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Happiness is based on a just discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what is destructive.
The joy built upon successful slaughter is not the right kind of joy; it will not do; it is fearful and it is trivial.
They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas. Some of them have come to see it, others are content merely to know it is there. They all know that it has to be there. Some of them understand why, and some do not, but they all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child’s abominable misery.
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.
They know that if the wretched one were not there snivelling in the dark, the other one, the flute-player, could make no joyful music as the young riders line up in their beauty for the race in the sunlight of the first morning of summer.
They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.
Games and stories are imitations of life, ways of playing at life, sometimes ways of learning how to live. Some of the rules may appear both cruel and arbitrary. But if you want to play the game, or live the life, you have to follow them.
A story can say different things to different people. It may have no definitive reading. And a reader may find a meaning in it that the writer never intended, never imagined, yet recognizes at once as valid.
