No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters

by Ursula K. Le Guin

For the seeker, the answer is less important than what the seeker does with the answer. I don’t know what the important part is for the sage. Le Guin suggests that it just might be breakfast.

There are too many ants, we think, reaching for the spray, when it is equally true that there are too many humans.

Le Guin has said that so-called realism centers the human. Only the literature of the fantastic deals with the nonhuman as of equal interest and importance.

Her essay here on the rattlesnake and then the one about the lynx work on me like poetry, sparking expanding emotions I can’t quite identify or have no words for. I should make up the words! Le Guin would. (Google “Fibble, Game of.”) So I should say that when I read Le Guin writing about birds or beasts, about particular animals with histories and personalities and singular behaviors, or when I read Le Guin on trees and rivers and all the vanishing beauties of the world, I feel transpaced. I feel other-awed. I feel tongue-gaped. Tongue-gapedly, KAREN JOY FOWLER

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.

Question 14: “Are you living your secret desires?” Floored again. I finally didn’t check Yes, Somewhat, or No, but wrote in “I have none, my desires are flagrant.”

The question remains: When all the time you have is spare, is free, what do you make of it? And what’s the difference, really, between that and the time you used to have when you were fifty, or thirty, or fifteen?

The opposite of spare time is, I guess, occupied time. In my case I still don’t know what spare time is because all my time is occupied. It always has been and it is now. It’s occupied by living.

An increasing part of living, at my age, is mere bodily maintenance, which is tiresome. But I cannot find anywhere in my life a time, or a kind of time, that is unoccupied. I am free, but my time is not. My time is fully and vitally occupied with sleep, with daydreaming, with doing business and writing friends and family on email, with reading, with writing poetry, with writing prose, with thinking, with forgetting, with embroidering, with cooking and eating a meal and cleaning up the kitchen, with construing Virgil, with meeting friends, with talking with my husband, with going out to shop for groceries, with walking if I can walk and traveling if we are traveling, with sitting Vipassana sometimes, with watching a movie sometimes, with doing the Eight Precious Chinese exercises when I can, with lying down for an afternoon rest with a volume of Krazy Kat to read and my own slightly crazy cat occupying the region between my upper thighs and mid-calves, where he arranges himself and goes instantly and deeply to sleep. None of this is spare time. I can’t spare it. What is Harvard thinking of? I am going to be eighty-one next week. I have no time to spare.

goes right back to the idea of the Power of Positive Thinking, which is so strong in America because it fits in so well with the Power of Commercial Advertising and with the Power of Wishful Thinking, aka the American Dream. It is the bright side of Puritanism: What you deserve is what you get. (Never mind just now about the dark side.)

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. People who run ten miles every morning before breakfast and people who live in a wheelchair. People who work the London Times crossword in ink in ten minutes and people who can’t quite remember who the president is just now. Old age is less a matter of fitness or courage than of luck equals longevity.

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

I’d like a poster showing two old people with stooped backs and arthritic hands and time-worn faces sitting talking, deep, deep in conversation. And the slogan would be “Old Age Is Not for the Young.”

So honest conversation concerning geezerhood takes place mostly among geezers.

Old age isn’t a state of mind. It’s an existential situation. Would you say to a person paralyzed from the waist down, “Oh, you aren’t a cripple! You’re only as paralyzed as you think you are! My cousin broke her back once but she got right over it and now she’s in training for the marathon!”

Encouragement by denial, however well-meaning, backfires. Fear is seldom wise and never kind.

To tell me my old age doesn’t exist is to tell me I don’t exist. Erase my age...

So it is that old men come to learn the invisibility women learned twenty or thirty years earlier. The kids on the street don’t see you. If they have to see you, it’s often with the indifference, distrust, or animosity animals feel for animals of a different species.

Animals have instinctive codes of etiquette for avoiding or defusing this mindless fear and hostility. Dogs ceremonially smell each other’s anuses, cats ceremonially yowl on the territorial borderline. Human societies provide us with various more elaborate devices. One of the most effective is respect. You don’t like the stranger, but your carefully respectful behavior to him elicits the same from him, thus avoiding the sterile expense of time and blood on aggression and defense.

This is morally problematic when personal decision is confused with personal opinion. A decision worthy of the name is based on observation, factual information, intellectual and ethical judgment. Opinion—that darling of the press, the politician, and the poll—may be based on no information at all. At worst, unchecked by either judgment or moral tradition, personal opinion may reflect nothing but ignorance, jealousy, and fear.

Respect has often been overenforced and almost universally misplaced (the poor must respect the rich, all women must respect all men, etc.). But when applied in moderation and with judgment, the social requirement of respectful behavior to others, by repressing aggression and requiring self-control, makes room for understanding. It creates a space where appreciation and affection can grow. Opinion all too often leaves no room for anything but itself.

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

The Golden Years the PR people keep gloating at us about are golden because that’s the color of the light at sunset.

I’m one of those pedestrians who start to cross the street, scuttle back to the curb for no reason, then suddenly leap out in front of your car just as you get into the intersection. I am the cause of several near accidents and a great deal of terrible swearing. It’s awful to think what I might have done armed with an automobile.

