"But it is a corrupting thing to live one's real life in secret. One should live with the stream of life, not against it."
--from "Burmese Days" (1934) by George Orwell

Everyman's Library

“To talk, simply to talk! It sounds so little, and how much it is! When you have existed to the brink of middle age in bitter loneliness, among people to whom your true opinion on every subject on earth is blasphemy, the need to talk is the greatest of all needs.” 

"Living a lie the whole time — the lie that we're here to uplift our poor black brothers instead of to rob them… it corrupts us, it corrupts us in ways you can't imagine."
--from "Burmese Days" (1934) by George Orwell

The lushly descriptive and tragic Burmese Days, a devastating indictment of British colonial rule, is based on Orwell’s own experience while serving in the Indian Imperial Police. His beloved satirical classic, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, features a young idealist whose attempt to rebel against middle-class respectability—by working in a bookshop and trying to be a writer—goes terribly and comically awry. The hero of Coming Up for Air tries to escape the bleakness of suburbia by returning to the idyllic rural village of his childhood—only to find that the simpler England he remembers so nostalgically is gone forever. These three novels share Orwell’s unsparing vision of the dark side of modern capitalist society in combination with his comic brilliance and his unerring compassion for humanity. READ an excerpt here:http://knopfdoubleday.com/…/burmese-days-keep-the-aspidist…/

http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/o/orwell/george/o79b/chapter1.html

Burmese Days, by George Orwell

Chapter 1

‘This desert inaccessible
Under the shade of melancholy boughs’

As you like it.

U Po Kyin, Sub-divisional Magistrate of Kyauktada, in Upper Burma, was sitting in his veranda. It was only half past eight, but the month was April, and there was a closeness in the air, a threat of the long, stifling midday hours. Occasional faint breaths of wind, seeming cool by contrast, stirred the newly drenched orchids that hung from the eaves. Beyond the orchids one could see the dusty, curved trunk of a palm tree, and then the blazing ultramarine sky. Up in the zenith, so high that it dazzled one to look at them, a few vultures circled without the quiver of a wing.

In Myanmar, Valuing an Isolated Orwellian Link /Burmese Days (George Orwell) In Myanmar, Valuing an Isolated Orwellian Link /Bu...