Why Orwell urged his readers to celebrate the spring, cynics be damned

‘At any rate, spring is here … and they can’t stop you enjoying it.’

In his essay ‘Some Thoughts on the Common Toad’ (1946), George Orwell celebrates the spring awakening of the titular amphibian – a creature that, as he puts it, ‘never had much of a boost from poets’. He then expands on many of the season’s small pleasures, which can be enjoyed for free even in the ‘decaying slum’ of London where he lives. Commissioned by the Deep Water Literary Festival in Narrowsburg, New York, this video adaptation of Orwell’s reflection on the irrepressible, cyclical beauty of our world features narration by Tilda Swinton and found-footage visuals from the Austrian-born, New York-based filmmaker G Anthony Svatek. Revisited some eight decades after its original release, Orwell’s typically vivid and politically provocative prose raises an interesting question: has it become naive to believe, as Orwell once did, that spring’s joys can never be fully commodified or eradicated?