No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters

by Ursula K. Le Guin

Only the literature of the fantastic deals with the nonhuman as of equal interest and importance.

These two issues combined—our inability to deal with our own numbers and our insistence that we are what matters most—may well be the finish of us.

I am happy with strangers only if I can write a story or a poem and hide from them behind it, letting it speak for me.

Actually, I don’t exactly have expectations. I have hopes, and fears. Mostly the fears predominate these days. When my kids were young I could still hope we might not totally screw up the environment for them, but now that we’ve done so, and are more deeply sold out than ever to profiteering industrialism with its future-horizon of a few months, any hope I have that coming generations may have ease and peace in life has become very tenuous, and has to reach far, far forward into the dark.

If I’m ninety and believe I’m forty-five, I’m headed for a very bad time trying to get out of the bathtub.

Old age is for anybody who gets there. Warriors get old; sissies get old. In fact it’s likely that more sissies than warriors get old. Old age is for the healthy, the strong, the tough, the intrepid, the sick, the weak, the cowardly, the incompetent.

But the longer a life is, the more of it will be old age.

Positive thinking is great. It works best when based on a realistic assessment and acceptance of the actual situation. Positive thinking founded on denial may not be so great.

Old age generally involves pain and danger and inevitably ends in death. The acceptance of that takes courage. Courage deserves respect.

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.

Jungians such as Joseph Campbell have generalized such journeys into a set of archetypal events and images. Though these generalities can be useful in criticism, I mistrust them as fatally reductive. “Ah, the Night Sea Voyage!” we cry, feeling that we have understood something important—but we’ve merely recognized it. Until we are actually on that voyage, we have understood nothing.

It isn’t what the people who established the awards want them to do or to mean, but it’s how they’re used.

But mostly because I didn’t and don’t think we have much idea of what’s enduringly excellent until it’s endured. Been around quite a long time. Five or six decades, to start with.

Of course the excellence of immediate, real impact, of an art that embodies the moment, is an excellent kind of excellence.

A book that makes me cry the way music can or tragedy can—deep tears, the tears that come of accepting as my own the grief there is in the world—must have something of greatness about it.

Story goes. Plot elaborates the going.

So when the interdependence of women is perceived as a threat to the dependence of women on men and the childbearing, child-rearing, family-serving, man-serving role assigned to women, it’s easy to declare that it simply doesn’t exist.

Denial is an effective weapon in the hands of fear.

All old people are nostalgic for certain things they knew that are gone, but I live in the past very little. So why am I feeling like an exile?

It appears that we’ve given up on the long-range view. That we’ve decided not to think about consequences—about cause and effect. Maybe that’s why I feel that I live in exile. I used to live in a country that had a future.

The life in a plant may be less visible but far more intense and durable than the life in an animal.

Extreme literalism in reading religious texts makes any kind of thinking hard.

Indignation is still the right response to indignity, to disrespect, but in the present moral climate it seems to be most effective expressed through steady, resolute, morally committed behavior and action.

Anger points powerfully to the denial of rights, but the exercise of rights can’t live and thrive on anger. It lives and thrives on the dogged pursuit of justice.

Perhaps the problem is this: when threatened, we pull out our weapon, anger. Then the threat passes or evaporates. But the weapon is still in our hand. And weapons are seductive, even addictive; they promise to give us strength, security, dominance . . .

People you thought you’d made up, invented, imagined, are there, not imaginary at all—solid, living, breathing. And they speak to each other. Not to you. Not anymore.

Envy coexists only too easily with righteous disapproval.

Democracy, by strenuously denying the fact of inequality, does enable us, to a surprising extent, to act as if it didn’t exist; but it does exist, and we know it.

We can perceive for ourselves, but have very little instinctive knowledge in how to act on our perceptions, and must be shown the basic patterns of how to arrange the world and how to find our way through it.

Therefore the incalculable value of true information, and the unforgivable wrongness of lying to a child.

Belief has no value in itself that I can see. Its value increases as it is useful, diminishes as it is replaced by knowledge, and goes negative when it’s noxious. In ordinary life, the need for it diminishes as the quantity and quality of knowledge increase.

“Gated communities” are not communities in any sense of the word I understand.