A Wizard of Earthsea (Earthsea Cycle, #1)

by Ursula K. Le Guin

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

But need alone is not enough to set power free: there must be knowledge.

‘But I haven’t learned anything yet!’ ‘Because you haven’t found out what I am teaching,’ replied the mage,

‘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 half-mile or so, and said at last, ‘To hear, one must be silent.’

In that moment Ged understood the singing of the bird, and the language of the water falling in the basin of the fountain, and the shape of the clouds, and the beginning and end of the wind that stirred the leaves: it seemed to him that he himself was a word spoken by the sunlight.

To change this rock into a jewel, you must change its true name. And to do that, my son, even to so small a scrap of the world, is to change the world. It can be done. Indeed it can be done. It is the art of the Master Changer, and you will learn it, when you are ready to learn it. But you must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on the act.

It must follow knowledge, and serve need. To light a candle is to cast a shadow …’

Press a mage for his secrets and he would always talk, like Ogion, about balance, and danger, and the dark.

‘He who would be Seamaster must know the true name of every drop of water in the sea.’

For magic consists in this, the true naming of a thing.

‘Many a mage of great power,’ he had said, ‘has spent his whole life to find out the name of one single thing – one single lost or hidden name. And still the lists are not finished. Nor will they be, till world’s end. Listen, and you will see why. In the world under the sun, and in the other world that has no sun, there is much that has nothing to do with men and men’s speech, and there are powers beyond our power.

But the death of a great mage, who has many times in his life walked on the dry steep hillsides of death’s kingdom, is a strange matter: for the dying man goes not blindly, but surely, knowing the way.

Thus to Ged who had lost faith in himself, Vetch had given that gift only a friend can give, the proof of unshaken, unshakeable trust.

‘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 …’

Heal the wound and cure the illness, but let the dying spirit go.

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,

not quite. He had almost yielded, but not quite. He had not consented. It is very hard for evil to take hold of the unconsenting soul.

‘I have come back to you as I left: a fool,’ the young man said, his voice harsh and thickened.