The Unreal and the Real: The Selected Short Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin

by Ursula K. Le Guin

The word responsible means that you have to answer. You can’t not answer. You’d might rather not answer, but you have to. When you answer you are making your soul, so that it has a shape to it, and size, and some staying power.

It’s like all the time I was working keeping house and raising the kids and making love and earning our keep I thought there was going to come a time or there would be some place where all of it all came together. Like it was words I was saying, all my life, all the kinds of work, just a word here and a word there, but finally all the words would make a sentence, and I could read the sentence. I would have made my soul and know what it was for.

But I have made my soul and I don’t know what to do with it. Who wants it? I have lived sixty years. All I’ll do from now on is the same as what I have done only less of it, while I get weaker and sicker and smaller all the time, shrinking and shrinking around myself, and die. No matter what I did, or made, or know.

So is all the responsibility you take only useful then, but no use later—disposable? What’s the use, then? All the work you did is just gone. It doesn’t make anything. But I may be wrong. I hope so, I would like to have more trust in dying. Maybe it’s worth while, like some kind of answering, coming into another place. Like I felt that winter in the Siskiyous, walking on the snow road between black firs under all the stars, that I was the same size as the universe, the same thing as the universe. And if I kept on walking ahead there was this glory waiting for me. In time I would come into glory. I knew that. So that’s what I made my soul for. I made it for glory. And I have known a good deal of glory. I’m not ungrateful. But it doesn’t last. It doesn’t come together to make a place where you can live, a house. It’s gone and the years go. What’s left? Shrinking and forgetting and thinking about aches and acid indigestion and cancers and pulse rates and bunions until the whole world is a room that smells like urine, is that what all the work comes to, is that the end of the babies’ kicking legs, the children’s eyes, the loving hands, the wild rides, the light on water, the stars over the snow? Somewhere inside it all there has to still be the glory.