The Found and the Lost: The Collected Novellas of Ursula K. Le Guin

by Ursula K. Le Guin

“there are things I do not know, which you know.”

“What was given me I give,” she said, meaning there was no question of payment or obligation.

She smiled; she had a quick, catching smile, but the young man listened with unchanging, intense seriousness. Her look rested on his face tenderly.

The world is sacred, Havzhiva. The cosmos is sacred. That’s not a knowledge I ever had to give up.

I learned, here and there, only increased it. There’s nothing that is not sacred.”

“You can choose the local sacredness or the great one. In the end they’re the same. But ...

‘To know there is a choice is to have to make the choice: change or stay: river or rock.’ The Peoples are the roc...

“Yes,” she said decisively. “One can be more than one kind of being. I have work to do, there.”

They stared at each other, the dear friends, the lovers.

He isn’t crazy, brother, but he is lame. He can’t walk. He can’t walk with us. So, if a man can’t walk, what should he do?” “Sit still and sing,” Granite said slowly. “If he can’t sit still? He can fly.” “Fly?” “They have wings for him, brother.”

What they had to do was grieve.

The old knowledge had been difficult but not distressing.

It had been all paradox and myth, and it had made sense. The new knowledge was all fact and reason, and it made no sense.

knowledge that his life, any life was one flicker of light for one moment on the surface of that river was sometimes distressing, sometimes restful.

They are childish, irrational beliefs! he said. They looked at him, and he knew he had said something childish and irrational.

She was the country he had left his own country to discover. She was what he sought to be. She was what he sought.

He was utterly happy when he was with her. For a long time he asked nothing beyond that, to be with her.

historians retained the vast human capacity for bigotry.

what did he have to offer her? She had and was everything. She was complete.

She had never expected to adore anybody, let alone to be adored.

She had led an orderly life, in which the controls were individual and internal, not social and external as they had been in Zhiv’s life in Stse.

Be fair, Zhiv!” After a long silence, he nodded. She sat stricken, understanding that she had won. She had won badly.

She was scared by the darkness in him, his grief, his mute acceptance of betrayal.

This is the wrong life. You know that! What are you doing here? Are you lost? Do you want to know the way home? Here it is. Listen.”

He was not going to die now, but he was very unwell.

All knowledge is partial—infinitesimally partial.

There was no going back and no going forward. So he must turn aside.

He had no hope of joy.

“If you want danger, it’s dangerous,” he said, “and if you like hope, it’s hopeful.

I believe in it because it is impossible.

All this was in a foreign language, which he seemed to understand. At least he understood “don’t worry,” and obeyed.

“I’ll listen. I’ll do what I can.” He would never learn much distrust.

She made a little soft sound. “Bereft,” she said. “And no wife?” “No.” “We will be your mothers, your sisters, your daughters. Your people. I kissed you for that love that will be between us. You will see.”

Caught in it, soon almost lost in it, he kept thinking now—now one of them will raise his voice—now the leos will give a shout, a shout of triumph, letting his voice free!—But he did not. None did.

But they never once sang above a whisper.

“No truth can make another truth untrue.

But I knew nothing of consent or refusal. Those are freedom words.

I would die before I would go back to Shomeke. I would die before I left this free world, my world, to go back to the place of slavery. But whatever I knew in my youth of beauty, of love, and of hope, was there. And there it was betrayed. All that is built upon that foundation in the end betrays itself.

It was a cruel death. It went on and on.

How can I tell you what that was to us, to see that, to see that gate stand open? How can I tell you?

She was a City woman, quick-thinking and quick-talking, impatient, aggressive, sensitive.

I had not felt anger while I lived at Zeskra. I could not. It would have eaten me. Here there was room for it, but I found no use for it. I lived with it in silence.

The first thing I did freely, as a free woman, was to shut my door.

Owners had paid the money but Ahas had done it. He came often to see us. He was the only link that had not broken between me and my childhood.

body. I was angry now at every man who looked at me as men look at women. I was angry at women who looked at me seeing me sexually. To Lady Tazeu all I had been was my body.

Even to Erod who would not touch me that was all I had been. Flesh to touch or not to touch, as they pleased. To use or not to use, as they chose. I hated the sexual parts of myself, my geni...

What I loved to learn was history. I had grown up without any history. There was nothing at Shomeke or Zeskra but the way things were. Nobody knew anything about any time when things had been different. Nobody knew there was any place where things might be different. We were enslaved by the present time.

We were to be changed, we were to be freed, just as we had been owned. In history I saw that any freedom has been made, not given.

For a moment it disturbed me deeply. Then it ceased to trouble me and I felt a great curiosity, almost a yearning, a drawing to her. I wished to know her, to know what she knew.

In me the owner’s soul was struggling with the free soul. So it will do all my life.