Dill was off again. Beautiful things floated around in his dreamy head. He could read two books to my one, but he preferred the magic of his own inventions. He could add and subtract faster than lightning, but he preferred his own twilight world, a world where babies slept, waiting to be gathered like morning lilies. He was slowly talking himself to sleep and taking me with him, but in the quietness of his foggy island there rose the faded image of a gray house with sad brown doors.

“Dill?”

“Mm?”

“Why do you reckon Boo Radley’s never run off?”

Dill sighed a long sigh and turned away from me.

“Maybe he doesn’t have anywhere to run off to....”»

Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird (1960)

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Aí está o Templo. Visto assim de perto, do plano inferior em que estamos, é uma construção que dá vertigens, uma montanha de pedras sobre pedras, algumas que nenhum poder do mundo pareceria ser capaz de aparelhar, levantar, assentar e ajustar e contudo estão ali, unidas pelo próprio peso, sem argamassa, tão simplesmente como se o mundo fosse todo ele uma construção de armar, até às altíssimas cimalhas que, olhadas de baixo, parecem roçar o céu, como outra e diferente torre de Babel que a protecção de Deus, contudo, não logrará salvar, pois um igual destino a espera, ruína, confusão, sangue derramado, vozes que mil vezes perguntarão, Porquê, imaginando que há uma resposta, e que mais cedo ou mais tarde acabam por calar-se, porque só o silêncio é certo.

José Saramago, O Evangelho Segundo Jesus Cristo (1991)

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"I sometimes rise late in the night beset by anxieties, thinking that my heart is about to stop beating; that robbers lurk outside, seeking entry; or a terrible storm is about to send lightning down upon me. 1 am convinced my talent has withered, and I have grown old and foolish; that women laugh cruelly when they speak of me; and all my careful investments have collapsed, leaving me a pauper. 1 imagine that a terrible war has begun that will sweep away all we know, and silent lines of soldiers pass by in the night. I worry that lack of rest will bring my health to ruin.

And then, when I can bear it no more, the terrible, infinite depths of the night sky turn stone gray, and the sun rises again, lifting up above the horizon like a bright promise, and I realize the condition from which 1 suffer is but the human condition. Our solid lives are balanced on the edge of calamity, so much so that we do everything possible never to think of it, for contemplation drives one to despair. Despair that there is nothing we can do except promote the illusion that all is well, though we live with the secret knowledge that this is not so.

We wake in the grip of terror, the night telling us that we are utterly alone, our safe lives nothing but dreams. And our greatest fear of all—that we will be released from this world of anxiety and terror. The sun will not rise on the morrow."

Sean Russell, Sea Without a Shore (1996)

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"It is strange to think that I, of all people, became a smith of the language, for my relations with human kind have always been marked by a fundamental lack of commonality, as though I came from a distant land and spoke an alien tongue. I have always looked at my countrymen and thought that they slept as they walked: a sleep without dreams."

Sean Russell, Sea Without a Shore (1996)

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"All of the disputed territories contain valuable minerals, and some of them yield important vegetable products such as rubber which in colder climates it is necessary to synthesize by comparatively expensive methods. But above all they contain a bottomless reserve of cheap labour. Whichever power controls equatorial Africa, or the countries of the Middle East, or Southern India, or the Indonesian Archipelago, disposes also of the bodies of scores or hundreds of millions of ill-paid and hard-working coolies. The inhabitants of these areas, reduced more or less openly to the status of slaves, pass continually from conqueror to conqueror, and are expended like so much coal or oil in the race to turn out more armaments, to capture more territory, to control more labour power, to turn out more armaments, to capture more territory, and so on indefinitely. It should be noted that the fighting never really moves beyond the edges of the disputed areas.

(...)

but the balance of power always remains roughly even, and the territory which forms the heartland of each super-state always remains inviolate. Moreover, the labour of the exploited peoples round the Equator is not really necessary to the world’s economy. They add nothing to the wealth of the world, since whatever they produce is used for purposes of war, and the object of waging a war is always to be in a better position in which to wage another war.

(...)

