Quotes from Ursula K. Le Guin's novels

A Fisherman of the Inland Sea
A Wizard of Earthsea
the Birthday of the World
Changing Plane
the Dispossessed
Four Ways to Forgiveness
Gifts
the Lathe of Heaven
the Left Hand of Darkness
Malafrena
Orsinian Tale
Powers
Tales from Earthsea
Tehanu
the Telling
Voices
the Word for the World is Forest

A Fisherman of the Inland Sea

At first I thought all the more reason to say nothing, but then I thought, that wouldn't be fair; to me, partly. Love has a right to be spoken. And you have a right to know that somebody loves you. That sombody has loved you, could love you. We all need to know that. Maybe it's what we need most.

A Wizard of Earthsea

“When you know the fourfoil in all its seasons root and leaf and flower, by sight and scent and seed, then you may learn its true name, knowing its being: which is more than its use. What, after all, is the use of you? Or of myself? Is Gont Mountain useful, or the Open Sea?” Ogion went on a halfmile or so, and said at last, “To hear, one must be silent.”

You thought, as a boy, that a mage is one who can do anything. So I thought, once. So did we all. And the truth is that as a man’s real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at last he chooses nothing, but does only and wholly what he must do…

From that time forth he believed that the wise man is one who never sets himself apart from other living things, whether they have speech or not, and in later years he strove long to learn what can be learned, in silence, from the eyes of animals, the flight of birds, the great slow gestures of trees.

A man: who, knowing his whole true self, cannot be used or possessed by any power other than himself, and whose life therefore is lived for life’s sake and never in the service of ruin, or pain, or hatred, or the dark.

Only in silence the word, only in dark the light, only in dying life: bright the hawk’s flight on the empty sky.

A man would know the end he goes to, but he cannot know it if he does not turn, and return to his beginning, and hold that beginning in his being. If he would not be a stick whirled and whelmed in the stream, he must be the stream itself, all of it, from its spring to its sinking in the sea.

the Birthday of the World

You don’t need fields and hills and all that stuff to be free! Freedom is what your mind does, what your soul is. It has nothing to do with all that Dichew stuff. Paradise Lost

Why do you think we’re here, Hsing?
If you mean literally, we’re here because the Zero Generation arranged that we should be here. If you mean it in some abstract sense, then I reject the question as loaded. To ask ‘why’ assumes purpose, a final cause. Paradise Lost

They talk, they don’t know. They know, they don’t talk. Paradise Lost

If everybody has access to the same food, clothing, furniture, tools, education, work, and authority, and hoarding is useless because you can have it for asking, and gambling is an idle sport because there’s nothing to lose, so that wealth and poverty have become mere metaphors – “rich in love”, “poor in spirit” – how’s one to understand the importance in money? Paradise Lost

Control over these functions wasn’t called unnatural, whoever… It was called civilization … Wonderful words! – wild – savage – civilization – citizen – no matter how you civilize it, the body remains somewhat wild or savage, or natural. It had to keep up its animal functions or die … what about the controller, the civilizer itself, the mind? Was it civilized? Did it control itself? There seems to be no reason why it shouldn’t, yet its failure to do so constituted most of what was taught as History. Paradise Lost

But what struck with Luis long after was the sheer, overwhelming enormity of that “jungle”, that “wild nature” in which the savage human beings seem so insignificant as to be accidental …Paradise Lost

A major responsibility of doctors was seeing that death did not come too hard.  Paradise Lost

Cultural. Metaorganic. But as individually real and definite as a metabolic deficiency. People either need to believe or they don’t. The ones that don’t believe that the others don’t. They don’t believe that there are people who don’t believe.
Hope?
Hope isn’t belief. Hope is contingent upon reality, even when not very realistic. Belief dismisses reality.
What’s the harm in believing?
It’s dangerous to confuse reality with unreality. To confuse desire with power, ego with cosmos. Extremely dangerous. Paradise Lost

Light-specks on a screen. We can’t reach them, we can’t get to them. Not us. Not in our lifetime. Our universe is this ship. Paradise Lost

You did History. All that suffering. Did anybody in the subzero generations ever live as well as we live? Half as well? Most of them were afraid all the time. In pain. They were ignorant. They fought each other over money and religions. They died from diseases and wars and food shortage…Paradise Lost

You have a sense of duty. An ancestral duty – go find a new world… scientific duty – go find new knowledge… If a door opens, you feel it’s your duty to go through it. If a door opens, I unquestioningly close it. If life is good, I don’t seek to change it. Life is good, Luis. Paradise Lost

We aren’t in control. None of us. Ever.
I know. But we’ve got a good imitation of it, here. VR is enough for me. Paradise Lost

When I smashed my knee, and had to lie around, I decided there was no use living without delight.
Bliss?
No. Bliss is a form of VU. No, I mean delight. I never knew it on the ship. Only here. Now and then. Moments of unconditional existence. Delight.
But I was thinking… When I was worshipping, or whatever, what I was thinking, was about the dirt. I was thinking that if I could, I’d get up and dance on it… Dance with me, will you, Hsing? Paradise Lost

We followed his weakness. His incompleteness. Failure’s open. Look at water, Esi. It finds the weak places in the rock, the openings, the hollows, the absences. Following water we come where we belong.” Old Music and the Slave Women

This baby was dying of disease that could be cured by a mere series of injections. It was wrong to accept his illness, his death. It was wrong to let him be cheated out of his life by circumstance, bad luck, an unjust society, a fatalistic religion. A religion that fostered and encouraged the terrible passivity of the salves, that told these women to do nothing, to let the child waste away and die. Old Music and the Slave Women

They all want to use me, but I’ve outlived my usefulness, he thought; and the thought went through him like a shaft of clear light. He had kept thinking there was something he could do. There wasn’t. It was a kind of freedom. Old Music and the Slave Women

Fool, to think you could give anybody freedom. That was what death was for. To get us out of the crouchcage. Old Music and the Slave Women

I never knew anybody, anywhere I have been, who found life simple. I think a life or a time looks simple when you leave out the details, the way a planet looks smooth, from orbit. Solitude

The boxes weren’t magic. The people were. They were sorcerers. They used their power to get power over other persons. To live rightly a person has to keep away from magic. Solitude

I have no people. I don’t belong to people. I am trying to be a person. Why do you want to take me away from my soul? You want me to do magic! I won’t. I won’t do magic. I won’t speak your language. I won’t go with you! Solitude

Yet I knew it was only a thing, and there is no magic in things, only in minds. Solitude

You owe your knowledge to our people, she said. I did not answer, because all I had to say was that they were not my people, that I had no people. I was a person. I had a language that I did not speak. I had my silence. I had nothing else. Solitude

I am not a child now. You have no power over me. I will not go. Go without me. You have no power over me.
I agree. I have no power over you. But I have certain rights; the rights of loyalty; of love.
Nothing is right that puts me in your power.
You are like one of them. You are one of them. You don’t know what love is. You’re closed into yourself like a rock. Solitude

And though it is of the others, of relationships, that I write, the heart of my life has been my being alone. Solitude

Thinking is one way of doing, and words are one way of thinking. Solitude

I think there is no way to write about being alone. To write is to tell something to somebody, to communicate to others. CP, as Steadiness would say. Solitude is noncommunication, the absence of others, the presence of a self sufficient to itself. Solitude

There are worlds where such persons are called saints, holy people. Since isolation is a sure way to prevent magic, on my world the assumption is that they are sorcerers, outcast by others or by their own will, their conscience. Solitude

Life in the auntring, or for a settled man, is repetitive, as I said; and so it can be dull. Nothing new happens. The mind always wants new happenings. So for the young soul there is wandering and scouting, travel, change. But of course travel and danger and change have their own dullness. It is finally always the same otherness over again; another hill, another river, another man, another day. The feet begin to turn in a long, long circle. The body begins to think of what it learned back home, when it learned to be still. To be aware. To be aware of the grain of dust beneath the sole of the foot, and the skin of the sole of the foot, and the touch and scent of the air on the cheek , and the fall and motion of the light across the air, and the color of the grass on the high hill across the river, and the thoughts of the body, of the soul, the shimmer and ripple of colors and sounds in the clear darkness of the depths, endlessly moving, endlessly changing, endlessly new. Solitude

By solitude the soul escapes from doing or suffering magic; it escapes from dullness, from boredom, by being aware. Nothing is boring if you are aware of it. It may be irritating, but it is not boring. If it is pleasant the pleasure will not fail so long as you are aware of it. Being aware is the hardest work the soul can do, I think. Solitude

Changing Plane

Mr. Battannele talked politics with gusto and energy, with a lively interest in the problems, but it seemed to me that there was something missing, some element I was used to considering part of political talk. He didn't shift about as some weak-minded folk do, adapting his views to his interlocutor's, but never seemed to defend any particular view of his own. Everything was left open. He would have been the most dismal failure on a radio call-in talk show or a TV experts roundtable. He lacked moral outrage. He seemed to have no convictions. Did he even have opinions? Feeling at Home with the Hennebet

"What's 'souls'?" He asked.
"I began with the body; it's always so much easier, you can make gestures. "This, here, me-arms legs head stomach-body. In your language I think it's atto?"
He turn to nod.
"And your soul is in your body."
"Such as tripe?"
I tried a different tack: "If someone is dead, we say their soul is gone."
"Gone?" he echoed. "Where?"
"The body, the atto stays here-the soul goes away. Some say to an afterlife."
He stared, mystified. We spent nearly an hour on the soul-body question, trying to find some common ground in both languages and getting only more confused. The body was unable to make any distinction at all between matter and spirit. Atto was all one was; one was all atto; how could one be anything else? There was no room for anything else. "How can there be anything more than unnua?" he finally asked me.
"So each of you-each person-is the universe?" I asked, after checking that unnua did mean universe, all, everything, all time, entirety, the whole, and finding that it also meant all the courses of a dinner, the contents of a full jug of bottle, and an infant of any species at the moment of birth.
"How could we not be? Except for slippage, of course." Feeling at Home with the Hennebet

"I am not sure who I am," I said cautiously.
"Many people never are," she said, quite earnestly now, looking up from her chain stitch. Her eyes amidst their wrinkles and behind their bifocals were brownish-green. The Hennebet seldom look directly at one, but she gazed at ne. The gaze was kind, serene, remote, and brief. I felt that she did not see me very clearly. "But it doesn't matter, you know," she said. "If for one moment of your whole life you know that you are, then that's your life, that moent, that's unnua, that's all. In a short life I saw my mother's face, like the sun, so I'm here. In a long life I went there and therer and there; but I dug in the garden, the root of a weed came up in my hand, so I'm unnua. When you get old, you know, you keep being here instead of there, everything is here. Everything is here," she repeated, with a comfortable little laugh, and went on with her embroidery. Feeling at Home with he Hennebet

People are always telling you that "we have always done thus," and then you find that their "always" means a generation or two, or a century or two, at most a millennium or two. Cultural ways and habits are blips compared to the ways and habits of the body, of the race. There really is very little that human beings on our plane have always done, except find food and drink, sleep, sing, talk, procreate, nurture the children, and probably band together to some extent. Indeed it can be seen as our human essence, how few behavioral imperatives we follow. How flexible we are in finding new things to do, new ways to go. How ingeniously, inventively, desperately we seek the right way, the true way, the Way we believe we lost long ago among the thickets of novelty and opportinuty and choice. Seasons of the Ansarac

I had been thinking about the best way to die, and this seemed a sort of halfway point. An island in the middle of the ocean, with not another soul of my people on it...not quite life, not quite death. The idea amused me. So I am here." Seasons of the Ansarac

Perhaps women don't feel shame the way men do. Perhaps their shame is different, more a matter of the body than the mind. They didn't care much for the cars and airplanes and bulldozers but cared a great deal about the medicines that would change us and the rules about who did which kind of work. After all, with us, the woman bears the child, but both parents feed it, both nurture it. Why should a child be left to the mother only? They asked that. How could a woman alone bring up four children? Or more than four children? It was inhuman. And then, in the cities, why should families stay together? The child doesn't want its parents then, the parents don't want the child, they all have other things to do... Seasons of the Ansarac

I have not tried to investigate it. It's no use. There is no information about corporation. There is only disinformation. Even after they collapse, imploding into a cratered ruin stinking of burnt stockholder and surrounded by an impenetrable barrier formed by members of Congress and other government officials holding hands and wearing yellow tape marked Private Property, No Trespassing, Keep Out, No Hunting, Fishing, or Accounting-even then there is no truth in them. Great Joy

