It is as though, once he had resigned from the Indian Service, he wished to be acted upon, rather than to act, that is, to follow the line of least resistance and see where it led—a quite common impulse in a writer, based on a mystical feeling that the will is evil. Blair-Orwell detested and resented every form of power; in politics, he loved rubbing his opponents’ noses in reality, the opposite of the corporate or individual will, just as in language he hated abstraction, the separation of mental concepts from the plurality of the concrete. The line of least resistance, obeying a law of social gravity, led him naturally downward to gauge the depths of powerlessness and indignity, and the knowledge he brought back made it impossible for him ever to eat a meal in a smart restaurant again, in the same way as, later, after going down into the English coal mines, he wrote “I don’t think I shall ever feel the same about coal again.” Every now and then, in those four or five years of vagrancy, Blair surfaced, working as a tutor to a defective boy, staying with his older sister and her husband, staying with his parents, only to plunge back again into anonymity. Was this “coming up for air” a simple manifestation of the life instinct or some complicated testing of his forces of resiliency? By coming to the top he kept his freedom to sink once more, when the spirit moved him. He refused to drop definitively out of sight by an act of choice.