As for doctors’ appointments, one of the finest paradoxes of senility is that the oftener you have to go to the doctor, the harder it is to get there.

things like that all get put on the back burner—which may or may not be functioning, as we have had the stove since 1960. But you know, they don’t make stoves like that anymore.

“You don’t want to look at any others?” she asked. No, I didn’t. Send him back, look at other cats, make a choice of one, maybe not him? I couldn’t. Fate or the Lord of the Animals or whatever had presented me with a cat, again. OK.

He still loves kibbles, oh kibbles, oh lovely kibbles! Crunch, crunch, crunch to the last crumb, then look up with instant, infinite pathos—I starve, I perish, I have not eaten for weeks . . .

he’s gaining more independence, which is good—if I wanted to be the center of the universe I’d have a dog.

I KEEP READING books and seeing movies where nobody can fucking say anything except fuck, unless they say shit. I mean they don’t seem to have any adjective to describe fucking except fucking even when they’re fucking fucking. And shit is what they say when they’re fucked. When shit happens, they say shit, or oh shit, or oh shit we’re fucked. The imagination involved is staggering. I mean, literally.

Soldiers and sailors have always cursed—what else can they do? But Norman Mailer in The Naked and the Dead was forced to use the euphemistic invention fugging, giving Dorothy Parker the chance, which naturally she didn’t miss, of cooing at him, “Oh, are you the young man who doesn’t know how to spell fuck?”

Fuck is an aggressive word, a domineering word. When the guy in the Porsche shouts Fuck you, asshole! he isn’t inviting you to an evening at his flat. When people say Oh shit, we’re fucked! they don’t mean they’re having a consensual good time. The word has huge overtones of dominance, of abuse, of contempt, of hatred.

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.

Writing is a risky bidness. No guarantees. You have to take the chance. I’m happy to take it. I love taking it. So my stuff gets misread, misunderstood, misinterpreted—so what? If it’s the real stuff, it will survive almost any abuse other than being ignored, disappeared, not read.

Art isn’t explanation. Art is what an artist does, not what an artist explains.

To have written a book is a very cool thing, when you are six or eight or ten years old. It leads to other cool things, such as fearless reading. Why would anybody who’s written a book be afraid of reading one?

I don’t really know what it is I’ve done all my life, this wordworking. But I know that to me words are things, almost immaterial but actual and real things, and that I like them. I like their most material aspect: the sound of them, heard in the mind or spoken by the voice.

Words are my matter—my stuff. Words are my skein of yarn, my lump of wet clay, my block of uncarved wood. Words are my magic, antiproverbial cake. I eat it, and I still have it.

That’s the thing about Homer. People keep going to him and discovering new things, or old things, or things for the first time, or things all over again, and saying them. This has been going on for two or three millennia. That is an amazingly long time for anything to mean anything to anybody.

But Homer truly doesn’t take sides, and so he permits the story to be tragic. By tragedy, mind and soul are grieved, enlarged, and exalted.

In the War of Good vs. Evil there can be divine or supernal justice but not human tragedy. It is by definition, technically, comic (as in The Divine Comedy): the good guys win. It has a happy ending. If the bad guys beat the good guys, unhappy ending, that’s mere reversal, flip side of the same coin. The author is not impartial. Dystopia is not tragedy.

Maybe it’s not only Christian habits of thought but the difficulty we all have in growing up that makes us insist justice must favor the good.

He felt that the huge label “Success” that the Nobel sticks on an author’s forehead would, as it were, hide his face. His becoming a “Nobelist” would adulterate his authority as Sartre. Which is, of course, precisely what the commercial machinery of bestsellerdom and prizedom wants: the name as product. The guaranteed imprint of salable Success. Nobel Prize Winner So-and-so. Best-Selling Author Thus-and-such. Thirty Weeks on the New York Times Bestseller List Whozit. Jane D. Wonthepulitzer . . . John Q. MacArthurgenius . . .

I wish somebody really contemptible would award me a prize so I could be in the running for a Sartre.

I think all the enduringly excellent books began, in fact, as immediately excellent, whether they were noticed at the time or not. Their special quality is to outlast the moment and carry immediacy, impact, meaning, undiminished or even increasing with time, to ages and people entirely different from those the novelist wrote for.

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.

So now, if somebody asked me what book would tell them the most about what is good and what is bad in America, what is the most truly American book, what is the great American novel . . . a year ago I would have said—for all its faults—Huckleberry Finn. But now—for all its faults—I’d say The Grapes of Wrath.

But a movie is something you see; a novel is something made out of language. And what’s beautiful and powerful in this novel is its LANGUAGE, the art that not only shows us what the author saw but lets us share, as directly as emotion can be shared, his passionate grief, indignation, and love.

Greatness in the abstract, in general, is still thought of as the province of men.

Is this still true?

Because competition for primacy, for literary supremacy, doesn’t seem as glamorously possible for women as it does for men, the whole idea of singular greatness—of there being one great anything—may not have the hold on a woman’s imagination that it has on a man’s. The knights in the lists have to believe the prize can be won and is worth winning. Those relegated to the preliminary jousts and the sidelines can see more clearly how arbitrary the judgment of championship is, and can question the value of the glittering prize.