The Dispossessed: A Novel (Hainish Cycle, #6)

by Ursula K. Le Guin

A stone lay there. It was dark like the wall, but on it, or inside it, there was a number; and 5 he thought at first, then took it for 1, then understood what it was—the primal number, that was both unity and plurality. “That is the cornerstone,” said a voice of dear familiarity, and Shevek was pierced through with joy.

Our earth is their Moon; our Moon is their earth.”

thousand million of them, and twenty million of us?

responsible to one another. And that responsibility is our freedom. To avoid it, would be to lose our freedom.

Wasn’t it immoral to do work you didn’t enjoy?

“I think men mostly have to learn to be anarchists. Women don’t have to learn.”

“Love is the true condition of human life.”

I’m trying to say what I think brotherhood really is. It begins—it begins in shared pain.”

This is what a world is supposed to look like, Shevek thought.

He had had no equals. Here, in the realm of inequity, he met them at last.

It was a revelation, a liberation. Physicists, mathematicians, astronomers, logicians, biologists, all were here at the University, and they came to him or he went to them, and they talked, and new worlds were born of their talking. It is of the nature of idea to be communicated: written, spoken, done. The idea is like grass. It craves light, likes crowds, thrives on crossbreeding, grows better for being stepped on.

They knew no relation but possession. They were possessed.

ignorance. We ignore you; you ignore us.

He felt the need for caution. But he felt more strongly the need that had brought him across the dry abyss from the other world, the need for communication, the wish to unbuild walls.

To be whole is to be part; true voyage is return.

he had been fool enough to think that he might serve to bring together two worlds to which he did not belong.

the Free World of Anarres was a mining colony of Urras.

“Excess is excrement,” Odo wrote in the Analogy. “Excrement retained in the body is a poison.”

was all there, all the work, all the life of the city, open to the eye and to the hand.

Awe came into him. He knew himself blessed though he had not asked for blessing.

Odo was an alien: an exile.

Since he was very young he had known that in certain ways he was unlike anyone else he knew.

He loved Shevek, but he could not show him what freedom is, that recognition of each person’s solitude which alone transcends it.

Can true function arise from basic dysfunction?

He gave way to the fear that had come with her, the sense of the breaking of promises, the incoherence of time. He broke.

Even from the brother there is no comfort in the bad hour, in the dark at the foot of the wall.

“Do they expect students not to be anarchists?” he said. “What else can the young be? When you are on the bottom, you must organize from the bottom up!”

It appeared to Shevek that their freedom from obligation was in exact proportion to their lack of freedom of initiative.

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 had not been free from anything: only free to do anything.

acres of luxuries, acres of excrement.

All the people in all the shops were either buyers or sellers. They had no relation to the things but that of possession.

What defines brotherhood but nonbrotherhood? Definition by exclusion, my dear!

No wonder he had felt his existence to be cut off, artificial, among men, always men, lacking the tension and attraction of the sexual difference.

There is no other reward, on Anarres, no other law. One’s own pleasure, and the respect of one’s fellows. That is all.

art was not considered as having a place in life, but as being a basic technique of life, like speech.

The music was a more urgent need, a deeper satisfaction, than the companionship.

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!”

“I don’t care what he sees. We don’t want him seen. Have you been reading the birdseed papers? Or the broadsheets that were circulating last week in Old Town, about the ‘Forerunner’? The myth—the one who comes before the millennium—‘a stranger, an outcast, an exile, bearing in empty hands the time to come.’ They quoted that.

Oiie stepped away from the bed, the fear and the love he felt for Shevek rising up in him, each strangling the other.

was not “the real Urras.” The dignity and beauty of the room he and Efor were in was as real as the squalor to which Efor was native. To him a thinking man’s job was not to deny one reality at the expense of the other, but to include and to connect. It was not an easy job.

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 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.

I’m going to go fulfill my proper function in the social organism. I’m going to go unbuild walls.”

With the myth of the State out of the way, the real mutuality and reciprocity of society and individual became clear.

and revolution begins in the thinking mind.

If you evade suffering you also evade the chance of joy.

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.

Even pain counts.

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.”