In the brightness of the light pouring in, Markino was painting fog. Specifically, the fog on the Strand in the late afternoon. Women and men, shopfronts, a bus—all emerging, disappearing, there and not there. “Extraordinary,” I muttered. “How you hide what you paint!” “I don’t hide,” Markino said. “Fog hides. I paint fog when it hides. So many things look like so far away when really, are right here, just hiding behind fog. Fog, hiding, sometimes more beautiful than things hidden.”

While I assume this dialogue is invented (please correct me if you know otherwise!), Yoshio Markino was a real artist. His paintings are gorgeous.

This could be the painting described in this scene (especially the bus seems, to me, to fit), though I’m not familiar enough with London to know for certain whether that’s the Strand.

The word chintz first appeared in English in seventeenth-century records of the East India Company and seems to come from a Hindi word meaning spray or sprinkle.

Doubtful, since the language “Hindi” didn’t exist yet in the seventeenth-century. Let’s not fill our histories with Hindutva propaganda please!

I don’t think I’ve ever read an account of Stalinist history that wasn’t from a right-wing source. Nothing I’ve read has ever, as Solnit does here, acknowledged that capitalism also kills millions and distorts science. These aversions/blinders that Solnit and Orwell accuse leftists of having toward fully acknowledging how terrible the Soviet Union was under Stalin seem, to me, to persist. I too find myself wanting her to return to discussing the political framing of the UK, partly because I’m more familiar with it and can more easily contextualize her arguments. I hoped she would discuss the eugenicist activism of Hurst and co. in more detail, for instance (this may still be coming). I’ve been trying to stop myself, however, and remember that Stalin is in many respects a better example of authoritarianism than of leftism. Passages such as these have much to teach us in our current moment:

The attack on truth and language makes the atrocities possible. If you can erase what has happened, silence the witnesses, convince people of the merit of supporting a lie, if you can terrorize people into silence, obedience, lies, if you can make the task of determining what is true so impossible or dangerous they stop trying, you can perpetuate your crimes. The first victim of war is truth, goes the old saying, and a perpetual war against truth undergirds all authoritarianisms from the domestic to the global. After all, authoritarianism is itself, like eugenics, a kind of elitism premised on the idea that power should be distributed unequally.