The primary aim of modern warfare (in accordance with the principles of doublethink, this aim is simultaneously recognized and not recognized by the directing brains of the Inner Party) is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living. Ever since the end of the nineteenth century, the problem of what to do with the surplus of consumption goods has been latent in industrial society. At present, when few human beings even have enough to eat, this problem is obviously not urgent, and it might not have become so, even if no artificial processes of destruction had been at work. The world of today is a bare, hungry, dilapidated place compared with the world that existed before 1914, and still more so if compared with the imaginary future to which the people of that period looked forward. In the early twentieth century, the vision of a future society unbelievably rich, leisured, orderly, and efficient — a glittering antiseptic world of glass and steel and snow-white concrete — was part of the consciousness of nearly every literate person. Science and technology were developing at a prodigious speed, and it seemed natural to assume that they would go on developing. This failed to happen, partly because of the impoverishment caused by a long series of wars and revolutions, partly because scientific and technical progress depended on the empirical habit of thought, which could not survive in a strictly regimented society.

(...)

Nevertheless the dangers inherent in the machine are still there. From the moment when the machine first made its appearance it was clear to all thinking people that the need for human drudgery, and therefore to a great extent for human inequality, had disappeared. If the machine were used deliberately for that end, hunger, overwork, dirt, illiteracy, and disease could be eliminated within a few generations. And in fact, without being used for any such purpose, but by a sort of automatic process — by producing wealth which it was sometimes impossible not to distribute — the machine did raise the living standards of the average human being very greatly over a period of about fifty years at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries.

But it was also clear that an all-round increase in wealth threatened the destruction — indeed, in some sense was the destruction — of a hierarchical society. In a world in which everyone worked short hours, had enough to eat, lived in a house with a bathroom and a refrigerator, and possessed a motor-car or even an aeroplane, the most obvious and perhaps the most important form of inequality would already have disappeared. If it once became general, wealth would confer no distinction.

(...)

For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away.

George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)

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"It was at night that they came for you, always at night. The proper thing was to kill yourself before they got you. Undoubtedly some people did so. Many of the disappearances were actually suicides. But it needed desperate courage to kill yourself in a world where firearms, or any quick and certain poison, were completely unprocurable. He thought with a kind of astonishment of the biological uselessness of pain and fear, the treachery of the human body which always freezes into inertia at exactly the moment when a special effort is needed. He might have silenced the dark-haired girl if only he had acted quickly enough: but precisely because of the extremity of his danger he had lost the power to act. It struck him that in moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external enemy, but always against one’s own body. Even now, in spite of the gin, the dull ache in his belly made consecutive thought impossible. And it is the same, he perceived, in all seemingly heroic or tragic situations. On the battlefield, in the torture chamber, on a sinking ship, the issues that you are fighting for are always forgotten, because the body swells up until it fills the universe, and even when you are not paralysed by fright or screaming with pain, life is a moment-to-moment struggle against hunger or cold or sleeplessness, against a sour stomach or an aching tooth."

George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)

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"Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.

(...)

They were born, they grew up in the gutters, they went to work at twelve, they passed through a brief blossoming-period of beauty and sexual desire, they married at twenty, they were middle-aged at thirty, they died, for the most part, at sixty. Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbours, films, football, beer, and above all, gambling, filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult. A few agents of the Thought Police moved always among them, spreading false rumours and marking down and eliminating the few individuals who were judged capable of becoming dangerous; but no attempt was made to indoctrinate them with the ideology of the Party. It was not desirable that the proles should have strong political feelings. All that was required of them was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working-hours or shorter rations. And even when they became discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontent led nowhere, because being without general ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific grievances. The larger evils invariably escaped their notice."

George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)

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"Under ground, under ground! Down in the safe soft womb of earth, where there is no getting of jobs or losing of jobs, no relatives or friends to plague you, no hope, fear, ambition, honour, duty — no duns of any kind. That was where he wished to be.

Yet it was not death, actual physical death, that he wished for. It was a queer feeling that he had. It had been with him ever since that morning when he had woken up in the police cell. The evil, mutinous mood that comes after drunkenness seemed to have set into a habit. That drunken night had marked a period in his life. It had dragged him downward with strange suddenness. Before, he had fought against the money-code, and yet he had clung to his wretched remnant of decency. But now it was precisely from decency that he wanted to escape. He wanted to go down, deep down, into some world where decency no longer mattered; to cut the strings of his self-respect, to submerge himself — to sink, as Rosemary had said. It was all bound up in his mind with the thought of being under ground. He liked to think about the lost people, the under-ground people: tramps, beggars, criminals, prostitutes. It is a good world that they inhabit, down there in their frowzy kips and spikes. He liked to think that beneath the world of money there is that great sluttish underworld where failure and success have no meaning; a sort of kingdom of ghosts where all are equal. That was where he wished to be, down in the ghost-kingdom, below ambition. It comforted him somehow to think of the smoke-dim slums of South London sprawling on and on, a huge graceless wilderness where you could lose yourself for ever.

