The Wind's Twelve Quarters

by Ursula K. Le Guin

‘Professionalism’ is no virtue; a professional is simply one who gets paid for doing what an amateur does for love. But in a money economy, the fact of being paid means your work is going to be circulated, is going to be read; it’s the means to communication, which is the artist’s goal.

The bread had been his dinner, the book had been his lifework. Both were dry.

‘The Masters’ was my first published genuine authentic real virgin-wool science fiction story, by which I mean a story in which or to which the existence and the accomplishments of science are, in some way, essential.

The figure of the scientist is a quite common one in my stories, and most often a rather lonely one, isolated, an adventurer, out on the edge of things.

It has a good sentence in it, though; ‘He had been trying to measure the distance between the earth and God.’

She was filthy, she was trembling, and her face was blank and mad, for she had lost that minimal confidence in the world which is called sanity.

Time stretches and shrinks; changes with the eye, with the age, with the star; does all except reverse itself – or repeat.’

And yet, at very nearly but never quite the speed of light, she voyages. She is the voyage. Quick as thought. She has doubled her age when she arrives, less than a day older,

Down the hatch it went, the bit of bitter candy, the acid-drop, the sourball, the peppy packet of power, etching a little corroded trail of terror behind it all the way down his esophagus like a poisoned snail swallowed whole.

illegitimate to be sure but this is not unusual in America where so little is legal that even a baby can be illegitimate)

It was hard to explain that he had already come back from the trip he had not made.

It is hard to meet a stranger. Even the greatest extravert meeting even the meekest stranger knows a certain dread, though he may not know he knows it. Will he make a fool of me wreck my image of myself invade me destroy me change me? Will he be different from me? Yes, that he will. There’s the terrible thing: the strangeness of the stranger.

he did not know his name. He was a blank, a cipher, an x. He had a body and all that, but he had no who.

‘How can I say who I am when I can’t say what I am?’ ‘How would you find out what you are?’ ‘If I had anything – If I did something—’ ‘That would make you be?’ ‘Of course it would.’ ‘I never thought of that. Well, then, it doesn’t matter what name you’re called by; any one will do; it’s what you do that counts.’

regular science fiction story, developed not for action/adventure, but psychologically. Unless physical action reflects psychic action, unless the deeds express the person, I get very bored with adventure stories; often it seems that the more action there is, the less happens. Obviously my interest is in what goes on inside. Inner space and all that. We all have forests in our minds. Forests unexplored, unending. Each of us gets lost in the forest, every night, alone.

I was also using science as a synonym for art. What happens to the creative mind when it is driven underground?

Perhaps this story is not about science, or about art, but about the mind, my mind, any mind, that turns inward to itself.

Not seeing the sky, one cannot know the turning of the earth. All the processes of time, the sun’s bright arch and the moon’s phases, the planet’s dance, the wheeling of the constellations around the pole star, the vaster wheeling of the seasons of the stars, all these were lost, the warp on which his life was woven. Here there was no time.

open my eyes, and I see the Face of God. And I’d give all my life just to see one human face again, to see a tree, just a tree, a chair – a plain wooden chair, ordinary – They can keep their God, they can keep their Light. I want the world back. I want questions, not the answer. I want my own life back, and my own death!’

‘Where do you get your ideas from, Ms Le Guin?’ From forgetting Dostoyevsky and reading road signs backwards, naturally. Where else?

The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.

to praise despair is to condemn delight,

Happiness is based on a just discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what is destructive.

To exchange all the goodness and grace of every life in Omelas for that single, small improvement: to throw away the happiness of thousands for the chance of the happiness of one: that would be to let guilt within the walls indeed.

After a lifetime of living on hope because there is nothing but hope, one loses the taste for victory. A real sense of triumph must be preceded by real despair. She had unlearned despair a long time ago. There were no more triumphs. One went on.

She learned from them, but they didn’t learn from her; they had learnt all she had to teach long ago, from her books, from the Movement. They just came to look, as if she were the Great Tower in Rodarred, or the Canyon of the Tulaevea. A phenomenon, a monument.

‘What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice.’

Nobody looked at her. Odo, who was Odo? Famous revolutionary, author of Community, The Analogy, etc etc. She, who was she? An old woman with grey hair and a red face sitting on a dirty doorstep in a slum, muttering to herself. True? Was that she? Certainly it was what anybody passing her saw. But was it she, herself, any more than the famous revolutionary, etc, was? No. It was not. But who was she, then? The one who loved Taviri.