"Pleasure Spots" is an
essay
An essay is, generally, a piece of writing that gives the author's own argument, but the definition is vague, overlapping with those of a letter, a paper, an article, a pamphlet, and a short story. Essays have been sub-classified as formal a ...
published in 1946 by the English
author
An author is the writer of a book, article, play, mostly written work. A broader definition of the word "author" states:
"''An author is "the person who originated or gave existence to anything" and whose authorship determines responsibility f ...
George Orwell. The essay considers how pleasure resorts are likely to develop in the future, consisting of artificial environments with vacuous pleasures. Orwell argues that people need peace and to be able to appreciate nature.
The essay first appeared in ''
Tribune
Tribune () was the title of various elected officials in ancient Rome. The two most important were the tribunes of the plebs and the military tribunes. For most of Roman history, a college of ten tribunes of the plebs acted as a check on th ...
'' on 11 January 1946.
Summary
Orwell quotes a journalist who met an entrepreneur planning a "pleasure spot" with a weather-proof roof covering acres of dance halls, bars, skittle alleys and swimming pools and bathed in artificial sunlight. This followed an encounter with a man who lamented that it was a pity no one had found a way in which "a man could relax, rest, play poker, drink and make love all at once and round the clock" and come out of it feeling refreshed.
Orwell notes that
Kubla Khan
''Kubla Khan'' () is a poem written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, completed in 1797 and published in 1816. It is sometimes given the subtitles "A Vision in a Dream" and "A Fragment." According to Coleridge's preface to ''Kubla Khan'', the poem ...
in
Samuel Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (; 21 October 177225 July 1834) was an English poet, literary critic, philosopher, and theologian who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake P ...
's poem has got it all wrong in decreeing a pleasure dome containing sacred rivers and measureless caverns. Modern resorts will be very different being artificial environments containing everything a life-hungry man could desire. He points out that the main characteristics of modern civilised man's view of pleasure are already present on a pleasure cruise or in a
Lyons Corner House
J. Lyons & Co. was a British restaurant chain, food manufacturing, and hotel conglomerate founded in 1884 by Joseph Lyons and his brothers in law, Isidore and Montague Gluckstein. Lyons’ first teashop opened in Piccadilly, London in 1894, an ...
as:
*One is never alone
*One never does anything for oneself
*One is never within sight of wild vegetation or natural objects of any kind
*Light and temperature are always artificially regulated
*One is never out of the sound of music
Orwell argues that tinned music is provided to prevent conversation from becoming serious and to prevent the onset of thought and that the unconscious aim of modern pleasure resorts is a return to the womb. In contrast the notion of admiring nature is bound up with the sense of man's littleness against the power of the universe. When much of what goes by the name of pleasure is an attempt to destroy consciousness, Orwell argues that man equally needs solitude, creative work and wonder and that the highest happiness does not lie in relaxing, resting, playing poker, drinking and making love simultaneously.
See also
*
Bibliography of George Orwell
The bibliography of George Orwell includes journalism, essays, novels, and non-fiction books written by the British writer Eric Blair (1903–1950), either under his own name or, more usually, under his pen name George Orwell. Orwell was a pro ...
External links
Text of ''Pleasure Spots''
{{Crimethink
Essays by George Orwell
1946 essays
Works originally published in Tribune (magazine)