And in a way this job was what he wanted; at any rate, it was something near what he wanted. Down there in Lambeth, in winter, in the murky streets where the sepia-shadowed faces of tea-drunkards drifted through the mist, you had a submerged feeling. Down here you had no contact with money or with culture. No highbrow customers to whom you had to act the highbrow; no one who was capable of asking you, in that prying way that prosperous people have, ‘What are you, with your brains and education, doing in a job like this?’ You were just part of the slum, and, like all slum-dwellers, taken for granted. The youths and girls and draggled middle-aged women who came to the library scarcely even spotted the fact that Gordon was an educated man. He was just ‘the bloke at the library’, and practically one of themselves."

George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936)

London Pleasures by Gordon Comstock [Quote / Citação (30)]

"Sharply the menacing wind sweeps over

The bending poplars, newly bare,

And the dark ribbons of the chimneys

Veer downward; flicked by whips of air,

Torn posters flutter; coldly sound

The boom of trains and the rattle of hooves,

And the clerks who hurry to the station

Look, shuddering, over the eastern rooves,

Thinking, each one, ‘Here comes the winter!

Please God I keep my job this year!’

And bleakly, as the cold strikes through

Their entrails like an icy spear,

They think of rent, rates, season tickets,

Insurance, coal, the skivvy’s wages,

Boots, school-bills, and the next instalment

Upon the two twin beds from Drage’s.

For if in careless summer days

In groves of Ashtaroth we whored,

Repentant now, when winds blow cold,

We kneel before our rightful lord;

The lord of all, the money-god,

Who rules us blood and hand and brain,

Who gives the roof that stops the wind,

And, giving, takes away again;

Who spies with jealous, watchful care,

Our thoughts, our dreams, our secret ways,

Who picks our words and cuts our clothes,

And maps the pattern of our days;

Who chills our anger, curbs our hope,

And buys our lives and pays with toys,

Who claims as tribute broken faith,

Accepted insults, muted joys;

Who binds with chains the poet’s wit,

The navvy’s strength, the soldier’s pride,

And lays the sleek, estranging shield

Between the lover and his bride."

George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936)

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Something deep below made the stone street shiver. The tube-train, sliding through middle earth. He had a vision of London, of the western world; he saw a thousand million slaves toiling and grovelling about the throne of money. The earth is ploughed, ships sail, miners sweat in dripping tunnels underground, clerks hurry for the eight-fifteen with the fear of the boss eating at their vitals. And even in bed with their wives they tremble and obey. Obey whom? The money-priesthood, the pink-faced masters of the world. The Upper Crust. A welter of sleek young rabbits in thousand guinea motor cars, of golfing stockbrokers and cosmopolitan financiers, of Chancery lawyers and fashionable Nancy boys, of bankers, newspaper peers, novelists of all four sexes, American pugilists, lady aviators, film stars, bishops, titled poets, and Chicago gorillas.

George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936)

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"It was so rarely that he could attain the peace of mind in which poetry, or prose for that matter, has got to be written. The times when he ‘could not’ work grew commoner and commoner. Of all types of human being, only the artist takes it upon him to say that he ‘cannot’ work. But it is quite true; there are times when one cannot work. Money again, always money! Lack of money means discomfort, means squalid worries, means shortage of tobacco, means ever-present consciousness of failure — above all, it means loneliness. How can you be anything but lonely on two quid a week? And in loneliness no decent book was ever written. It was quite certain that London Pleasures would never be the poem he had conceived — it was quite certain, indeed, that it would never even be finished. And in the moments when he faced facts Gordon himself was aware of this.

Yet all the same, and all the more for that very reason, he went on with it. It was something to cling to. It was a way of hitting back at his poverty and his loneliness. And after all, there were times when the mood of creation returned, or seemed to return."

George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936)

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"‘Oh, leave me alone, for God’s sake!’ he said irritably, stepping out of Flaxman’s reach, and went up the stairs without looking back.

