Apples and humbugs

More new years, traditions, and confusing writing

Dear Friend,

I hope you have had a good week so far.

If you read my last couple of letters, you will have read about the Rentrée back-to-school season in France that happens in September and allows you to restart your year afresh. In addition to the general rentrée feeling in the air, this week I also got to celebrate two more new years.

On Tuesday I went to a dinner to mark Ethiopian New Year, on the initiation of a friend who is Ethiopian-American, at a small and welcoming restaurant in the 9th arrondissement called Taitu. The food, a mix of delicately spiced stews served on injera bread, was excellent, as was the coffee. Everyone present, a mix of many nationalities including one token French person, seemed pretty happy to have another chance to start the year afresh.

On Friday, I went to my friend Fiona’s place to celebrate a non-religious Rosh Hashanah, or Jewish New Year. Fiona and I have been meeting once a week since January to eat bagels (at Bob’s Bagels café) in a tradition we call ‘intentional Fridays’, though it only sometimes happens on Fridays. At some point in spring, I learned that Fiona was pregnant and this week we celebrated the ancestral new year with her husband and her three-week-old daughter. Fiona made a honey and apple puff pastry (Jewish tradition dictates honey and apples at new year; France dictates pastry most days), her daughter wore an apple babygro and we listened to the Fiddler on the Roof cast recording. Delightful.

I have written before in my letters about my relationship with being Jewish-ish — I have one Jewish grandparent on each side, I know very little about religious traditions, but I relate to many elements of the culture(s). I think, being born in the tail-end of the 20th-century, I have always experienced the idea of Jewishness as so much bound up in the Holocaust. As I’ve mentioned before, Paris is peppered with signs that recount the deportation of Jewish children to concentration camps. I understand why and I think it’s important to remember what happened.

But I have also appreciated in more recent years getting a chance to to learn about Jewish culture as it is intrinsically, rather than as it is thrown into relief by suffering, exile, murder. There is an American writer whose work I follow named Dara Horn who has written a book (which I haven’t yet read) provocatively entitled People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present. Horn, a journalist, wrote the book after realising that whenever she was asked to write about a Jewish topic, it would be related to Jews who had died, often murdered, but very rarely about the ‘vitality, complexity and depth’ of what it means to be a Jew today.

All this in mind, it’s nice to lightly celebrate that part of my heritage, particularly with puff pastry, great friends and a brand-new Jewish-ish person in an apple onesie.

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Thirty-second book club

Thank you to those people who wrote back last week about the subject of creating your own mental maps and the joy of paper maps. I am continuing to enjoy the fruits of my ludditeness with my paper map of Paris.

humbug

1. deceptive or false talk or behaviour.

"his comments are sheer humbug"

2. BRITISH

   a boiled sweet, especially one flavoured with peppermint.

This week I have been re-reading a collection of essays by George Orwell brought together under the title Why I Write. I can’t recall if I stole this book off my beloved former housemate Ellen or she gave it to me (sorry and thank you, Ellen), but the pencil notes in the margin show it’s one I’ve come back to a few times over the past few years.

Today I was re-reading the last essay in the book, which is called Politics and the English Language. In the essay, which was written in 1946, Orwell begins with a rather stark premise:

“Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way.” — George Orwell, Why I write

But, as he goes on to clarify, he is not talking about grammatical or syntactical errors or the introduction of new words, but rather an overarching “staleness of imagery” and “lack of precision”. Basically his main point is that language was becoming too vague, full of unnecessary pretentious words that, rather than clarifying the meaning of what’s being said, actually help to obscure the fact that the actual substance is unpalatable (especially when it comes to politicians), or that there isn’t any actual substance there to grab on to. As he puts it:

“The whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness”

In the essay, Orwell argues that instead of taking the time to really think about the thing or feeling they are describing, his peers instead razzle-dazzled over their lack of clear thought with what he calls ‘meaningless words’, ‘ready-made phrases’ (clichés, meme-ified rhetoric) and ‘verbal false limbs’.

“As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug.”

On reading this, I thought of a couple of things:

• I thought of the politicians of today in the UK. Not having been around in the Forties, I can’t make a like-for-like comparison with those Orwell was talking about, but based on the examples he cites in the essay, I can say confidently that much of this deliberate vagueness he talks about is still very much around.

• Orwell’s writings on this subject also made me think about the language of the internet. Phrases we say that seem to show understanding, but in their catch-all/malleable usage, become almost like little caps we put on ideas and feelings, to contain them. As I have written before, I am a sucker for a self-help podcast, and reading Orwell’s descriptions I thought immediately of some of the phrases that come up on those again and again:

Powerful

Impactful

I resonate with that

I love that for you

We love that

And of the many things I concluded from reading this essay, one of the big ones is this: we need to start saying ‘humbug’ again as a heckle! It’s very impactful.

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That’s it for now! Thanks for reading this letter about new years, old TRADITIONS <Tevye voice> and language.

As ever, if you enjoy receiving these Pen Friend letters, please do share them with your friends.

Have a good week!

Yours,

Hannah