The Demon and the Windowpane
Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive, and a strong one... But there is also the minority of gifted, willful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class... Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand... And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.
, Why I Write (1946) · Read the full text
In these lines from his 1946 essay, Orwell offers an uncomfortable taxonomy of motives, beginning with the least noble: sheer egoism. There is a peculiar shame in admitting that we create to be seen, yet he insists this vanity is the engine that drives the work. The demon he describes—that irrational, exhausting compulsion to arrange words in the face of obscurity—feels especially acute now, when the possibility of being drowned out by infinite mechanical chatter makes the desire to be remembered seem not just vain but futile. If the machine can produce the windowpane without the ego, without the squalling infant demanding recognition, what remains of our “gifted, willful” insistence on living our own lives to the end?
Perhaps the answer lies in the very horror Orwell describes. The struggle to efface the self—to make the prose transparent enough that reality shines through—is not the elimination of the human but its most demanding expression. The demon is not merely ego; it is the refusal to let others see through eyes not our own. When we speak of fear in this moment, we are afraid not just of irrelevance but of discovering that the exhausting struggle itself was the gift, that the illness was the cure.
What if the windowpane is not the same when no one has suffered to polish it? The urge to get our own back on the grown-ups, to insist that we were here, persists even when the grown-ups have been replaced by algorithms. The mystery at the bottom of our motives—that resistance to understanding—may be exactly what keeps us writing when the pages could fill themselves.