Flaxman settled his hat on his head and made for the front door, mildly offended. Gordon reflected dully that it was always like this nowadays. He was for ever snubbing friendly advances. Of course it was money that was at the bottom of it, always money. You can’t be friendly, you can’t even be civil, when you have no money in your pocket. A spasm of self-pity went through him. His heart yearned for the saloon bar at the Crichton; the lovely smell of beer, the warmth and bright lights, the cheery voices, the clatter of glasses on the beer-wet bar. Money, money! He went on, up the dark evil-smelling stairs. The thought of his cold lonely bedroom at the top of the house was like a doom before him."

George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936)

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"Gordon watched them go. They were just by-products. The throw-outs of the money-god. All over London, by tens of thousands, draggled old beasts of that description; creeping like unclean beetles to the grave.

He gazed out at the graceless street. At this moment it seemed to him that in a street like this, in a town like this, every life that is lived must be meaningless and intolerable. The sense of disintegration, of decay, that is endemic in our time, was strong upon him. Somehow it was mixed up with the ad-posters opposite. He looked now with more seeing eyes at those grinning yard-wide faces. After all, there was more there than mere silliness, greed, and vulgarity. Roland Butta grins at you, seemingly optimistic, with a flash of false teeth. But what is behind the grin? Desolation, emptiness, prophecies of doom. For can you not see, if you know how to look, that behind that slick self-satisfaction, that tittering fat-bellied triviality, there is nothing but a frightful emptiness, a secret despair? The great death-wish of the modern world. Suicide pacts. Heads stuck in gas-ovens in lonely maisonettes. French letters and Amen Pills. And the reverberations of future wars. Enemy aeroplanes flying over London; the deep threatening hum of the propellers, the shattering thunder of the bombs. It is all written in Roland Butta’s face."

George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936)

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"It was queer, really. Even at the time it struck me as queer. I was a second-loot with hardly any Cockney accent left, I could already distinguish between Arnold Bennett and Elinor Glyn, and yet it was only four years since I’d been slicing cheese behind the counter in my white apron and looking forward to the days when I’d be a master-grocer. If I tot up the account, I suppose I must admit that the war did me good as well as harm. At any rate that year of reading novels was the only real education, in the sense of book-learning, that I’ve ever had. It did certain things to my mind. It gave me an attitude, a kind of questioning attitude, which I probably wouldn’t have had if I’d gone through life in a normal sensible way. But — I wonder if you can understand this — the thing that really changed me, really made an impression on me, wasn’t so much the books I read as the rotten meaninglessness of the life I was leading."

George Orwell, Coming Up for Air (1939)

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"It struck me that perhaps a lot of the people you see walking about are dead. We say that a man’s dead when his heart stops and not before. It seems a bit arbitrary. After all, parts of your body don’t stop working — hair goes on growing for years, for instance. Perhaps a man really dies when his brain stops, when he loses the power to take in a new idea. Old Porteous is like that. Wonderfully learned, wonderfully good taste — but he’s not capable of change. Just says the same things and thinks the same thoughts over and over again. There are a lot of people like that. Dead minds, stopped inside. Just keep moving backwards and forwards on the same little track, getting fainter all the time, like ghosts."

George Orwell, Coming Up for Air (1939)

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"Every thinking person nowadays is stiff with fright. This is merely a chap who’s got sufficient foresight to be a little more frightened than the others. Hitler’s after us! Quick! Let’s all grab a spanner and get together, and perhaps if we smash in enough faces they won’t smash ours. Gang up, choose your Leader. Hitler’s black and Stalin’s white. But it might just as well be the other way about, because in the little chap’s mind both Hitler and Stalin are the same. Both mean spanners and smashed faces.

War! I started thinking about it again. It’s coming soon, that’s certain. But who’s afraid of war? That’s to say, who’s afraid of the bombs and the machine-guns? ‘You are’, you say. Yes, I am, and so’s anybody who’s ever seen them. But it isn’t the war that matters, it’s the after-war. The world we’re going down into, the kind of hate-world, slogan-world. The coloured shirts, the barbed wire, the rubber truncheons. The secret cells where the electric light burns night and day, and the detectives watching you while you sleep. And the processions and the posters with enormous faces, and the crowds of a million people all cheering for the Leader till they deafen themselves into thinking that they really worship him, and all the time, underneath, they hate him so that they want to puke. It’s all going to happen. Or isn’t it? Some days I know it’s impossible, other days I know it’s inevitable. That night, at any rate, I knew it was going to happen. It was all in the sound of the little lecturer’s voice."

George Orwell, Coming Up for Air (1939)