After finding out that George Orwell was reading the biographies of Tolstoi, Dickens, Joyve and Dalí in the midst of World War II, a few thoughts unavoidably come to my mind: that I have not read anything by the first three authors and can barely understand the lastone’s surrealist universe; that, therefore, between the culture of a genius like Orwell and mine there is a deep rift; that this fact makes my interest in reading War and Peace boost; that I need to go beyond The Persistence of Memory: Dalí is much more than a few melting clocks. Like Orwell, as we are discovering with these articles, he is not limited to a dystopia and a world in which the possibility of criticism does not exist. Finally, it has occurred to me some sort of hypothesis: Orwell might have felt identified with Dali’s surrealism. After all, the British author found war and its consequences to share a strange component, something between insouciance and reality, between deceit and the darkest cynicism. Moreover, George Orwell was aware, better than anybody, of the importance of the persistence of memory in a society in which everything tends to fade into oblivion.

The cartoon is by Joseph Lee and was published in the Evening News on December 5th, 1951.