Orichi thinkers continue to argue about them. Are you happy if you aren't conscious of being happy? What is consciousness? Is consciousness the great boon we consider it? Which is better off, a lizard basking in the sun or a philosopher? Better off in what way and for what? There have been lizards far longer than there have been philosophers. Lizards do not bathe, do not bury their dead, and do not perform scientific experiments. There have been many more lizards than philosophers. Are lizards, then, a more successful species than philosophers? Does God love lizards better than he loves philosophers?
However one may decide such questions, observation of the asomniacs, or of lizards, seems to indicate that consciousness is not necessary to living a contented sentient life. Indeed, when carried to such an extreme as human beings have carried it, consciousness may prevent true contentment: the worm in the apple of happiness. Does consciousness of being interfere with being-pervert, stunt, cripple it? It seems that every mystical practice on every plane seeks precisely to escape from consciousness. If Nirvana is the mind freed of itself, allowed to rejoin the body in the body's pure oneness with its world or god, have not the asonmics achieved Nirvana? Wake Island

To be a self, one must also be nothing. To know oneself, one must be able to know nothing. The asomnics know the world continuously and immediately, with no empty time, no room for selfhood. Having no dreams, they tell no stories and so have no use for language. Without language, they have no lies. Thus they have no future. They live here, now, perfectly in touch. They live in pure fact. But they can't live in truth, because the way to truth, says the philosopher, is through lies and dreams. Wake Island

I believe it's just as difficult for them to learn their language as it is for us. But then, they have enough time, so it doesn't matter. Their lives don't start here and run to there, like ours, like horses on a racecourse. They live in the middle of time, like a starfish in its own center. Like the sun in its light. the Nna Mmoy Language

I am certain this terrible poverty dates from the age of the ruins. Their ancestors, with all the resources of science and all the best intentions, robbed them blind. Our world is full of diseases, enemies, waste, and danger, those ancestors said-hostile microbes and viruses infecting us, noxious weeds growing thick about us while we starve, useless animals that carry plagues and poisons and compete with us for air and food and water. This world is too hard for our children, they said, but we know how to make it easy.
So they did. They eliminated everything that was not useful. They took a great complex pattern and simplified it to perfection. A nursery room safe for the children. A theme park where people have nothing to do but enjoy themselves.
But the Nna Mmoy outwitted their ancestors, at least in part. They've made the pattern back into something endlessly complicated, infinitely rich, and without any rational use. They do it with words. the Nna Mmoy Language

In this they resemble any reasonable being who does an unreasonable thing and justifies it with reasons. War, for example. My species has a great many good reasons for making war, though none of them is as good as the reason for not making war. Our most rational and scientific justifications-for instance, that we are an aggressive species-are perfectly circular: we make war because we make war. Our justifications for making a particular war (such as: our people must have more land and more wealth, or: our people must have more power, or: our people must obey out deity's orders to crush the sacrilegious infidel) all come down to the same thing: we must make war because we must. We have no choice. We have no freedom. This argument is not uiltimately satisfactory to the reasoning mind, which desires freedom. the Building

When I was twelve or thirteen, I used to plan what I'd wish for if they gave me three wishes. I thought I'd wish, I wish that having lived well to the age of eighty-five and having written some very good books, I may die quietly, knowing that all the people I love are happy and in good health. I knew that this was a stupid, disgusting wish. Pragmatic. Selfish. A coward's wish. I knew it wasn't fair. They would never allow it to be one of my three wishes. Besides, having wished it, what would I do with the other two wishes? So then I'd think, with the other two I could wish that everybody in the world was happier, or that they'd stop fighting wars, or that they'd wake up tomorrow morning feeling really good and be kind to everybody else all day, no, all year, no, forever, but then I'd realise I didn't really believe in any of these wishes as anything but wishes. So long as they were wishes they were fine, even useful, but they couldn't go any further than being wishes. By nothing I do can I attain a goal beyond my reach, as King Yudhishthira said when he found heaven wasn't all he'd hoped for. There are gates the bravest horse can't jump. If wishes were horses, I'd have a whole herd of them, roan and buckskin, lovely wild horses, never bridled, never broken, galloping over the plains past red mesas and blue mountains. But cowards ride rocking horses made of wood with painted eyes, and back and forth they go, back and forth in one place on the playroom floor, back and forth, and all the plains and mesas and mountains are only in the rider's eyes. So never mind about the wishes. Give me a sausage, please. Confusions of Uni

the Dispossessed

You admit no religion outside the churches. Just as you admit no morality outside the laws. You know, I had not ever understood that, in all my reading of Urrasti books.

"Men are physically stronger," the doctor asserted with professional finality.
"Yes, often, and larger, but what does that matter when we have machines? And even when we don't have machines, when we must dig with the shovel or cany on the back, the men maybe work faster--the big ones--but the women work longer.... Often I have wished I was as tough as a woman."

"It exists," Shevek said, spreading out his hands. "It's real. I can call it a misunderstanding, but I can't pretend that it doesn't exist, or will ever cease to exist. Suffering is the condition on which we live. And when it comes, you know it. You know it as the truth. Of course it's right to cure diseases, to prevent hunger and injustice, as the social organism does. But no society can change the nature of existence. We can't prevent suffering. This pain and that pain, yes, but not Pain. A society can only relieve social suffering, unnecessary suffering. The rest remains. The root, the reality. All of us here are going to know grief; if we live fifty years, we'll have known pain for fifty years. And in the end we'll die. That's the condition we're born on. I'm afraid of life! There are times I--I am very frightened. Any happiness seems trivial. And yet, I wonder if it isn't all a misunderstanding--this grasping after happiness, this fear of pain. ... If instead of fearing it and running from it, one could ... get through it, go beyond it. There is something beyond it. It's the self that suffers, and there's a place where the self--ceases. I don't know how to say it. But I believe that the reality--the truth that I recognize in suffering as I don't in comfort and happiness--that the reality of pain is not pain. If you can get through it. If you can endure it all the way."
"The reality of our life is in love, in solidarity," said a tall, soft-eyed girl. "Love is the true condition of human life."
Bedap shook his head. "No. Shev’s right," he said. "Love's just one of the ways through, and it can go wrong, and miss. Pain never misses. But therefore we don't have much choice about enduring it! We will, whether we want to or not.”
The girl with short hair shook her head vehemently. “But we won't! One in a hundred, one in a thousand, goes all the way, all the way through. The rest of us keep pretending we're happy, or else just go numb. We suffer, but not enough. And so we suffer for nothing." "What are we supposed to do," said Tirin, "go hit our heads with hammers for an hour every day to make sure we suffer enough?" "You're making a cult of pain," another said. "An Odonian'a goal is positive, not negative. Suffering is dysfunctional, except as a bodily warning against danger. Psychologically and socially it's merely destructive." "What motivated Odo but an exceptional sensitivity to suffering--her own and others'?" Bedap retorted.
"But the whole principal of mutual aid is designed to prevent suffering!"
Shevek was sitting on the table, his long legs dangling, his face intense and quiet. "Have you ever seen anybody die?" he asked the others. Most of them had, in a domicile or on volunteer hospital duty. All but one had helped at one time or another to bury the dead. "There was a man when I was in camp in Southeast It was the first time I saw anything like this. There was some defect in the aircar engine, it crashed lifting off and caught fire. They got him out burned all over. He lived about two hours. He couldn’t have been saved; there was no reason for him to live that long, no justification for those two hours. We were waiting for them to fly in anesthetics from the coast. I stayed with him, along with a couple of girls. We'd been there loading the plane. There wasn’t a doctor. You couldn't do anything for him, except just stay there, be with him. He was in shock but mostly conscious. He was in terrible pain, mostly from his hands. I don’t think he knew the rest of his body was all charred, he felt it mostly in his hands. You couldn’t touch him to comfort him, the skin and flesh would come away at your touch, and he'd scream. You couldn't do anything for him. There was no aid to give. Maybe he knew we were there, I don't know. It didn't do him any good. You couldn’t do anything for him. Then I saw... you see… I saw that you can't do anything for anybody. We can't save each other. Or ourselves."
"What have you left, then? Isolation and despair! You're denying brotherhood, Shevek!" the tall girl cried.
"No--no, I'm not. I'm trying to say what I think brotherhood really is. It begins--it begins in shared pain."
"Then where does it end?"
"I don’t know. I don't know yet."

What they were free to do, however, was another question. It appeared to Shevek that their freedom from obligation was in exact proportion to their lack of freedom of initiative.

He was appalled by the examination system, when it was explained to him; he could not imagine a greater deterrent to the natural wish to leam than this pattern of cramming in information and disgorging it at demand.

If you do not want to do the work, you should not do it.

Shevek's readings in Urrasti history led him to decide that they were, in fact, though the word was seldom used these days, aristocrats. In feudal times the aristocracy had sent their sons to university, conferring superiority on the institution. Nowadays it was the other way rounds the university conferred superiority on the man. They told Shevek with pride that the competition for scholarships to Ieu Eun was stiffer every year, proving the essential democracy of the institution. He said, "You put another lock on the door and call it democracy." He liked his polite, intelligent students, but he felt no great warmth towards any of them. They were planning careers as academic or industrial scientists, and what they learned from him was to them a means to that end, success in their careers. They either had, or denied the importance of, anything else he might have offered them.

He tried to read an elementary economics text; it bored him past endurance, it was like listening to somebody interminably recounting a long and stupid dream. He could not force himself to understand how banks functioned and so forth, because all the operations of capitalism were as meaningless to him as the rites of a primitive religion, as barbaric, as elaborate, and as unnecessary. In a human sacrifice to deity there might be at least a mistaken and terrible beauty; in the rites of the moneychangers, where greed, laziness, and envy were assumed to move all men's acts, even the terrible became banal. Shevek looked at this monstrous pettiness with contempt, and without interest. He did not admit, he could not admit, that in fact it frightened him.

The whole experience had been so bewildering to him that he put it out of mind as soon as possible, but he had dreams about it for months afterwards, nightmares. Saemtenevia Prospect was two miles long, and it was a solid mass of people, traffic, and things: things to buy, things for sale. Coats, dresses, gowns, robes, trousers, breeches, shuts, blouses, hats, shoes, stockings, scarves, shawls, vests, capes, umbrellas, clothes to wear while sleeping, while swimming, while playing games, while at an afternoon party, while at an evening party, while at a party in the country, while traveling, while at the theater, while riding horses, gardening, receiving guests, boating, dining, hunting--all different, all in hundreds of different cuts, styles, colors, textures, materials. Perfumes, clocks. lamps, statues, cosmetics, candles, pictures, cameras, games, vases, sofas, kettles, puzzles, pillows, dolls, colanders, hassocks, jewels, carpets, toothpicks, calendars, a baby's teething rattle of platinum with a handle of rock crystal, an electrical machine to sharpen pencils, a wristwatch with diamond numerals; figurines and souvenira and kickshaws and mementos and gewgaws and bric-abrac, everything either useless to begin with or ornamented so as to disguise its use; acres of luxuries, acres of excrement. In the first block Shevek had stopped to look at a shaggy, spotted coat, the central display in a glittering window of clothes and jewelry. 'The coat costs 8,400 units?" he asked in disbelief, for he had recently read in a newspaper that a "living wage" was about 2,000 units a year- "Oh, yes, that's real fur, quite rare now that the animals are protected," Pae had said. "Pretty thing, isn't it? Women love furs." And they went on. After one more block Shevek had felt utterly exhausted. He could not look any more. He wanted to hide his eyes.
And the strangest thing about the nightmare street was that none of the millions of things for sale were made there. They were only sold there. Where were the workshops, the factories, where were the farmers, the craftsmen, the miners, the weavers, the chemists, the carvers, the dyers, the designers, the machinists, where were the hands, the people who made? Out of sight, somewhere else. Behind walls. All the people in all the shops were either buyers or sellers. They had no relation to the things but that of possession.

To make a thief, make an owner; to create crime, create laws.

"You are lying," Shevet said peaceably. "I think you are a patriot, yes. But you set above patriotism your respect for the truth, scientific truth, and perhaps also your loyalty to individual persons. You would not betray me."

I thought you were sharing them with me. Were they a gift? We say thank you only for gifts, in my country. We share other things without talking about it, you see. Would you like the pickles back again?

