If we, in 1984, are asked to choose between, on the one hand, the Miller of Tropic of Cancer and ‘the first hundred pages of Black Spring’ and, on the other, the collected works of Auden, MacNeice and Spender, I doubt that many of us would go for old Henry. So it would appear that politically committed art can actually prove more durable than messages from the stomach of the fish.

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "If we, in 1984, are asked to choose between, on the one hand, the Miller of Tropic of Cancer and ‘the first hundred pages of Black Spring’ and, on the other, the collected works of Auden, MacNeice and Spender, I doubt that many of us would go for old Henry. So it would appear that politically committed art can actually prove more durable than messages from the stomach of the fish." in the context of "Salman Rushdie, "Outside the Whale", in Granta magazine, 1st March 1984. Reprinted in Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, Penguin Books, 1991." to mean that wisdom is timeless.