Orwell wrote 80 "As I Please" columns between Dec. 3, 1943, and April 4, 1947 -- all but the last 21 during the war -- and nearly a third of them respond to readers' questions or thoughts or complaints. The boring excerpt above, from "As I Please" No. 8, begins: "A correspondent reproaches me with being 'negative' and 'always attacking things.' The fact is we that we live in a time when causes for rejoicing are not numerous." Thus Orwell's ironic concession to his reader: Indeed he has something to praise and will spend two lengthy and tedious paragraphs doing so. Ultimately a blogger's domain is the paragraph, and just as blogs are really no more than a collection of often unrelated paragraphs posted each day, so "As I Please" is each week three or four long paragraphs on two or three subjects; it is never an entire essay, with exposition from start to end. It plunges us in without preliminaries, and ends only with the next day's, or week's, or hour's, post. In short, it is continuous, which the essay never is.

For that Orwell conference the first weekend of May, and my last-minute talk, I had to read all 80 "As I Please" columns in a period of two days. The timing turned out to be more opportune than I had expected. If I had read them a month or more before, just before the Iraq war, the echoes would not have resonated, only faded within the walls of an empty room. Beyond well-fed, well-paid American soldiers carrying about the place, the following all surface in Orwell's first 40 or so columns: tense British-U.S. relations although allies, "unsinkable" military experts wrong in their predictions, air bombing and bomb shelters, the faults and problems inherent in the BBC, the writing of history, "the freedom for which we are fighting," Jews and anti-Semitism, maps and politics, a well-informed citizenry, or not, and its right to influence policy, postwar redevelopment of a damaged country (the U.K., not Germany), punishing collaborators and war criminals, postwar policy toward the vanquished enemy, vulgar newspapers becoming temporarily serious but also, in Orwell's words, "reticent," gas and other weapons, pilotless planes, millions of irreplaceable books disappearing in the Blitz and emptied libraries, psychological operations, human or civilian shields, and provisioning the capital.

This is London, of course, not defeated Berlin; and the wartime "As I Please's" have very much a London or metropolitan tone to them. Harold Pinter, who for all we know may have learned something about terror from Winston Smith, is not the first writer to be obsessed with London bus routes; in No. 5 there is Orwell on the 53 bus, despising the "hideous war memorial" that blocks the facade of a Regency church across the road from Lord's cricket ground.

What is the importance of any of this to us now? Then, of course, it would have been important, in the sense that any opinion-writing in an intelligent magazine read by intelligent people is important; and it's not as though Orwell is slumming with these pieces. They are hack work like any regular journalism, but they are distinguished hack work, and often playful or witty, and certainly highly observant, which is another way of saying they're intelligent. If you like Orwell for himself, the man you think he is, he is an attractive figure in these pages, and for biographers, who must have everything a man writes, "As I Please" is indispensable. Same too for those who have an agenda, and most people who claim Orwell have an agenda. If it's important that Orwell be sound on the Jews, he is: Some of his most robust writing against anti-Semitism can be found here. If you believe your country should welcome large numbers of refugees or immigrants with no impediment to race or ethnic background, you will be heartened to read Orwell encouraging whole-scale immigration to the U.K. in No. 61, of November 1946. In short, if you want to like Orwell as you do your friends, dipping into "As I Please" humanizes or relaxes him, but some of us don't want our important writers in a relaxed mode. We prefer the urgency, the concentration.

Judged as literature -- and why shouldn't it be? -- or at the very least belles-lettres, the blog on its own is insufficient unless a prelude to greater things, and in Orwell's case the better stuff to come, first worked out in some aspect beforehand in "As I Please," includes the landmark essays "You and the Atom Bomb," "The Prevention of Literature" and "Politics and the English Language." ("Looking Back on the Spanish War" is the reverse: the great essay preceding its shallower echoes in "As I Please.")

In the last few months, we've been told that Iraq: The Second Coming is the first bloggers' war, that bloggers brought down the leadership of the New York Times; and even before that, in 2000, we were told that bloggers had started to change our election campaigns: first evidence of this being the midterm elections last fall, the most decisive evidence still to come in the presidential year 2004. All of which may be true, but beside the point. The bloggers' aim is the immediate response, and first thoughts are seldom the sharpest; rough drafts are never read except by scholars and pedants. If Orwell's blogs are readable now yet not especially interesting, it tells us how lesser writers like the rest of us will appear in the decades to come. Any writer worthy of the name (now there's an Orwell generalization for you) wonders about his legacy, how foolish or sensible or eloquent he will seem after he is gone. The best record of a writing life is on paper, collected into volumes that are then printed; in that way does the essay survive, whereas we don't know yet how the weblog will.

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