Nobody owns anything to rob. If you want things you take them from the depository. As for violence, well, I dont know, Oiie; would you murder me, ordinarily? And if you felt like it, would a law against it stop you? Coercion is the least efficient means of obtaining order.

You know, life on Anarres isn't rich, as it is here. In the little communities there isn't very much entertainment, and there is a lot of work to be done. So, if you work at a mechanical loom mostly, every tenthday it's pleasant to go outside and lay a pipe or plow a field, with a different group of people....And then there is challenge. Here you think that the incentive to work is finances, need for money or desire for profit, but where there's no money the real motives are clearer, maybe. People like to do things. They like to do them well. People take the dangerous, hard jobs because they take pride in doing them, they can—egoize, we call it—show off?—to the weaker ones. Hey, look, little boys, see how strong I am! You know? A person likes to do what he is good at doing.... But really, it is the question of ends and means. After all. work is done for the work's sake. It is the lasting pleasure of life. The private conscience knows that. And also the social conscience, the opinion of one's neighbors. There is no other reward, on Anarres, no other law. One's own pleasure, and the respect of one's fellows. That is all. When that is so, then you see the opinion of the neighbors becomes a very mighty force.

"No. We have no government, no laws, all right. But as far as I can see, ideas never were controlled by laws and governments, even on Urras. If they had been, how would Odo have worked out hers? How would Odonianism have become a world movement? The archists tried to stamp it out by force, and failed. You can't crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change. And that's precisely what our society is doing! Sabul uses you where he can, and where he can't, he prevents you from publishing, from teaching, even from working. Right? In other words, he has power over you. Where does he get it from? Not from vested authority, there isn't any. Not from intellectual excellence, he hasn't any. He gets it from the innate cowardice of the average human mind. Public opinion! That's the power structure he's part of, and knows how to use. The unadmitted, inadmissible government that rules the Odonian society by stifling the individual mind.

But you spoke of physical suffering, of a man dying of burns. And I speak of spiritual suffering! Of people seeing their talent, their work, their lives wasted. Of good minds submitting to stupid ones. Of strength and courage strangled by envy, greed for power, fear of change. Change is freedom, change is life—is anything more basic to Odonian thought than that? But nothing changes any more! Our society is sick. You know it. Your suffering its sickness. Its suicidal sickness!"

Music is a cooperative art, organic by definition, social. It may be the noblest form of social behavior we're capable of. It's certainly one of the noblest jobs an individual can undertake. And by its nature, by the nature of any art, it's a sharing. The artist shares, it's the essence of his act.

They can Justify it because music isn't useful. Canal digging is important, you know; music's mere decoration. The circle has come right back around to the most vile kind of profiteering utilitarianism. The complexity, the vitality, the freedom of invention and initiative that was the center of the Odonian ideal, we've thrown it all away. We've gone right back to barbarism. If it's new, run away from it; if you cant eat it, throw it away!

There's a connection. But I don't know what it is, it's not causal. About the time sex began to go sour on me, so did the work. Increasingly. Three years without getting anywhere. Sterility. Sterility on all sides. As far as the eye can see the infertile desert lies in the pitiless glare of the merciless sun, a lifeless, trackless, feckless, fuckless, waste strewn with the bones of luckless wayfarers....

When you can see a thing whole," he said, "it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives.... But close up, a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death."
"That's all right for Urras. Let it stay off there and be the moon—I don't want it! But I'm not going to stand up on a gravestone and look down on life and say, 'O lovely!' I want to see it whole right in the middle of it, here, now. I don't give a hoot for eternity."
"It's nothing to do with eternity." said Shevek, grinning, a thin shaggy man of silver and shadow. "All you have to do to see life whole is to see it as mortal. I'll die, you'll die; how could we love each other otherwise? The sun's going to burn out, what else keeps it shining?"
"Ah! Your talk, your damned philosophy!"
"Talk? It's not talk. It's not reason. It's hand's touch. I touch the wholeness, I hold it. Which is moonlight, which is Takver? How shall I fear death? When I hold it, when I hold in my hands the light—"

He used the phrase because he had been fascinated from the start by the Urrasti habit of wrapping everything up in clean, fancy paper or plastic or cardboard or foil. Laundry, books, vegetables, clothes, medicines, everything came inside layers and layers of wrappings. Even packets of paper were wrapped in several layers of paper. Nothing was to touch anything else. He had begun to feel that he, too, had been carefully packaged.

"The politics of reality," Shevek repeated. He looked at Oiie and said, "That is a curious phrase for a physicist to use."
"Not at all. The politician and the physicist both deal with things as they are, with real forces, the basic laws of the world."
"You put your petty miserable 'laws' to protect wealth, your 'forces' of guns and bombs, in the same sentence with the law of entropy and the force of gravity? I had thought better of your mind, Demaere!"

"Four thousand units is the money it costs to keep two families alive for a year in this city," Shevek said.
The man inspected him and said drawling, “Yes, well, you see, sir, that happens to be a work of art."
"Art? A man makes art because he has to. Why was that made?"
"You're an artist, I take it," the man said, now with open insolence.
"No, I am a man who knows shit when he sees it!"

Shevek had listened with incredulous disgust "You call that organization?" he had inquired. "You even call it discipline? But it is neither. It is a coercive mechanism of extraordinary inefficiency—a kind of seventh-millennium steam engine! With such a rigid and fragile structure what could be done that was worth doing?" This had given Atro a chance to argue the worth of warfare as the breeder of courage and manliness and the weeder-out of the unfit, but the very line of his argument had forced him to concede the effectiveness of guerillas, organized from below, self-disciplined. "But that only works when the people think they're fighting for something of their own—you know, their homes, or some notion or other," the old man had said. Shevek had dropped the argument He now continued it, in the darkening basement among the stacked crates of unlabeled chemicals. He explained to Atro that he now understood why the army was organized as it was. It was indeed quite necessary. No rational form of organization would serve the purpose. He simply had not understood that the purpose was to enable men with machine guns to kill unarmed men and women easily and in great quantities when told to do so. Only he still could not see where courage, or manliness, or fitness entered in.

"It seems that everything your society does is done by men. The industry, arts, management, government, decisions. And all your life you bear the father's name and the husband's name. The men go to school and you don't go to school; they are all the teachers, and judges, and police, and government, aren't they? Why do you let them control everything? Why don't you do what you like?"
"But we do. Women do exactly as they like. And they don't have to get their hands dirty, or wear brass helmets, or stand about shouting in the Directorate, to do it."
"But what is it that you do?"
"Why, run the men, of course! And you know, it's perfectly safe to tell them that, because they never believe it They say, 'Haw haw, funny little woman!' and pat your head and stalk off with their medals jangling, perfectly self-content."
"And you too are self-content?"
"Indeed I am."
"I don't believe it."
"Because it doesn't fit your principles. Men always have theories, and things always have to fit them."
"No, not because of theories, because I can see that you are not content. That you are restless, unsatisfied, dangerous."
"Dangerous!" Vea laughed radiantly. "What an utterly marvelous compliment! Why am I dangerous, Shevek?"
"Why, because you know that in the eyes of men you are a thing, a thing owned, bought, sold. And so you think only of tricking the owners, of getting revenge—"
She put her small hand deliberately on his mouth. "Hush," she said. "I know you don't intend to be vulgar. I forgive you. But that's quite enough."
He scowled savagely at the hypocrisy, and at the realization that he might really have hurt her. He could still feel the brief touch of her hand on his lips. "I am sorry!" he said.
"No, no. How can you understand, coming from the Moon? And you're only a man, anyway. . . . I'll tell you something, though. If you took one of your 'sisters' up there on the Moon, and gave her a chance to take off her boots, and have an oil bath and a depilation, and put on a pair of pretty sandals, and a belly jewel, and perfume, she'd love it. And you'd love it too! Oh, you would! But you won't, you poor things with your theories. All brothers and sisters and no fun!"

"You mean you have all the same old rules? You see, I believe that morality is just another superstition, like religion. It's got to be thrown out."
"But my society," he said, completely puzzled, "is an attempt to reach it. To throw out the moralizing, yes—the rules, the laws, the punishments—so that men can see good and evil and choose between them."
"So you threw out all the do's and don'ts- But you know, I think you Odonians missed the whole point. You threw out the priests and judges and divorce laws and all that, but you kept the real trouble behind them. You just stuck it inside, into your consciences. But it's still there. You're just as much slaves as ever! You arent really free."
"How do you know?"
"I read an article in a magazine about Odonianism," she said. "And we've been together all day. I don't know you, but I know some things about you. I know that you've got a-a Queen Teaea inside you, right inside that hairy head of yours- And she orders you around just like the old tyrant did her serfs. She says, 'Do this!' and you do, and 'Don't!' and you don't."
"That is where she belongs," he said, smiling. "Inside my head."
"No. Better to have her in a palace. Then you could rebel gainst her. You would have! Your great-great-grandfather did; at least he ran off to the Moon to get away. But he took Queen Teaea with him, and you've still got her!"
"Maybe. But she has learned, on Anarres, that if she tells me to hurt another person, I hurt myself."
"The same old hypocrisy. Life is a fight, and the strongest wins. All civilization does is hide the blood and cover up the hate with pretty words!"
"Your civilization, perhaps. Ours hides nothing. It is all plain. Queen Teaea wears her own skin, there. We follow one law, only one, the law of human evolution."
"The law of evolution is that the strongest survives!"
"Yes, and the strongest, in the existence of any social species, are those who are most social. In human terms, most ethical. You see, we have neither prey nor enemy, on Anarres. We have only one another. There is no strength to be gained from hurting one another. Only weakness."
"I don't care about hurting and not hurting. I don't care about other people, and nobody else does, either. They pretend to. I don't want to pretend. I want to be free!"

