I have problems understanding this Enligsh essay.Could someone help me please?
By RabbitCanFly
@RabbitCanFly (120)
China
May 14, 2011 8:28pm CST
In our new society there's a growing dislike of original,creative men.The manipulated do not understand them;The manipulators fear them.The tidy committee men regrard them with horror,knowing that no pigenonholes can be found for them.We could do with a few original,creative men in our political lives-if only to creat some enthusiasm,release some energy-but where are they?We are asked to choose between various shades of negatives.The engine is falling into pieces while the joint owners of the car argued whether the footbrake or handbrake should be applied.Notice how the cold,colorless men,without ideas and with no other passon but a craving for success,get on in this society,capturing one plum after another and taking the juice and taste out of them.Between midnight and dawn,when sleep will not come,and all the old wounds beginto ache,I often have a nightmare vision of a future world in which there are billions of people,all numbered and registered,with not a gleam of genius anywhere,not an original mind,a rich personality,on the whole pack globe.The twin ideals of our time,organization and quantity,will have won forever.
------------------------------J.BPriestley Thoughts in the wilderness
So,what does he mean by "pigeonholes" and"twin ideals","whole pack globe"?Can someone help me please?Thanks!
2 responses
@jazzsue58 (2666)
•
15 May 11
Easiest way to cover this is to read the piece in its entirety and see what you pick up in the authors message. Priestley was a poet with words, so you can’t be too analytical with individual phrases.
He’s talking about the stifling of creative intellect, about the way people have to comply to a certain social “norm”. In other words, he sees everyone being pigeonholed, or categorized, into narrowly defined spaces, in a classification method which ignores the fact there are billions of people who think and act differently to the confines set within those spaces. Square pegs being forced into round holes, to suit the whim of those doing the classifying, in other words. Originally, a pigeonhole meant a small compartment in a desk, similar to those used to confine birds in a pigeon coop. Now it’s used as a metaphor.
Twin ideals: organization/ quantity is easy. It comes back to pigeonholing people into set groups. At school: Johnny loves drawing horses, but that’s not in the curriculum, so he’s pigeonholed with the rest of the “difficult” children – who may have become fabulous artists, musicians and writers had the teachers not been too pigeonholed themselves to see creative intellect. So you’ve got a whole group of children, all individuals, crammed into one box en masse. Twin ideals – organization and quantity, see? No place for an Einstein, Vettriano or J.B Priestley though.
Whole pack globe: His way of describing the human race en masse. Switch it to whole globe pack, and it makes more sense. Priestley may well have made a deliberate puzzle of this end phrase, to make the reader think hard about the points he was getting across. When you have to peer hard, you notice the finer detail.
Very Orwellian - love Priestley! 
