Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places

by Ursula K. Le Guin

The entire life of a woman from ten or twelve through seventy or eighty has become secular, uniform, changeless. As there is no longer any virtue in virginity, so there is no longer any meaning in menopause. It requires fanatical determination now to become a Crone.

Faced with the fulfilled Crone, all but the bravest men wilt and retreat, crestfallen and cockadroop.

In her book Knowing Woman, Irene Claremont de Castillejo writes: Woman, who is so intimately and profoundly concerned with life, takes death in her stride. For her, to rid herself of an unwanted foetus is as much in accord with nature as for a cat to refuse milk to a weakling kitten. It is man who has evolved principles about the sacredness of life … and women have passionately adopted them as their own. But principles are abstract Woman’s basic instinct is not concerned with the idea of life, but with the fact of life. The ruthlessness of nature which discards unwanted life is deeply ingrained in her.

Time for a physicist is quite likely to be reversible. It doesn’t matter whether you read an equation forwards or backwards—unlike a sentence. On the subatomic level directionality is altogether lost. You cannot write the history of a photon; narration is irrelevant; all you can say of it is that it might be, or, otherwise stated, if you can say where it is you can’t say when and if you can say when it is you can’t say where.

Narrative is a central function of language. Not, in origin, an artifact of culture, an art, but a fundamental operation of the normal mind functioning in society. To learn to speak is to learn to tell a story.