"As I see it," he informed Shevek, "your Simultaneity Theory simply denies the most obvious fact about time, the fact that time passes."
"Well, in physics one is careful about what one calls 'facts.' It is different from business," Shevek said very mildly and agreeably, but there was something in his mildness that made Vea, chatting with another group nearby, turn around to listen. "Within the strict terms of Simultaneity Theory, succession is not considered as a physically objective phenomenon, but as a subjective one."
"Now stop trying to scare Dearri, and tell us what that means in baby talk," Vea said. Her acuteness made Shevek grin.
"Well. we think that time 'passes,' flows past us, but what if it is we who move forward, from past to future, always discovering the new? It would be a little like reading a book, you see. The book is all there, all at once, between its covers. But if you want to read the story and understand it, you must begin with the first page, and go forward, always in order. So the universe would be a very great book, and we would be very small readers."
"But the fact is," said Dearri, "that we experience the universe as a succession, a flow. In which case, what's the use of this theory of how on some higher plane it may be all eternally coexistent? Fun for you theorists, maybe, but it has no practical application, no relevance to real life. Unless it means we can build a time machinel" he added with a kind of hard, false joviality.
"But we don't experience the universe only successively," Shevek said. "Do you never dream, Mr. Dearri?" He was proud of himself for having, for once, remembered to call someone 'Mr.'
"What's that got to do with it?"
"It is only in consciousness, it seems, that we experience time at all. A little baby has no time; he can't distance himself from the past and understand how it relates to his present, or plan how his present might relate to his future. He does not know time passes; he does not understand death. The unconscious mind of the adult is like that still. In a dream there is no time, and succession is all changed about, and cause and effect are all mixed together. In myth and legend there is no time. What past is it the tale means when it says 'Once upon a time'? And so, when the mystic makes the reconnectiou of his reason and his unconscious, he sees all becoming as one being, and understands the eternal return."
"Yes, the mystics," the shyer man said, eagerly, 'Tebores, in the Eighth Millennium. He wrote. The unconscious mind is coextensive with the universe."
"But we're not babies," Dearri cut in, "we're rational men. Is your Simultaneity some kind of mystical regressivism?"
"Maybe you could see it," he said, "as an effort to strike a balance. You see, Sequency explains beautifully our sense of linear time, and the evidence of evolution. It includes creation, and mortality. But there it stops. It deals with all that changes, but it cannot explain why things also endure. It speaks only of the arrow of time— never of the circle of time."
"The circle?" asked the politer inquisitor, with such evident yearning to understand that Shevek quite forgot Dearri, and plunged in with enthusiasm, gesturing with hands and arms as if trying to show his listener, materially, the arrows, the cycles, the oscillations he spoke of. 'Time goes in cycles, as well as in a line. A planet revolving: you see? One cycle, one orbit around the sun, is a year, isnt it? And two orbits, two years, and so on. One can count the orbits endlessly—an observer can. Indeed such a system is how we count time. It constitutes the time-writer, the clock. But within the system, the cycle, where is time? Where is beginning or end? Infinite repetition is an atemporal process. It must be compared, referred to some other cyclic or noncyclic process, to be seen as temporal. Well, this is very queer and interesting, you see. The atoms, you know, have a cyclic motion. The stable compounds are made of constituents that have a regular, periodic motion relative to one another. In fact. it is the tiny timereversible cycles of the atom that give matter enough permanence that evolution is possible. The little timelessnesses added together make up time. And then on the big scale, the cosmos: well, you know we think that the whole universe is a cyclic process, an oscillation of expansion and contraction, without any before or after. Only within each of the great cycles, where we live, only there is there linear time, evolution, change. So then time has two aspects. There is the arrow, the running river, without which there is no change, no progress, or direction, or creation. And there is the circle or the cycle, without which there is chaos, meaningless succession of instants, a world without clocks or seasons or promises."
"You can't assert two contradictory statements about the same thing," said Dearri, with the calmness of superior knowledge. "In other words, one of these "aspects* is real, the other's simply an illusion."
"Many physicists have said that," Shevek assented.
"But what do you say?" asked the one who wanted to know.
"Well, I think it's an easy way out of the difficulty.... Can one dismiss either being, or becoming, as an illusion? Becoming without being is meaningless. Being without becoming is a big bore. ... If the mind is able to perceive time in both these ways, then a true chronosopby should provide a field in which the relation of the two aspects or processes of time could be understood."
"But what's the good of this sort of 'understanding,'" Dearri said, "if it doesn't result in practical, technological applications? Just word juggling, isn't it."
"You ask questions like a true profiteer," Shevek said, and not a soul there knew he had insulted Dearri with the most contemptuous word in his vocabulary; indeed Dearri nodded a bit, accepting the compliment with satisfaction.
Vea, however, sensed a tension, and burst in, "I don't really understand a word you say, you know, but it seems to me that if I did understand what you said about the book—that everything really all exists now—then couldn't we foretell the future? If it's already there?"
"No, no," the shyer man said, not at all shyly. "It's not there like a couch or a house. Time isn't space. You can't walk around in it!" Vea nodded brightly, as if quite relieved to be put in her place. Seeming to gain courage from his dismissal of the woman from the realms of higher thought, the shy man turned to Dearri and said, "It seems to me the application of temporal physics is in ethics. Would you agree to that. Dr. Shevek?"
"Ethics? Well, I don't know. I do mostly mathematics, you know. You cannot make equations of ethical behavior."
"Why not?" said Dearri.
Shevek ignored him. "But it's true, chronosophy does involve ethics. Because our sense of time involves our ability to separate cause and effect, means and end. The baby. again, the animal, they don't see the difference between what they do now and what will happen because of it. They can't make a pulley, or a promise. We can. Seeing the difference between now and not now, we can make the connection. And there morality enters in. Responsibility. To say that a good end will follow from a bad means is just like saying that if I pull a rope on this pulley it will lift the weight on that one. To break a promise is to deny the reality of the past; therefore it is to deny the hope of a real future. If time and reason are functions of each other, if we are creatures of time, then we had better know it, and try to make the best of it. To act responsibly."
"But look here," said Dearri, with ineffable satisfaction in his own keenness, "you just said that in your Simultaneity system there is no past and future, only a sort of eternal present. So how can you be responsible for the book that's already written? All you can do is read it There's no choice, no freedom of action left."
'That is the dilemma of determinism. You are quite right, it is implicit in Simultanist thinking. But Sequency thinking also has its dilemma. It is like this, to make a foolish little picture—you are throwing a rock at a tree, and if you are a Simultanist the rock has alreadyJ^it the tree, and if you are a Sequentist it never can. So wmch do you choose? Maybe you prefer to throw rocks without thinking about it, no choice. I prefer to make things difficult, and choose both."
"How—how do you reconcile them?" the shy man asked earnestly.
Shevek nearly laughed in despair. "I don't know. I have been working a long time on it! After all, the rock does hit the tree. Neither pure sequency nor pure unity will explain it. We don't want purity, but complexity, the relationship of cause and effect, means and end. Our model of the cosmos must be as inexhaustible as the cosmos. A complexity that includes not only duration but creation, not only being but becoming, not only geometry but ethics. It is not the answer we are after, but only how to ask the question...."
"All very well, but what industry needs is answers," said Deani.
Shevek turned slowly, looked down at him, and said nothing at all.

"Why do you talk only in abstractions?" he inquired suddenly, wondering as he spoke why he was speaking, when he had resolved not to. "It is not names of countries, it is people killing each other. Why do the soldiers go? Why does a man go kill strangers?"

"I don't know," he said; his tongue felt half paralyzed. "No. It is not wonderful. It is an ugly world. Not like this one. Anarres is all dust and dry hills. All meager, all dry. And the people aren't beautiful. They have big hands and feet, like me and the waiter there. But not big bellies. They get very dirty, and take baths together, nobody here does that. The towns are very small and dull, they are dreary. No palaces. Life is dull, and hard work. You can't always have what you want, or even what you need, because there isn't enough. You Urrasti have enough. Enough air, enough rain, grass, oceans, food, music, buildings, factories, machines, books, clothes, history. You are rich, you own. We are poor, we lack. You have, we do not have. Everything is beautiful, here. Only not the faces. On Anarres nothing is beautiful, nothing but the faces. The other faces, the men and women. We have nothing but that, nothing but each other. Here you see the jewels, there you see the eyes. And in the eyes you see the splendor, the splendor of the human spirit because our men and women are free— possessing nothing, they are free. And you the possessors are possessed. You are all in jail. Each alone, solitary, with a heap of what he owns. You live in prison, die in prison. It is all I can see in your eyes—the wall, the wall!"

It was difficult for Shevek to follow, both in language and in substance. He was being told about things he had no experience of at all. He had never seen a rat, or an army barracks, or an insane asylum, or a poorhouse, or a pawnshop, or an execution, or a thief, or a tenement, or a rent collector, or a man who wanted to work and could not find work to do, or a dead baby in a ditch. All these things occurred in Efor's reminiscences as commonplaces or as commonplace horrors. Shevek had to exercise his imagination and summon every scrap of knowledge he had about Urras to understand them at all. And yet they were familiar to him in a way that nothing he had yet seen here was, and he did understand. This was the Urras he had learned about in school on Anarres. This was the world from which his ancestors had fled, preferring hunger and the desert and endless exile. This was the world that had formed Odo's mind and had jailed her eight times for speaking it. This was the human suffering in which the ideals of his society were rooted, the ground from which they sprang.

"What's it to them? They're used to mass conscriptions. It's what they're for, my dear fellow! To fight for their country. And let me tell you, there's no better soldier on earth than the Ioti man of the ranks, once he's broken into taking orders. In peacetime he may spout sentimental pacifism, but the grit's there, underneath. The common soldier has always been our greatest resource as a nation. It's how we became the leader we are."
"By climbing up on a pile of dead children?"

"I haven't accepted it, Tuio. I'm not going to let my face get knocked in or my brains blown out by the blackcoats. If they hurt me, I'll hurt back."
"Join them, if you like their methods. Justice is not achieved by force!"
"And power isn't achieved by passivity."
"We are not seeking power. We are seeking the end of power! What do you say?" Maedda appealed to Shevek. "The means are the end. Odo said it all her life. Only peace brings peace, only just acts bring justice! We cannot be divided on that on the eve of action!"

I am here because you see in me the promise, the promise that we made two hundred years ago in this city —the promise kept. We have kept it, on Anarres. We have nothing but our freedom. We have nothing to give you but your own freedom. We have no law but the single principle of mutual aid between individuals. We have no government but the single principle of free association. We have no states, no nations, no presidents, no premiers, no chiefs, no generals, no bosses, no bankers, no landlords, no wages, no charity, no police, no soldiers, no wars. Nor do we have much else. We are sharers, not owners. We are not prosperous. None of us is rich. None of us is powerful. If it is Anarres you want, if it is the future you seek, then I tell you that you must come to it with empty hands. You must come to it alone, and naked, as the child comes into the world, into his future, without any past, without any property, wholly dependent on other people for his life. You cannot take what you have not given, and you must give yourself. You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.

By damn, I agree with that! Now that's what some don't see. But the way I see it, if you copulate around enough in your teens, that's when you get the most out of it, and also you find out that it's all pretty much the same damn thing. And a good thing, too! But still, what's different isn't the copulating; it's the other person. And eighteen years is just a start, all right, when it comes to figuring out that difference. At least, if it's a woman you're trying to figure out. A woman won't let on to being so puzzled by a man, but maybe they bluff.... Anyhow, that's the pleasure of it The puzzles and the bluffs and the rest of it. The variety. Variety doesnt come with just moving around. I was all over Anarres, young. Drove and loaded in every Division. Must have known a hundred girls in different towns. It got boring. I came back here, and I do this run every three decads year in year out through this same desert where you cant ten one sandhill from the next and it's all the same for three thousand kilos whichever way you look, and go home to the same partner—and I never been bored once. It isn't changing around from place to place that keeps you lively. It's getting time on your side. Working with it, not against it

"A syndic, fellow I've known for years, he did just that, north of here, in '66. They tried to take a grain truck off. his train. He backed the train, killed a couple of them before they cleared the track, they were like worms in rotten fish, thick, he said. He said, there's eight hundred people waiting for that grain truck, and how many of them might die if they don't get it? More than a couple, a lot more. So it looks like he was right But by damn I can't add up figures like that I don't know if its right to count people like you count numbers. But then, what do you do? Which ones do you kill?"
"The second year I was in Elbow, I was worklister, the mill syndicate cut rations. People doing six hours in the plant got half rations—just barely enough for that kind of work. People on half time got three-quarter rations. If they were sick or too weak to work, they got half. On half rations you couldnt get well. You couldn't get back to work. You might stay alive. I was supposed to put people on half rations, people that were already sick. I was working full time, eight, ten hours sometimes, desk work, so I got full rations: I earned them, I earned them by making lists of who should starve." The man's light eyes looked ahead into the dry light. "Like you said, I was to count people."
"You quit?"
"Yes, I quit. Went to Grand Valley. But somebody else took over the lists at the mills in Elbow. There's always somebody willing to make lists."
"Now that's wrong," the driver said, scowling into the glare. He had a bald brown face and scalp, no hair left between cheeks and occiput, though he wasn't past his middle forties. It was a strong, hard, and innocent face. "That's dead wrong. They should have shut the mills down. You can't ask a man to do that. Aren't we Odonians? A man can lose his temper, all right That's what the people who mobbed trains did. They were hungry, the kids were hungry, been hungry too long, there's food coming through and its not for you. you lose your temper and go for it. Same thing with the friend, those people were taking apart the train he was in charge of, he lost his temper and put it in reverse. He didn't count any noses. Not then! Later, maybe. Because he was sick when he saw what he'd done. But what they had you doing, saying this one lives and that one dies—that's not a job a person has a right to do, or ask anybody else to do."

Well, this. That we're ashamed to say we've refused a posting. That the social conscience completely dominates the individual conscience, instead of striking a balance with it. We don't cooperate—we obey. We fear being outcast, being called lazy, dysfunctional, egoizing. We fear our neighbor's opinion more than we respect our own freedom of choice. You don't believe me, Tak, but try, just try stepping over the line, just in imagination, and see how you feel. You realize then what Tirin is, and why he's a wreck, a lost soul. He is a criminall We have created crime, just as the propertarians did. We force a man outside the sphere of our approval, and then condemn him for it We've made laws, laws of conventional behavior, built walls all around ourselves, and we can't see them, because they're part of our thinking. Tir never did that I knew him since we were ten years old. He never did it, he never could build walls. He was a natural rebel. He was a natural Odonian—a real one! He was a free man, and the rest of us, his brothers, drove him insane in punishment for his first free act.

He recognized that need, in Odonian terms, as his "cellular function," the analogic term for the individual's individuality, the work he can do best, therefore his best contribution to his society. A healthy society would let him exercise that optimum function freely, in the coordination of all such functions finding its adaptability and strength. That was a central idea of Odo's Analogy. That the Odonian society on Anarres had fallen short of the ideal did not, in his eyes, lessen his responsibility to it; just the contrary. With the myth of the State out of the way, the real mutuality and reciprocity of society and individual became clear. Sacrifice might be demanded of the individual, but never compromise: for though only the society could give security and stability, only the individual, the person, had the power of moral choice—the power of change, the essential function of life. The Odonian society was conceived as a permanent revolution, and revolution begins in the thinking mind.

