The Lathe of Heaven

by Ursula K. Le Guin

The infinite possibility, the unlimited and unqualified wholeness of being of the uncommitted, the nonacting, the uncarved: the being who, being nothing but himself, is everything.

He never spoke with any bitterness at all, no matter how awful the things he said. 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?

“I don’t do anything,” Orr said morosely. “I never have done anything. I just dream. And then it is.”

he sat down on the bed. “Do you –” He stuttered several times. “Do you remember anything about April, four years ago – in ’98?” “April? No, nothing special.” “That’s when the world ended,”

They rewrote the Constitution in 1984, the way you remember, but things were so bad by then that it was a lot worse, it didn’t even pretend to be a democracy any more, it was a sort of police state, but it didn’t work, it fell apart right away.

I’ve told myself ever since that it was a dream. That it was a dream! But it wasn’t. This is. This isn’t real. This world isn’t even probable. It was the truth. It was what happened. We are all dead, and we spoiled the world before we died. There is nothing left. Nothing but dreams.”

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.

Heaven and Earth are not humane. – Lao Tse: V

When you dream this time, you’ll dream big, baby. Big enough to stop this crazy invasion, and get us clean over into another continuum, where we can start fresh. That’s what you do, you know. You don’t change things, or lives; you shift the whole continuum.”

Those who dream of feasting wake to lamentation. – Chuang Tse: II

It might very well be that there was no Heather Lelache: that – this time – she had never been born. After facing this, Orr faced another possibility. If she walked by right now looking for me, he thought, would I recognize her? She was brown. A clear, dark, amber brown, like Baltic amber, or a cup of strong Ceylon tea. But no brown people went by. No black people, no white, no yellow, no red. They came from every part of the earth to work at the World Planning Center or to look at it, from Thailand, Argentina, Ghana, China, Ireland, Tasmania, Lebanon, Ethiopia, Vietnam, Honduras, Lichtenstein. But they all wore the same clothes, trousers, tunic, raincape; and underneath the clothes they were all the same color. They were gray.

Orr had looked down at his own pale-gray hands, with their short gray nails. “I suppose that you suggested that there be no more color problems. No question of race.” “Precisely. And of course I was envisaging a political and ethical solution. Instead of which, your primary thinking processes took the usual short cut, which usually turns out to be a short circuit, but this time they went to the root. Made the change biological and absolute. There never has been a racial problem! You and I are the only two men on earth, George, who know that there ever was a racial problem! Can you conceive of that? Nobody was ever outcaste in India – nobody was ever lynched in Alabama – nobody was massacred in Johannesburg! War’s a problem we’ve outgrown and race is a problem we never even had! Nobody in the entire history of the human race has suffered for the color of his skin. You’re learning, George! You’ll be the greatest benefactor humanity has ever had in spite of yourself. All the time and energy humans have wasted on trying to find religious solutions to suffering, then you come along and make Buddha and Jesus and the rest of them look like the fakirs they were. They tried to run away from evil, but we, we’re uprooting it – getting rid of it, piece by piece!”

The quality of the will to power is, precisely, growth. Achievement is its cancellation. To be, the will to power must increase with each fulfillment, making the fulfillment only a step to a further one. The vaster the power gained, the vaster the appetite for more.

Orr bought a tasteless plateful of fish and chips with African peanut sauce at a crowded counter-restaurant; while he ate it he thought sorrowfully, well, once I stood her up at Dave’s, and now she’s stood me up. He could not face his grief, his bereavement. Dream-grief. The loss of a woman who had never existed. He tried to taste his food, to watch other people. But the food had no taste and the people were all gray.

If the experiment or technique cannot be repeated successfully by others, it is of no use.

When I have made sure of my techniques, then you’ll be free to go. Absolutely free. And since you’ve claimed all along that all you want is to be free of responsibility, incapable of dreaming effectively, then I’ll promise that my very first effective dream will include your ‘cure’ – you’ll never have an effective dream again.”

I can autosuggest an entire dream and dream it in every detail precisely as thought out by my waking mind. I’ve done so, every night this past week, getting in training. When the Augmentor synchronizes the generalized e-state pattern with my own d-state, such dreams will be effectivized. And then – and then –” The lips within the curly beard parted in a straining, staring smile, a grin of ecstasy that made Orr turn away as if he had seen something never meant to be seen, both terrifying and pathetic.

“Then this world will be like heaven, and men will be like gods!”

genius consists in being in the right time in the right place!”

Il descend, réveillé, l’autre côté du rêve. – Hugo, Contemplations

“One swallow does not make a summer,”

Do you need anybody? I need somebody to love.

I get by, with a little help, With a little help from my friends.

Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; re-made all the time, made new.

Nobody was in Haber’s big, sleek waiting room. George said his name to a desklike thing by the door, an auto-receptionist, he explained to Heather. She was making a nervous funny about did they have autoeroticists, too, when a door opened, and Haber stood in the doorway.

As if the electrode things were little suction cups that would drain the thoughts out of George’s head and turn them into scribbles on a piece of paper, the meaningless writing of the mad.

The light of the eruption was terrible and gorgeous.

It was there. It was an area, or perhaps a time-period, of a sort of emptiness. It was the presence of absence: an unquantifiable entity without qualities, into which all things fell and from which nothing came forth. It was horrible, and it was nothing. It was the wrong way.

She found that all things were gone and that she was lost in the panic dark, crying out her husband’s name with no voice, desolate, until she sank down in a ball curled about the center of her own being, and fell forever through the dry abyss.

He went forward. He knew as he went that he would lose all he had. He entered the eye of the nightmare.

He looked at the machine, its cabinets all standing open; it should be destroyed, he thought. But he had no idea how to do it, nor any will to try. Destruction was not his line; and a machine is more blameless, more sinless even than any animal. It has no intentions whatsoever but our own.

Starlight asked Non-Entity, ‘Master, do you exist? or do you not exist?’ He got no answer to his question, however …

His dreams, like waves of the deep sea far from any shore, came and went, rose and fell, profound and harmless, breaking nowhere, changing nothing. They danced the dance among all the other waves in the sea of being. Through his sleep the great, green sea turtles dived, swimming with heavy inexhaustible grace through the depths, in their element.