Vaguely he looked forward to some kind of moneyless, anchorite existence. To get out of the money-world-that was what he wanted. “But still, it was not the desire to ‘write’ that was his real motive. The aspidistra is the tree of life, he thought suddenly.” They begot children, which is what the saints and the soul-savers never by any chance do. They were bound up in the bundle of life. They ‘kept themselves respectable’- kept the aspidistra flying. They had their standards, their inviolable points of honour. The money-code as they interpreted it was not merely cynical and hoggish. The lower-middle-class people in there, behind their lace curtains, with their children and their scraps of furniture and their aspidistras - they lived by the money-code, sure enough, and yet they contrived to keep their decency. Our civilization is founded on greed and fear, but in the lives of common men the greed and fear are mysteriously transmuted into something nobler. It mightn’t be a bad thing, if you could manage it, to feel yourself one of them, one of the ruck of men. And if they did, what would they care? They were too busy being born, being married, begetting, working, dying. Did they know that they were only puppets dancing when money pulled the strings? You bet they didn’t. They would be, for example, small clerks, shop-assistants, commercial travellers, insurance touts, tram conductors. “He wondered about the people in houses like those. There will be no revolution in England while there are aspidistras in the windows.” The aspidistra, the flower of England! It ought to be on our coat of arms instead of the lion and the unicorn. The aspidistra became a sort of symbol for Gordon after that. One for the employers-the elect, the money priesthood as it were- 'Thou shalt make money' the other for the employed- the slaves and underlings'- 'Thou shalt not lose thy job.' It was about this time that he came across The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists and read about the starving carpenter who pawns everything but sticks to his aspidistra. The decalogue has been reduced to two commandments.

Hence the profoundly significant phrase, to make good. Good and evil have no meaning any longer except failure and success. Perhaps it is the only real religion-the only felt religion-that is left to us. “What he realised, and more clearly as time went on, was that money-worship has been elevated into a religion.

Keep the aspidistra flying meaning