For her as for him, there was no end. There was process: process was all. You could go in a promising direction or you could go wrong, but you did not set out with the expectation of ever stopping anywhere. All responsibilities, all commitments thus understood took on substance and duration.
Fulfillment, Shevek thought, is a function of time. The search for pleasure is circular, repetitive, atemporal. The variety seeking of the spectator, the thrill hunter, the sexually promiscuous, always ends in the same place. It has an end. It comes to the end and has to start over. It is not a journey and return, but a closed cycle, a locked room, a cell.
Outside the locked room is the landscape of time, in which the spirit may, with luck and courage, construct the fragile, makeshift, improbable roads and cities of fidelity: a landscape inhabitable by human beings. It is not until an act occurs within the landscape of the past and the future that it is a human act Loyalty, which asserts the continuity of past and future, binding time into a whole, is the root of human strength; there is no good to be done without it.

For we each of us deserve everything, every luxury that was ever piled in the tombs of the dead kings, and we each of us deserve nothing, not a mouthful of bread in hunger. Have we not eaten while another starved? Will you punish us for that? Will you reward us for the virtue of starving while others ate? No man earns punishment, no man earns reward. Free your mind of the idea of deserving, the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think.

It's your nature to be Tirin. and my nature to be Shevek, and our common nature to be Odonians, responsible to one another. And that responsibility is our freedom. To avoid it. would be to lose our freedom. Would you really like to live in a society where you kave no responsibility and no freedom, no choice, only the false option of obedience to the law, or disobedience followed by punishment? Would you really want to go live in a prison?

"I must explain to you why I have come to you, and why I came to this world also. I came for the idea. For the sake of the idea. To learn, to teach, to share in the idea. On Anarres, you see, we have cut ourselves off. We don't talk with other people, the rest of humanity. I could not finish my work there. And if I had been able to finish it, they did not want it, they saw no use in it So I came here. Here is what I need—the talk, the sharing, an experiment in the Light Laboratory that proves something it wasn't meant to prove, a book of Relativity Theory from an alien world, the stimulus I need. And so I finished the work, at last. It is not written out yet but I have the equations and the reasoning, it is done. But the ideas in my head aren't the only ones imrportant to me. My society is also an idea. I was made by it. An idea of freedom, of change, of human solidarity, an important idea. And though I was very stupid I saw at last that by pursuing the one, the physics, I am betraying the other. I am letting the propertarians buy the truth from me."
"What else could you do, Shevek?"
"Is there no alternative to selling? Is there not such a thing as the gift?"
"Yes—"
"Do you not understand that I want to give this to you —and to Hain and the other worlds—and to the countries of Urraa? But to you all! So that one of you cannot use if as A-Io wants to do, to get power over the others, to get richer or to win more wars. So that you cannot use the truth for your private profit but only for the common good."
"In the end, the truth usually insists upon serving only the common good," Keng said.
"In the end, yes, but I am not willing to wait for the end. I have one lifetime, and I will not spend it for greed and profiteering and lies. I will not serve any master."

There is nothing, nothing on Urras that we Anarresti need! We left with empty hands, a hundred and seventy years ago, and we were right we took nothing. Because there is nothing here but States and their weapons, the rich and their lies, and the poor and their misery. There is no way to act rightly, with a clear heart, on Urras. There is nothing you can do that profit does not enter into, and fear of loss, and the wish for power. You cannot say good morning without knowing which of you is 'superior' to the other, or trying to prove it. You cannot act like a brother to other people, you must manipulate them, or command them, or obey them, or trick them. You cannot touch another person, yet they will not leave you alone. There is no freedom. It is a box—Urras is a box, a package, with all the beautiful wrapping of blue sky and meadows and forests and great cities. And you open the box, and what is inside it? A black cellar full of dust, and a dead man. A man whose hand was shot off because he held it out to others. I have been in Hell at last. Desar was right; it is Urras; Hell is Urras.

I know it's full of evils, full of human injustice, greed, folly, waste. But it is also full of good, of beauty, vitality, achievement. It is what a world should be! It is alive, tremendously alive—alive, despite all its evils, with hope. Is that not true?"

"You don't understand what time is," he said. "You say the past is gone, the future is not real, there is no change, no hope. You think Anarres is a future that cannot be reached, as your past cannot be changed. So there is nothing but the present, this Urras, the rich, real, stable present, the moment now. And you think that is something which can be possessed! You envy it a little. You think it's something you would like to have. But it is not real, you know. It is not stable, not solid—nothing is. Things change, change. You cannot have anything.... And least of all can you have the present, unless you accept with it the past and the future. Not only the past but also the future, not only the future but also the past, because they are real: only their reality makes the present real. You will not achieve or even understand Urras unless you accept the reality, the enduring reality, of Anarres. You are right, we are the key. But when you said that, you did not really believe it. You don't believe in Anarres. You dont believe in me, though I stand with you, in this room, in this moment... My people were right, and I was wrong, in this: We cannot come to you. You will not let us. You do not believe in change, in chance, in evolution. You would destroy us rather than admit our reality. rather than admit that there is hope! We cannot come to you. We can only wait for you to come to us."

"I thought I knew what 'realism' was," Keng said. She smiled, but it was not an easy smile.
"How can you, if you don't know what hope is?"

A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart. The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skillful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well—this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection and of sociality as a whole.

Four Ways to Forgiveness

And blood had been shed. From the Uprising at Nadami on, thirty years of fighting, rebellions, retaliations, half her lifetime, and even after Liberation. after all the Werelians were gone, the fighting went on. Always, always, the young men were ready to rush out and kill whoever the old men told them to kill, each other, women, old people, children; always there was a war to be fought in the name of Peace, Freedom, Justice, the Lord. Newly freed tribes fought over land, the city chiefs fought for power. Betrayals

“It is wrong, wrong, wrong!” he said, his voice strong and loud. “We had our own destiny, our own way to the Lord, and they’ve taken it from us —we’re slaves again! The wise Aliens, the scientists with all their great knowledge and inventions, our ancestors, they say they are — ‘Do this!’ they say, and we do it. ‘Do that!’ and we do it. Take your children on the wonderful ship and fly to our wonderful worlds!’ And the children are taken, and they’ll never come home. Never know their home. Never know who they are. Never know whose hands might have held them.” Betrayals

A friend sent me that from the city, she never approved of me coming here, pretending to drink water and be silent. She was right, too, I should go back, I should never have come. What a liar I am, what a fool! Stealing wood! Stealing wood so I could have a nice fire! So I could be warm and cheerful! So I set the house on fire, so everything’s gone, mined, Kebi’s house, my poor little cat, your hands, it’s my fault. I forgot about sparks from wood fires, the chimney was built for peat fires, I forgot. I forget everything, my mind betrays me, my memory lies, I lie. I dishonor my Lord, pretending to turn to him when I can’t turn to him, when I can’t let go the world. So I burn it! So the sword cuts your hands. Betrayals

"I betrayed my cause, I lied and stole in its name, because I could not admit I had lost faith in it. I feared the Aliens because I feared their gods. So many gods! I feared that they would diminish my Lord. Diminish him!" He was silent for a minute, and drew breath; she could hear the deep rasp in his chest. "I betrayed my son’s mother many times, many times. Her, other women, myself. I did not hold to the one noble thing." Betrayals

You’re the only person I’ve ever known who was neither owned nor owner. That is freedom. That is freedom. I wonder if you know it? Forgiveness Day

“I keep thinking about long life, about living long,” she said. “I don’t mean just being alive a long time, hell, I’ve been alive about eleven hundred years, what does that mean, nothing. I mean ... Something about thinking of life as long makes a difference. Like having kids does. Even thinking about having kids. It’s like it changes some balance It’s funny I keep thinking about that now, when my chances for a long life have kind of taken a steep fall...” Forgiveness Day

“It seems to me that you cut off human contact. You don’t touch slaves and slaves don’t touch you, in the way human beings ought to touch, in mutuality. You have to keep yourselves separate, always working to maintain that boundary. Because it isn’t a natural boundary — it’s totally artificial, manmade. I can’t tell owners and assets apart physically. Can you?”
“Mostly.”
“By cultural, behavioral clues — right?”
After thinking a while, he nodded.
“You are the same species, race, people, exactly the same in every way, with a slight selection towards color. If you brought up an asset child as an owner it would be an owner in every respect, and vice versa. So you spend your lives keeping up this tremendous division that doesn’t exist. What I don’t understand is how you can fail to see how appallingly wasteful it is. I don’t mean economically!” Forgiveness Day

To live simply is most complicated. Forgiveness Day

“Like this. When I left, I knew I was a Buried Cable woman. When I was there, I had to unknow that knowledge. There, I’m not a Buried Cable woman. I’m a woman. I can have sex with any person I choose. I can take up any profession I choose. Lineage matters, here. It does not matter, there. It has meaning here, and a use. It has no meaning and no use, anywhere else in the universe.” She was as intense as he, now. “There are two kinds of knowledge, local and universal. There are two kinds of time, local and historical.” A Man of the People

She said after a while, “There are souls, there. Many, many souls, minds, minds full of knowledge and passion. Living and dead. People who lived on this earth a hundred, a thousand, a hundred thousand years ago. Minds and souls of people from worlds a hundred lightyears from this one, all of them with their own knowledge, their own history. The world is sacred, Havzhiva. The cosmos is sacred. That’s not a knowledge I ever had to give up. All I learned, here and there, only increased it. There’s nothing that is not sacred.” She spoke slowly and quietly, the way most people talked in the pueblo. “You can choose the local sacredness or the great one. In the end they’re the same. But not in the life one lives. To know there is a choice is to have to make the choice: change or stay: river or rock.’ The Peoples are the rock. The historians are the river.” A Man of the People

“Yes,” she said decisively. “One can be more than one kind of being. I have work to do, there.”
He shook his head, slower, but equally decisive. “What good is work without the gods? It makes no sense to me, Mother of All Children. I don’t have the mind to understand.”
She smiled at the double meaning. “I think you’ll understand what you choose to understand, Man of my People.” A Man of the People

He put his face in his hands. “Nothing is right,” he said. “Nothing is right. Everything I do, I have to do because that’s how it’s done, but it — it doesn’t make sense — there are other ways —“
“There’s one way to live rightly,” Iyan Iyan said, “that I know of. And this is where I live. There’s one way to make a baby. If you know another, you can do it with somebody else!” A Man of the People

He knew now that historians did not study history. No human mind could encompass the history of Hain; three million years of it. The events of the first two million years, the Fore-Eras, like layers of metamorphic rock, were so compressed, so distorted by the weight of the succeeding millennia and their infinite events that one could reconstruct only the most sweeping generalities from the tiny surviving details. And if one did chance to find some miraculously preserved document from a thousand millennia ago, what then? A king ruled in Azbahan; the Empire fell to the Infidels; a fusion rocket has landed on Ve. . . . But there had been uncountable kings, empires, inventions, billions of lives lived in millions of countries, monarchies, democracies, oligarchies, anarchies, ages of chaos and ages of order, pantheon upon pantheon of gods, infinite wars and times of peace, incessant discoveries and forgettings, innumerable horrors and triumphs, an endless repetition of unceasing novelty. What is the use trying to describe the flowing of a river at any one moment, and then at the next moment, and then at the next, and the next, and the next? You wear out. You say: There is a great river, and it flows through this land, and we have named it History. A Man of the People

Local knowledge is not partial knowledge, they said. There are different ways of knowing. Each has its own qualities, penalties, rewards. Historical knowledge and scientific knowledge are a way of knowing. Like local knowledge, they must be learned. A Man of the People

The pueblos choose not to have many books. They prefer the live knowledge, spoken or passing on the screens, passing from the breath to the breath, from living mind to living mind. Would you give up what you learned that way? Is it less than, is it inferior to what you’ve learned here from books? There’s more than one kind of knowledge, said the historians. A Man of the People

