No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters

by Ursula K. Le Guin

Meaning in art isn’t the same as meaning in science. The meaning of the second law of thermodynamics, so long as the words are understood, isn’t changed by who reads it, or when, or where. The meaning of Huckleberry Finn is.

So as long as men need to “be reflected at twice their natural size,” a woman writer knows that open competition with them is dangerous.

Dream is free of intellectual control; its narratives are irrational and unstable, and its aesthetic value is mostly accidental.

This is why it’s hard for me to imagine that anyone who likes science can dislike fantasy. Both are based so profoundly on the admission of uncertainty, the welcoming acceptance of unanswered questions. Of course the scientist seeks to ask how things are the way they are, not to imagine how they might be otherwise. But are the two operations opposed, or related? We can’t question reality directly, only by questioning our conventions, our belief, our orthodoxy, our construction of reality.

As for female solidarity, without it human society, I think, would not exist. But it remains all but invisible to men, history, and God.

Wherever the male arrangement of society permits the fellowship of women on their own terms, it tends to be casual, unformulated, unhierarchical; to be ad hoc rather than fixed, flexible rather than rigid, and more collaborative than competitive. That it has mostly operated in the private rather than the public sphere is a function of the male control of society, the male definition and separation of “public” and “private.” It’s hard to know if women’s groups would ever gather into great centers, because the relentless pressure from male institutions against such aggregation has prevented it. It might not happen anyhow. Instead of rising from the rigorous control of aggression in the pursuit of power, the energy of female solidarity comes from the wish and need for mutual aid and, often, the search for freedom from oppression. Elusiveness is the essence of fluidity.

The great ancient male institutions have been increasingly infiltrated by women for the last two centuries, and this is a very great change. But when women manage to join the institutions that excluded them, they mostly end up being co-opted by them, serving male ends, enforcing male values.

Can women operate as women in a male institution without becoming imitation men? If so, will they change the institution so radically that the men are likely to label it second-class, lower the pay, and abandon it? This has happened to some extent in several fields, such as the practice of teaching and medicine, increasingly in the hands of women. But the management of those fields, the power and the definition of their aims, still belongs to men.

Indifference to what words actually say; willingness to accept a vapid truism as a useful, even revelatory concept; carelessness about where a supposed quotation comes from—that’s all part of what I like least about the Internet. A “blah blah blah, who cares, information is what I want it to be” attitude—a lazy-mindedness that degrades both language and thought.

a soul enters life forgetting its eternal being, can remember it throughout life only in intimations and moments of revelation, and will recall and rejoin it fully only in death. Nature, says Wordsworth, offers us endless reminders of the eternal, and we are most open to them in our childhood.

The whole undertaking of science is to deal, as well as it can, with reality. The reality of actual things and events in time is subject to doubt, to hypothesis, to proof and disproof, to acceptance and rejection—not to belief or disbelief.

Does the fear of being unsafe and not in control express itself as anger, or does it use anger as a kind of denial of the fear? One view of clinical depression explains it as sourced in suppressed anger. Anger turned, perhaps, against the self, because fear—fear of being harmed, and fear of doing harm—prevents the anger from turning against the people or circumstances causing it. If so, no wonder a lot of people are depressed, and no wonder so many of them are women. They are living with an unexploded bomb. So how do you defuse the bomb, or when and how can you explode it safely, even usefully?