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

by Ursula K. Le Guin

Consistency is a virtue until it gets annoying.

They bore him down with their grief as large as life.

He employed all his strength to learn his new trade, that of weakness. The silence in which he passed the days clung to him

Stefan felt peace come into him, as intangible and real as the coming of the darkness.

Stefan blew in gusts like autumn wind, bitter and fitful; you didn’t know where you were with him.

seeing nothing but the motion of the wind.

Rosana realised that though their feet were on the earth they themselves stuck up into the sky, it was the sky they were walking through, just as birds flew through it.

feeling his gaze on her back like a hand on her flesh.

Does it matter where you go? All you have is what you are. Or what you meet.”

clearing a tunnel through solid black with its headlights.

They were all shouting at once in their hoarse, worn-out voices. They had all been talking and listening and drinking bad coffee and living for days, for weeks, on love. Yes, on love; these are lovers’ quarrels. It is for love that he pleads, it is for love that she rages. It was always for love. That’s why the camera snout came poking and sucking into this dirty basement room where the lovers meet. It craves love, the sight of love; for if you can’t have the real thing you can watch it on TV, and soon you don’t know the real thing from the images on the little screen where everything, as he said, can be done in two seconds. But the lovers know the difference.

You know the song, that old song with words like “land,” “love,” “free,” in the language you have known the longest. Its words make stone part from stone, its words prevent tanks, its words transform the world, when it is sung at the right time by the right people, after enough people have died for singing it.

Leaves overhead and underfoot; an air like green water through which birds swam and the dark trunks rose lifting their burdens, their crowns, towards the other element, the sky.

galaxy after galaxy of green leaves without end.

What she needs, at least one thing she needs, is companionship. After all why should she eat? Who needs her to be alive? What we call psychosis is sometimes simply realism. But human beings can’t live on realism alone.

But the country? You mean the thing on the map, lines, everything inside the lines is good and nothing outside them matters? How can an adult love such a childish idea?”

Eternity is none of my business. I am an oak, no more, no less. I have my duty, and I do it; I have my pleasures, and enjoy them, though they are fewer, since the birds are fewer, and the wind’s foul. But, long-lived though I may be, impermanence is my right. Mortality is my privilege. And it has been taken from me.

He saw me under the aspect of eternity. He confused me with eternity. And because he died in that moment of false vision, because it can never change, I am caught in it, eternally. This is unendurable. I cannot uphold such an illusion.

If it is necessary to the Order of Things, I will kill drivers of cars, though killing is not a duty usually required of oaks. But it is unjust to require me to play the part, not of the killer only, but of death. For I am not death. I am life: I am mortal.

If they wish to see death visibly in the world, that is their business, not mine. I will not act Eternity for them. Let them not turn to the trees for death. If that is what they want to see, let them look into one another’s eyes and see it there.

the music that crashes and cries out like the sea and the seabirds, bringing relief and a burst of tears to the grief-dried heart.

One day is the day for moving on, and overnight, the next day, there is no more good in moving on, because you have come where you were going to.

Not that they lived together thirty years without some quarrelling. Two rocks sitting side by side would get sick of each other in thirty years, and who knows what they say now and then when nobody is listening.

Thirty years, how can you say how long that is, and yet no longer than the saying of it: thirty years. How can you say how heavy the weight of thirty years is, and yet you can hold all of them together in your hand lighter than a bit of ash, briefer than a laugh in the dark.

the black cats who lived in the barn kept discreetly out of the story.

I HAVE TOLD THIS TRUE story which May gave to us as truly as I could, and now I want to tell it as fiction, yet without taking it from her: rather to give it back to her, if I can do so.

She considers it natural for children to shrink away from somebody partway dead, and knows that when they’re a little older and have got used to her they’ll ask her for stories.

It’s still your story, Aunt May; it was your lion. He came to you. He brought his death to you, a gift; but the men with the guns won’t take gifts, they think they own death already. And so they took from you the honor he did you, and you felt that loss.

What a safety net they have, don’t they? All the women the knots in the net.”

The last week was the worst thing I will ever go through.” She knew what she was saying, and it was tremendous. To be able to say that meant that you need not be afraid again. But it seemed like you had to lose a good deal for that gain.

I guess that is the point there. They clean dirt till it is a sanitary substance and spread it out to look like dirt so you don’t have to touch dirt.

Walt Disney can get rid of the dirt on his property if he likes, but this is going too far. This is my property.

But in wars they kill people more or less simultaneously, not one by one, so that they are mass murderers, not serial killers, but I’m not sure I see the difference, really. Since for the person being murdered it only happens once.

I find being invisible works both ways. Often I don’t see as much as I used to when I was visible. Being invisible however I’m less likely to become a serial victim. It’s odd how the natural fascination they talk about doesn’t include the serial victims.

How strange that their whole life was only a few years, like a cat.

But all the reporters tell is the nature of the mutilations and how decomposed they were, and that’s all about them. They were little boys not men. They are not fascinating. They are just dead. But the serial killer they tell all about over and over and discuss his psychology and how his parents caused him to be so fascinating, and he lives forever, as witness Jack the Ripper and Hitler the Ripper. Everyone around here certainly remembers the name of the man who serially raped and photographed the tortured little boys before he serially murdered them. He was named Westley Dodd but what were their names?

Of course we the people murdered him back. That was what he wanted. He wanted us to murder him. I cannot decide if hanging him was a mass murder or a serial murder. We all did it, like a war, so it is a mass murder, but we each did it, democratically, so I suppose it is serial, too.

It’s only with people that my eyes are more and more transparent, so that I don’t always see what they’re doing, and so that they can look right through me as if my eyes were air and say, “Hi, Emma, how’s life treating you?” Life’s treating me like a serial victim, thank you.

I know that my invisibility is not universal when I wake up in the middle of the night and Lo is sitting on the bed right beside my pillow purring and looking very intently at me. It’s a strange thing to do, a little uncanny. His eyes wake me, I think. But it’s a good waking, knowing that he can see me, even in the dark.

The word responsible means that you have to answer. You can’t not answer. You’d might rather not answer, but you have to.

Nobody young can afford to believe in getting old.

Personally I’d of preferred the hippies over the National Guard. Hippies were unarmed.

rights of citizens to be white and not foreign and not share anything with anybody.

Lol!

Am I going to sell Gatorade to shits all my life? I ought to be somewhere that is somewhere.

Prison clerk. What a job. Walk out of a place every night where the others are all locked in, how’s that for a ball and chain? Sink you if you ever tried to swim.

The still heat and the smell of newly turned earth made her sleepy. Everything made her sleepy. Waking up made her sleepy.

You can keep up that crap for years. But it finally catches up with you. And then you realise all you’ve done is save your shit to drown in.

But not all. “The Matter of Seggri” started very differently, with my own questions. A scientific question, not yet fully and satisfactorily answered: When a few males would serve to procreate a species, why are there so many? And a social question, not yet answered adequately at all: Why, in almost all societies, do men dominate women? What’s the Darwinian profit in having equal numbers of the two genders but making them unequal in power? What if the situation were reversed? . . . A lot of science fiction starts out that way.

I LEAVE IT ENTIRELY UP you, O Reader, to decide which volume of these two is the Real and which is the Unreal. I believe the science of deciding such questions is called Ontology, but I never learned it. I am strictly an amateur. I don’t know anything about reality, but I know what I like.

But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else.