What she had — so it seemed to him — was perfect equilibrium. When he was with her he felt that for the first time in his life he was learning to walk. To walk as she did: effortless, unselfconscious as an animal, and yet conscious, careful, keeping in mind all that might unbalance her and using it as tightrope walkers use their long poles.... This, he thought, this is a dweller in true freedom of mind, this is a woman free to be fully human, this perfect measure, this perfect grace. A Man of the People

“What you select from, in order to tell your story, is nothing less than everything,” he said, watching the branches of the old trees dark against the sky. “What you build up your world from, your local, intelligible, rational, coherent world, is nothing less than everything. And so all selection is arbitrary. All knowledge is partial — infinitesimally partial. Reason is a net thrown out into an ocean. What truth it brings in is a fragment, a glimpse, a scintillation of the whole truth. All human knowledge is local. Every life, each human life, is local, is arbitrary, the infinitesimal momentary glitter of a reflection of...” His voice ceased; the silence of the glade among the great trees continued. A Man of the People

In his own mind it was quite clear. As he had betrayed and forsaken Iyan Iyan, so Tiu had betrayed and forsaken him. There was no going back and no going forward. So he must turn aside. Though he was one of them, he could no longer live with the People; though he had become one of them, he did not want to live with the historians. So he must go live among Aliens.
He had no hope of joy. He had bungled that, he thought. But he knew that the two long, intense disciplines that had filled his life, that of the gods and that of history, had given him an uncommon knowledge, which might be of use somewhere; and he knew that the right use of knowledge is fulfillment. A Man of the People

“You’re out of balance,” he said. “Did you know it?”
“Yes.”
“I could get a Staying Chant together this evening.”
“It’s all right,” Havzhiva said. “I’ve always been off balance.”
“There’s no need to be,” the medicine man said. “On the other hand, maybe it’s best, since you’re going to Werel. So: Goodbye for this life.”
A Man of the People

Do you know what women are, here, in this world? They are nothing. They are not part of the government. Women made the Liberation. They worked and they died for it just like the men. But they weren’t generals, they aren’t chiefs. They are nobody. In the villages they are less than nobody, they are work animals, breeding stock. Here it’s some better. But not good. I was trained in the Medical School at Besso. I am a doctor, not a nurse. Under the Bosses, I ran this hospital. Now a man runs it. Our men are the owners now. And we’re what we always were. Property. A Man of the People

Well, one thing we have learned in my lifetime, you don’t change a mind with a gun. You kill the boss and you become the boss. We must change that mind. The old slave mind, boss mind. A Man of the People

Loquacity is half of diplomacy, Havzhiva had already decided. The other half is silence. A Man of the People

“We are a free people now,” said the Young Chief, the Son and Heir, the Chosen.
“I haven’t yet known a free people,” Havzhiva said, polite, ambiguous. A Man of the People

“Lines and colors made with earth on earth may hold knowledge in them. All knowledge is local, all truth is partial,” Havzhiva said with an easy, colloquial dignity that he knew was an imitation of his mother, the Heir of the Sun, talking to foreign merchants. “No truth can make another truth untrue. All knowledge is a part of the whole knowledge. A true line, a true color. Once you have seen the larger pattern, you cannot go back to seeing the part as the whole.” A Man of the People

“Not many people have the choices I had. How to live, whom to live with, what work to do. Sometimes I think I was able to choose because I grew up where all choices had been made for me.”
“So you rebelled, made your own way,” she said, nodding.
He smiled. “I’m no rebel.”
“Bah!” she said again. “No rebel? You, in the thick of it, in the heart of our movement all the way?”
“Oh yes,” he said. “But not in a rebellious spirit That had to be your spirit. My job was acceptance, To keep an acceptant spirit. That’s what I learned growing up. To accept. Not to change the world. Only to change the soul. So that it can be in the world. Be rightly in the world.” A Man of the People

What the rules are. Ways of needing one another. Human ecology. What have we been doing here, all these years, but trying to find a good set of rules — a pattern that makes sense? A Man of the People

She knew nothing of the compound at all. She knew nothing beyond the beza, the women’s side of the House. She was kept there just as I had been kept in the compound, ignorant of anything outside. She had never smelled cowdung, as I had never seen flowers. A Woman’s Liberation

Perhaps you will say that I could not or should not have had pleasure in being used without my consent by my mistress, and if I did, I should not speak of it, showing even so little good in so great an evil. But I knew nothing of consent or refusal. Those are freedom words. A Woman’s Liberation

Now you may say in disgust that my story is all of such things, and there is far more to life, even a slave’s life, than sex. That is very true. I can say only that it may be in our sexuality that we are most easily enslaved, both men and women. It may be there, even as free men and women, that we find freedom hardest to keep. The politics of the flesh are the roots of power. A Woman’s Liberation

“Don’t believe any news,” he counseled me. “Especially don’t believe the neareals. Don’t ever go into them. They’re just as much lies as the rest, but if you feel and see a thing, you will believe it. And they know that. They don’t need guns if they own our minds.” A Woman’s Liberation

Bumpkin, you have it all wrong. No wonder. How could you have got it right? You think sex is something that gets done to you. It’s not. It’s something you do. With somebody else. Not to them. You never had any sex. All you ever knew was rape. A Woman’s Liberation

I don’t put myself first — politicians and capitalists do that. I put freedom first. Why can’t you cooperate with me? It goes two ways, Ahas! A Woman’s Liberation

“Men must bear the responsibility for the public side of life, the greater world the child will enter; women, for the domestic side of life, the moral and physical upbringing of the child. This is a division enjoined by God and Nature,” Erod answered.
“Then will emancipation for a woman mean she’s free to enter the beza, be locked in on the women’s side?”
“Of course not,” he began, but I broke in again, fearing his golden tongue — “Then what is freedom for a woman? Is it different from freedom for a man? Or is a free person free?” A Woman’s Liberation

I was utterly miserable, and yet fearless as I had never been. I was carefree. It was like dying. It would be foolish to worry about anything while one died. A Woman’s Liberation

“Well, they mean so much to me because I was illiterate when I came to the City, and it was the books that gave me freedom, gave me the world — the worlds — But now, here, I see how the net, the holos, the neareals mean so much more to people, giving them the present time. Maybe it’s just clinging to the past to cling to books. Yeowans have to go towards the future. And we’ll never change people’s minds just with words.”
He listened intently, as he had done at the meeting, and then answered slowly, “But words are an essential way of thinking. And books keep the words true.... I didn’t read till I was an adult, either.”
“You didn’t?”
“I knew how, but I didn’t. I lived in a village. It’s cities that have to have books,” he said, quite decisively, as if he had thought about this matter. “If they don’t, we keep on starting over every generation. It’s a waste. You have to save the words.”
A Woman’s Liberation

I have told the story I was asked to tell. I have closed it, as so many stories close, with a joining of two people. What is one man’s and one woman’s love and desire, against the history of two worlds, the great revolutions of our lifetimes, the hope, the unending cruelty of our species? A little thing. But a key is a little thing, next to the door it opens. If you lose the key, the door may never be unlocked. It is in our bodies that we lose or begin our freedom, in our bodies that we accept or end our slavery. So I wrote this book for my friend, with whom I have lived and will die free. A Woman’s Liberation

Gifts

You don't use gift. It uses you.

I am ashamed of you. I thought I had taught you better. Do you think a rag around your eyes will keep you from doing evil, if there's evil in your heart? And if there's good in your heart, how will you do good now? 'Will you stop the wind with a wall of grasses, or the tide by telling it to stay?'

Maybe you tricked yourself because you couldn't stand it that your son wasn't what you wanted. I don't know. I don't care. I know you can't use me any longer. My eyes or my blindness. They're not yours, they're mine. I won't let your lies cheat me any more. I won't let your shame shame me any more. Find yourself another son, since this one's not good enough.

the Lathe of Heaven

You are alone in the jungle, in the Mato Grosso, and you find a native woman on the path, dying of snakebite. You have serum in your kit, plenty of it, enough to cure thousands of snakebites. Do you withhold it because “this is the way it is” – do you “let it be”?
It would depend… if reincarnation is a fact, you might be keeping her from a better life and condemning her to live out a wretched one. Perhaps you cure her and she goes home and murders six people in the village. I know you’d give her the serum, because you have it, and feel sorry for her. But you don’t know whether what you are doing is good or evil or both…

To be God you have to know what you’re doing. And to do any good at all, just believing you’re right and your motives are good isn’t enough. You have to… be in touch.

Are there really people without resentment, without hate, she wondered. People who never go cross-grained to the universe? Who recognize evil, and resist evil, and yet are utterly unaffected by it? Of course there are. Countless, the living and the dead. Those who have returned in pure compassion to the wheel, those who follow the way that cannot be followed without knowing they follow it, the sharecropper's wife in Alabama and the lama in Tibet and the entomologist in Peru and the millworker in Odessa and the greengrocer in London and the goatherd in Nigeria and the old, old man sharpening a stick by a dry streambed somewhere in Australia, and all the others. There is not one of us who has not known them. There are enough of them, enough to keep us going. Perhaps.

Things don't have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What's the function of a galaxy? I don't know if our life has a purpose and I don't see that it matters. What does matter is that we're a part. Like a thread in a cloth or a grass-blade in a field. Itis and weare. What we do is like wind blowing on the grass.

A person who believes, as she did, that things fit: that there is a whole of which one is a part, and that in being a part one is whole: such a person has no desire whatever, at any time, to play God. Only those who have denied their being yearn to play at it.

the Left Hand of Darkness

My business is unlearning, not learning. And I'd rather not yet learn an art that would change the world entirely.

"The unknown," said Faxe's soft voice in the forest, "the unforetold, the unproven, that is what life is based on. Ignorance is the ground of thought. Unproof is the ground of action. If it were proven that there is no God there would be no religion. No Handdara, no Yomesh, no hearthgods, nothing. But also if it were proven that there is a God, there would be no religion… Tell me, Genry, what is known? What is sure, predictable, inevitable—the one certain thing you know concerning your future, and mine?"
"That we shall die."
"Yes. There's really only one question that can be answered, Genry, and we already know the answer. … The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next."

To oppose vulgarity is inevitably to be vulgar. You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road.

To be an atheist is to maintain God. His existence or his nonexistence, it amounts to much the same, on the plane of proof. Thus proof is a word not often used among the Handdarata, who have chosen not to treat God as a fact, subject either to proof or to belief: and they have broken the circle, and go free.

How does one hate a country, or love one? Tibe talks about it; I lack the trick of it. I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of certain ploughland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the nature ceases to apply? What is love of one’s country; is it hate of one’s uncountry?

"Fear's very useful. Like darkness; like shadows." Estraven's smile was an ugly split in a peeling, cracked brown mask, thatched with black fur and set with two flecks of black rock. "It's queer that daylight's not enough. We need the shadows, in order to walk."

He loved his country very dearly, sir, but he did not serve it, or you. He served the master I serve."
"The Ekumen?" said Argaven, startled.
"No. Mankind."

Malafrena

Freedom consists in doing what you can do best, your work, what you have to do, doesn't it? It's nothing you have or keep. It is action, it is life itself. But how can you live in the prison of others' servitude? I can't live for myself until everyone is free to do so!

You think freedom's yours to hand out?
What I have I can give.
Words, Itale.
These are words, too. This book. It brought the Bastille down. Those are words, those documents about your land. You've given your life to what they stand for.

You cannot speak to me as if I were a child. I'm not a child. I am what you made me, and I know what duty is; and I respect your principles; therefore I ask you to respect mine.

"I don't know if people can ever really explain," she said. "Not in words anyway." She saw he did not believe her. That was all right. She too had once believed that people could be entirely honest with one another; she did not consider herself better for having lost that faith.

"The important thing," Itale said, "is a force inside you, that belongs to you alone. It is yourself, actually, all that makes you a self, a man. Once you've found it, that force or will or need, whatever it is, then all you have to do is obey it-stay on the road it takes you." "But if you can't find the road...."
"You can if you want to."
"How many people really want to?"
"To find their destiny? To be themselves? Surely everyone does?"
"Takes work," said Paludeskar.
"Well, it does. And it's true most people don't even seem to try. They do what comes next, or what's expected of them, and get lost in a meaningless tangle of-of desires, frivoloties, contingencies," said Itale with an abolishing wave of his hand. "Why don't they simly do what's necessary?"
"Easier not to."
"But how stupid it is. Even if you sit in a chair for ten years still the years go by. So why not get up and walk, make it a journey? I used to envy adults when I was a boy, I thought they were all going somewhere, but now I see most of them not really going anywhere, never getting home, lost in eating and sleeping and talking and visiting and meaningless work-not the poor of course, I mean people free to do as they please-they do nothihng, they lost their souls out of sheer carelessness!"
"Civilisation's wasted on humanity," said Paludeskar. "If I had it to hand out I'd give it to the bees. Industrious little bastards."
"I don't know if it's wasted on us, but most of us seem to waste it."
"I used to think I'd like to add my bit. But I don't know. I suppose I really haven't anything to add."
"You do," Itale said, and Paludeskar relied with equal simplicity, "I know. But it's getting away from me. I'm not religious, you know, and all that, but I'm going to be twenty-five in November-I'd like to-You know, to think that I was going to do something worth doing-Before the end."

"I do not hope. I do not have time for hope. I am a poorer man than you know, than you're able to know. You have no idea what poverty is, Itale." He spoke with open affection, tenderly, so that Itale, confused between what he had said and how he said it, did not know what to reply.
"I gave up all I had," he said at last, painfully.
"You gave up all you could. It's not your fault you're rich!"
"What I care about-What I care about most in the world, it's no use talking about it here, I didn't know it myself, until I gave it up. That's what's so stupid, I keep going ahead, working for the time to come, that's what I care about, you say. But what I know is that my home is behind me, that I've lost it-let it go."
"Your home?"
"My home, no metaphore, I mean the land, the place, the house I was born in-the dirt, the stupid dirt! I am tied to that land like an os tied to a stake...."
"If you don't know where your home is, how shall you be a pilgrim?-You're a hypocrite, Itale, you wouldn't trade your homesickness for all the freedom in the world."
"But I am ashamed of it."
"Shame is the conscience of the rich."

They passed on the raod, she at sixteen and he at fifty-six, and she left him a blue cornflower twined in his horse's mane. It was queer, he thought, how you met and passed souls thus, and a few of them left sweetness with you. You passed one another and parted, it might as well be forever, and yet there remained the touch of sweetness, and of pain.

It did not make much sense to her at first. Laura was Laura, and was here;Itale was Itale, and was there. Piera's mind did not easily mix the absent with the present. Her imagination did not move lightly in and out of possibilities; so she was seldom envious, and seldom discontented. She was cautious about entering the realm of the possible, for when she did her will came with her.

"I never get bored. I just feel unnecessary. It's what Itale says here about Mr Estenskar, that's what I mean-"She already knew the sentence by heart:"'He seeks with all his strength to find the way that he and only he can, and hence must, follow.'So is Itale trying to do that.And he will do it.But anybody in the world could do everything I do."
"Nobody else could be Laura Sorde, though."
"What's the use being me if I don't do anything?"
"If you weren't you what would I do? Who would I talk to? How could I even be me? Anybody can run around doing things, but nobody can be you except you. And I hope you never change."
"I won't change in what I love," Laura said. Her face was turned to the western sunlight and the dark reflecting bulk of San Larenz Mountain above the lake."But you see, you're already in love, you've started on your way....I haven't. I have no way. I just wait and time goes by and by and by and life goes by....Surely I was made for more?"

"Your grandfater, he was young, a young man, seventy years ago. Young, like-like any young man now-like us. And then we get old. And maybe he was in love. Of course he was, with your grandmother, and they got married, and they lived, and had two sons, and they thought, and talked, and wanted things, and there was wind and rain and sunshine on the snow and they saw it, and ... now ... now us, and the people that come after us, and we can't know any of them, because time keeps going on and on. What was my own father like, when he was twenty? Does he even remember himself? I have to believe in the afterlife, I think. It would be so strange and senseless without it-never to understand-" She looked around the graves streaked with sun and shadow, and her light voice shook a little. "Why were they ever young?"

One must wait outside. There is no hiding away from storm, waste, injustice, death. There is no shelter, no stopping, only a pretense, a mean, stupid pretense of being safe and letting time and evil pass by outside. But we are all outside, Piera thought, and all defenseless. There is no safe house but death. Nothing of our own building will protect us, not the jails, nor the palaces, nor the comfortable houses. But the gradeur of knowing that, the pride and grandeur of being on one's own at last, alone, under the enormous and indifferent sky, unhoused and unprotected!

I believe that. But we may be wrong, Peri. Does love matter as much in marriage as the will to love? I don't know. I keep watching people, trying to find out.

"But you must not trust me, Laura!" He said desperately, all pretense of irony abandoned. "When I used to talk about freedom, I didn't know what prison was. I talked about the good but I-I didn't know evil-I am responsible for all the evil I saw, for the-For the deaths-There is nothing I can do about it. All I can do is be silent, not to say what I'm saying now. Let me be silent, I don't want to do more harm!"

Orsinian Tale

Don't talk like everybody else. They all say that. We can't leave Rakava, we're stuck here. I can't marry Sanzo Chekey, he's blind. We can't do anything we want to do, we haven't got enough money. It's all true, it's all perfectly true. But it's not all. Is it true that if you're a beggar you mustn't beg? What else can you do? If you get a piece of bread do you throw it away? If you felt like I do, Sanzo, you'd take what you were given and hold on to it! Conversations at Night

Let that kind of man look after himself, what's he to you, what's his life to you? Why did you go in after him when you saw the slide coming? For the same reason as you went into the pit, for the same reason as you keep working in the pit. For no reason. Because it just came up. It just happened. You let things happen to you, you take what's handed you, when you could take it all in your hands and do what you wanted with it! Brothers and Sisters

I feel like I was an ant, something smaller, so small you can hardly see it, crawling along on this huge floor. Getting nowhere because where is there to get. Brothers and Sisters

Does it matter where you go? All you have is what you are. Or what you meet. Brothers and Sisters

One mustn't choose too soon. If I marry I know what will happen, what I'll do, what I'll be. And I don't want to know. I want nothing, except my freedom. the Lady of Moge

Powers

Freedom is largely a matter of seeing that there are alternatives.

Again and again I thought of that night when Sallo and I were talking in the library as Sotur came in, and they tried to tell me why they were afraid. They had clung to each other, loving, helpless, and I hadn't understood. It wasn't only the family who had betray them. I had betrayed them. Not in acts. What could I had done, but I should have understood. I had been unwilling to see. I had blinded my eyes with the belief. I had believed that the rule of the master and the obedience of the slave were a mutual and sacred trust. I had believed that justice could exist in a society founded on injustice. "Belief in a lie is the life of the lie," that line from Caspro's book came back to me and cut like a razor. Honour can exist anywhere. Love can exist anywhere, but justice can exist only among people who found their relationships upon it.

Tales from Earthsea

"Whatever I am, whatever I can do, it's not enough," he said.
"It's never enough," Mead said. "And what can anyone do alone?" the Finder

"You already know it. You gave it to Flag. She gave it to you. Trust."
"Trust," the young man said. "Yes. But against- Against them?- Gelluk's gone. Maybe Losen will fall now. Will it make any difference? Will the slaves go free? Will beggars eat? Will justice be done? I think there's an evil in us, in humankind. Trust denies it. Leaps across it. Leaps the chasm. But it's there. And everything we do finally serves evil, because that's what we are. Greed and cruelty. I look at the world, at the forests and the mountain here, the sky, and it's all right, as it should be. But we aren't. People aren't. We're wrong. We do wrong. No animal does wrong. How could they? But we can, and we do. And we never stop." the Finder

"I could not save one, not one, not the one who saved me," he said. "Nothing I know could have set her free. I know nothing. If you know how to be free, I beg you, teach me!"
"Free!" said the tall woman, and her voice cracked like a whip. Then she looked at her companions, and after a while she smiled a little. Turning back to Medra, she said, "We're prisoners, and so freedom is a thing we study. You came here through the walls of our prison. Seeking freedom, you say. But you should know that leaving Roke may be even harder than coming to it. Prison within prison, and some of it we have built ourselves." She looked at the others. "What do you say?" she asked them. the Finder

"Why did you have me if you didn't want me?"
"How can you deliver babies properly if you haven't had one?" said her mother.
"So I was practice," Rose snarled.
"Everything is practice," Tangle said. Darkrose and Diamond

"My son, there is no reason," she said, suddenly passionate, "there is no reason why you should give up everything you love!"
He took her hand and kissed it as they sat side by side.
"Things don't mix," he said. "They ought to, but they don't. I found that out. When I left the wizard, I thought I could be everything. You know -- do magic, play music, be Father's son, love Rose.... It doesn't work that way. Things don't mix."
"They do, they do," Tuly said. "Everything is hooked together, tangled up!"
"Maybe things are, for women. But I...I can't be double-hearted."
"Double-hearted? You? You gave up wizardry because you knew that if you didn't, you'd betray it."
He took the word with a visible shock, but did not deny it.
"But why did you give up music?"
"I have to have a single heart. I can't play the harp while I'm bargaining with a mule-breeder. I can't sing ballads while I'm figuring what we have to pay the pickers to keep 'em from hiring out to Lowbough!" His voice shook a little now, a vibrato, and his eyes were not sad, but angry.
"So you put a spell on yourself," she said, "just as that wizard put one on you. A spell to keep you safe. To keep you with the mule-breeders, and the nut-pickers, and these." She struck the ledger full of lists of names and figures, a flicking, dismissive tap. "A spell of silence," she said. Darkrose and Diamond

"I gave it up, Darkrose. I had to either do it and nothing else, or not do it. You have to have a single heart."
"I don't see why," she said. "My mother can cure a fever and ease a childbirth and find a lost ring, maybe that's nothing compared to what the wizards and the dragonlords can do, but it's not nothing, all the same. And she didn't give up anything for it. Having me didn't stop her. She had me so that she could learn how to do it! Just because I learned how to play music from you, did I have to give up saying spells? I can bring a fever down now too. Why should you have to stop doing one thing so you can do the other?" Darkrose and Diamond

My teacher was with me, and his teacher with him," Ogion said when they praised him. "I could hold the Gate open because he held the Mountain still." They praised his modesty and did not listen to him. Listening is a rare gift, and men will have their heroes. Bones of the Earth

"Some of them are really bad and stupid," she said in a low voice. "They get into the School because they're rich. And they study there just to get richer. Or to get power."
"Well, of course they do," said Rose, "that's what they're there for!"
"But power - like you told me about - that .isn't the same as making people do what you want, or pay you -"
"Isn't it?"
"No!"
"If a word can heal, a word can wound," the witch said. "If a hand can kill, a hand can cure. It's a poor cart that goes only in one direction,"
"But on Roke, they learn to use power well, not for harm, not for gain."
"Everything's for gain some way, I'd say. People have to live. But what do I know? I make my living doing what I know how to do. But I don't meddle with the great arts, the perilous crafts, like summoning the dead," and Rose made the hand-sign to avert the danger spoken of.
"Everything's perilous," Dragonfly said, gazing now through the sheep, the hill, the trees, into still depths, a colorless, vast emptiness like the clear sky before sunrise.
Dragonfly

"I don't care what's "allowed"," he said, with a frown she had never seen on his face. "The Archmage himself said, Rules are made to he broken. Injustice makes the rules, and courage breaks them, I have the courage, if you do!" Dragonfly

Tehanu

This is a bad time-a time when even such a name can go unheard, can fall like a stone! Is listening not power? Listen, then: his name was Aihal. His name in death is Aihal, In the songs he will be known as Aihal of Gont. If there are songs to be made any more. He was a silent man. Now he’s very silent. Maybe there will be no songs, only silence. I don’t know. I’m very tired. I’ve lost my father and dear friend.

It was I who wouldn’t be taught. I left him. What did I want with his books? What good were they to me? I wanted to live, I wanted a man, I wanted my children, I wanted my life.

As cautiously, lowering her voice, Moss replied, “I don’t know, my dearie. I’ve thought on it. Often I’ve thought on it. The best I can say it is like this. A man’s in his skin, see, like a nut in its shell.” She held up her long, bent, wet fingers as if holding a walnut. “It’s hard and strong, that shell, and it’s all full of him. Full of grand man-meat, man-self. And that’s all. That’s all there is. It’s all him and nothing else, inside.” Tenar pondered awhile and finally asked, “But if he’s a wizard-” “Then it’s all his power, inside. His power’s himself, see. That’s how it is with him. And that’s all. When his power goes, he’s gone. Empty.” She cracked the unseen walnut and tossed the shells away. “Nothing.”
“And a woman, then?”
“Oh, well, dearie, a woman’s a different thing entirely. Who knows where a woman begins and ends? Listen, mistress, I have roots, I have roots deeper than this island. Deeper than the sea, older than the raising of the lands. I go back into the dark.” Moss’s eyes shone with a weird brightness in their red rims and her voice sang like an instrument. “I go back into the dark! Before the moon I was. No one knows, no one knows, no one can say what I am, what a woman is, a woman of power, a woman’s power, deeper than the roots of trees, deeper than the roots of islands, older than the Making, older than the moon. Who dares ask questions of the dark? Who’ll ask the dark its name?”

Many a wind blows here on the Overfell, some good, some ill. Some bears clouds and some fair weather, and some brings news to those who can hear it, but those who won’t listen can’t hear. Who am I to know, an old woman without mage-learning, without book-learning? All my learning’s in the earth, in the dark earth. Under their feet, the proud ones. Under their feet, the proud lords and mages. Why should they look down, the learned ones? What does an old witch-woman know?

I never saw a man till I was a woman grown. Only girls and women. And yet I didn’t know what women are, because women were all I did know. Like men who live among men, sailors, and soldiers, and mages on Roke-do they know what men are? How can they, if they never speak to a woman?

But wizards, as such, had nothing to do with courtesy. They were men of power. It was only power that they dealt with. And what power had she now? What had she ever had? As a girl, a priestess, she had been a vessel: the power of the dark places had run through her, used her, left her empty, untouched. As a young woman she had been taught a powerful knowledge by a powerful man and had laid it aside, turned away from it, not touched it. As a woman she had chosen and had the powers of a woman, in their time, and the time was past; her wiving and mothering was done. There was nothing in her, no power, for anybody to recognize.

And she went on, pondering the indifference of a man towards the exigencies that ruled a woman: that someone must be not far from a sleeping child, that one’s freedom meant another’s unfreedom, unless some ever-changing, moving balance were reached, like the balance of a body moving forward, as she did now, on two legs, first one then the other, in the practice of that remarkable art, walking.

I used to think, I could be dressed up as a warrior, with a lance and a sword and a plume and all, but it wouldn t fit, would it? What would I do with the sword? Would it make me a hero? I’d be myself in clothes that didn’t fit, is all, hardly able to walk.

Distraught, she used the defense of her appearance, her seeming to be a mere goodwife, a middle-aged house-keeper-but was it seeming? It was also truth, and these matters were more subtle even than the guises and shape- changes of wizards.

And yet there’s things I know that you’ve had no way of knowing, for all the learning of the runes, and the Old Speech, and all you’ve learned from the wise, and in the foreign lands.

And I know that all I understand about living is having your work to do, and being able to do it. That’s the pleasure, and the glory, and all. And if you can’t do the work, or it’s taken from you, then what’s any good? You have to have something.

It seems to me that we make up most of the differences, and then complain about them.

“Ours is only a little power, seems like, next to theirs,” Moss said. “But it goes down deep. It’s all roots. It’s like an old blackberry thicket. And a wizard’s power’s like a fir tree, maybe, great and tall and grand, but it’ll blow right down in a storm. Nothing kills a blackberry bramble.”

They had pulled her away, as ever, from what she knew, what she knew how to do, the world she had chosen to live in-a world not of kings and queens, great powers and dominions, high arts and journeys and adventures (she thought as she made sure Therru was with Heather, and set off into town), but of common people doing common things, such as marrying, and bringing up children, and farming, and sewing, and doing the wash.

“But I should be teaching her,” Tenar thought, distressed. “Teach her all, Ogion said, and what am I teaching her? Cooking and spinning?” Then another part of her mind said in Goha’s voice, “And are those not true arts, needful and noble? Is wisdom all words?”

She could feel the mage’s controlled impatience with her. What’s she holding out for? What is it she wants? he was thinking, no doubt. And she wondered why it was she could not tell him. His deafness silenced her. She could not even tell him he was deaf.

“I don’t know,” Lark said. “It was crazy, but maybe . . . I don’t know. What could you do but lock the doors? But it’s like we’re all our lives locking the doors. It’s the house we live in.”

“I will, Ged. Poor man! There’s no mercy in me, only justice. I wasn’t trained to mercy. Love is the only grace I have. Oh, Ged, don’t fear me! You were a man when I first saw you! It’s not a weapon or a woman can make a man, or magery either, or any power, anything but himself.”

Arha was taught that to be powerful she must sacrifice. Sacrifice herself and others. A bargain: give, and so get. And I cannot say that that’s untrue. But my soul can’t live in that narrow place-this for that, tooth for tooth, death for life. . . . There is a freedom beyond that. Beyond payment, retribution, redemption-beyond all the bargains and the balances, there is freedom.

“If power were trust,” she said. “I like that word. If it weren’t all these arrangements-one above the other-kings and masters and mages and owners- It all seems so unnecessary. Real power, real freedom, would lie in trust, not force.”

What’s youth or age? I don’t know. Sometimes I feel as if I’d been alive for a thousand years; sometimes I feel my life’s been like a flying swallow seen through the chink of a wall. I have died and been reborn, both in the dry land and here under the sun, more than once. And the Making tells us that we have all returned and return forever to the source, and that the source is ceaseless. Only in dying, life. . . . I thought about that when I was up with the goats on the mountain, and a day went on forever and yet no time passed before the evening came, and morning again. . . . I learned goat wisdom. So I thought, What is this grief of mine for? What man am I mourning? Ged the archmage? Why is Hawk the goatherd sick with grief and shame for him? What have I done that I should be ashamed?

You seemed, in your power, as free as man can be. But at what cost? What made you free? And I . . . I was made, molded like clay, by the will of the women serving the Old Powers, or serving the men who made all services and ways and places, I no longer know which. Then I went free, with you, for a moment, and with Ogion, But it was not my freedom. Only it gave me choice; and I chose. I chose to mold myself like clay to the use of a farm and a farmer and our children. I made myself a vessel, I know its shape. But not the clay. Life danced me. I know the dances. But I don’t know who the dancer is.

the Telling

"I warn you," he said, paying no attention, his voice more intense, "that there are people here who intend to use you for their own ends. These people are not picturesque relics of a time gone by. They are not harmless. They are vicious. They are the dregs of a deadly poison —the drug that stupefied my people for ten thousand years. They seek to drag us back into that paralysis, that mindless barbarism. They may treat you kindly, but I tell you they are ruthless. You are a prize to them. They'll flatter you, teach you lies, promise you miracles. They are the enemies of truth, of science. Their so-called knowledge is rant, superstition, poetry. Their practices are illegal, their books and rites are banned, and you know that. Do not put my people into the painful position of finding a scientist of the Ekumen in possession of illegal materials — participating in obscene, unlawful rites. I ask this of you —as a scientist of the Ekumen —" He had begun to stammer, groping for words.
Sutty looked at him, finding his emotion unnerving, grotesque. She said drily, "I am not a scientist. I read poetry. And you need not tell me the evils religion can do. I know them."

To learn a belief without belief is to sing a song without the tune

They saw that religion is a useful tool for those in power. But there was no native theism or deism here. On Aka, god is a word without referent. No capital letters. No creator, only creation. No eternal father to reward and punish, justify injustice, ordain cruelty, offer salvation. Eternity not an endpoint but a continuity. Primal division of being into material and spiritual only as two-as-one, or one in two aspects. No hierarchy of Nature and Supernatural. No binary Dark/Light, Evil/ Good, or Body/Soul. No afterlife, no rebirth, no immortal disembodied or reincarnated soul. No heavens, no hells. The Akan system is a spiritual discipline with spiritual goals, but they're exactly the same goals it seeks for bodily and ethical well-being. Right action is its own end. Dharma without karma.

"O Ram!" she said. She sat back, as far from him as she could get, and hugged her knees. She spoke slowly, stopping after each sentence. "You people have learned everything we did wrong, and nothing we did right. I wish we'd never come to Aka. But since in our own stupid intellectual hubris we did so, we should either have refused you the information you demanded, or taught you Terran history. But of course you wouldn't have listened. You don't believe in history. You threw out your own history like garbage."

"I know who you are," she said. "You're my enemy. The true believer. The righteous man with the righteous mission. The one that jails people for reading and burns the books. That persecutes people who do exercises the wrong way. That dumps out the medicine and pisses on it. That pushes the button that sends the drones to drop the bombs. And hides behind a bunker and doesn't get hurt. Shielded by God. Or the state. Or whatever lie he uses to hide his envy and self-interest and cowardice and lust for power. It took me a while to see you, though. You saw me right away. You knew I was your enemy. Was unrighteous. How did you know it?"

'My brother, my husband, my love, my self, you and I believed that we would defeat our enemy and bring peace to our land. But belief is the wound that knowledge heals, and death begins the Telling of our life.

After a prolonged silence she said, "I beg your pardon for the way I've been talking to you. I disliked your manner to me, on the boat and in Okzat-Ozkat. I came to hate you when I thought you responsible for destroying Maz Sotyu Ang's herbary, his lifework, his life. And for hounding my friends. And hounding me. I hate the bigotry you believe in. But I'll try not to hate you."
"Why?" he asked. His voice was cold, as she remembered it.
"Hate eats the hater," she quoted from a familiar text of the Telling.

They used drones, unmanned bombers. From hundreds of kilos away, in the Dakotas. They hid underground and pressed a button and sent the drones. They blew up the college, the library, blocks and blocks of the downtown. Thousands of people were killed. Things like that happened all the time in the Holy Wars. She was just one person. Nobody, nothing, one person. I wasn't there. I heard the noise.

Voices

I wonder if men find it easier than women to consider people not as bodies, as lives, but as numbers, figures, toys of the mind to be pushed about a battle ground of the mind. This disembodiment gives pleasure, exiting them and freeing them to act for the sake of acting, for the sake of manipulating the figures, the game pieces. Love of country, or honour, or freedom, then, may be names they give that pleasure to justify it to the god and to the people who suffer and kill and die in the game. So those words – love, honour, freedom – are degraded from their true sense. Then people may come to hold them in contempt as meaningless, and poet must struggle to give them back their truth.

the Word for the World is Forest

"I can't see why any hilfer voluntarily ties himself up to an Open Colony. You know the people you're studying are going to get plowed under, and probably wiped out. It's the way things are. It's human nature, and you must know you can't change that. Then why come and watch the process? Masochism?"
"I don't know what 'human nature' is. Maybe leaving descriptions of what we wipe out is part of human nature.—Is it much pleasanter for an ecologist, really?"
Gosse ignored this. "All right then, write up your descriptions. But keep out of the carnage. A biologist studying a rat colony doesn't start reaching in and rescuing pet rats of his mat get attacked, you know."
At this Lyubov had blown loose. He had taken too much. "No, of course not," he said. "A rat can be a pet, but not a friend."

"Should we have let them live?" said Selver with vehemence equal to Gosse's, but softly, his voice singing a little." To breed like insects in the carcase of the World? To overrun us? We killed them to sterilise you. I know what a realist is, Mr. Gosse. Lyubov and I have talked about these words. A realist is a man who knows both the world and his own dreams. You're not sane: there's not one man in a thousand of you who knows how to dream. Not even Lyubov and he was the best among you. You sleep, you wake and forget your dreams, you sleep again and wake again, and so you spend your whole lives, and you think that is being, life, reality! You are not children, you are grown men, but insane. And that's why we had to kill you, before you drove us mad. Now go back and talk about reality with the other insane men. Talk long, and well!"

We're both gods, you and I. You're an insane one, and I'm not sure whether I'm sane or not. But we are gods. There will never be another meeting in the forest like this meeting now between us. We bring each other such gifts as gods bring. You gave me a gift, the killing of one's kind, murder. Now, as well as I can, I give you my people's gift, which is not killing. I think we each find each other's gift heavy to carry. However, you must carry it alone.

"Kill you?" Selver said, and his eyes looking up at Davidson seemed to shine, very clear and terrible, in the twilight of the forest. "I can't kill you, Davidson. You're a god. You must do it yourself."

"Sometimes a god comes," Selver said. "He brings a new way to do a thing, or a new thing to be done. A new kind of singing, or a new kind of death. He brings this across the bridge between the dream-time and the world-time. When he has done this, it is done. You cannot take things that exist in the world and try to drive them back into the dream, to hold them inside the dream with walls and pretenses. That is insanity. What is, is. There is no use pretending, now, that we do not know how to kill one another."

But you must not pretend to have reasons to kill one another. Murder has no reason.

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