No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters

by Ursula K. Le Guin

and the “exportation” of “democracy” (which I assume is a euphemism for our policy of invading countries we don’t like and trying to destroy their society, culture, and religion).

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 less a matter of fitness or courage than of luck equals longevity.

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.

To tell me my old age doesn’t exist is to tell me I don’t exist. Erase my age, you erase my life—me.

If memory remains sound and the thinking mind retains its vigor, an old intelligence may have extraordinary breadth and depth of understanding. It’s had more time to gather knowledge and more practice in comparison and judgment. No matter if the knowledge is intellectual or practical or emotional, if it concerns alpine ecosystems or the Buddha nature or how to reassure a frightened child: when you meet an old person with that kind of knowledge, if you have the sense of a bean sprout you know you’re in a rare and irreproducible presence.

I’ve often compared writing with handicrafts—weaving, pot-making, woodworking. I see my fascination with the word as very like, say, the fascination with wood common to carvers, carpenters, cabinetmakers—people who find a fine piece of old chestnut with delight, and study it, and learn the grain of it, and handle it with sensuous pleasure, and consider what’s been done with chestnut and what you can do with it, loving the wood itself, the mere material, the stuff of their craft.

What relates my small refusal to Sartre’s big one is the sense that to accept an award from an institution is to be co-opted by, embodied as, the institution. Sartre refused this on general principle, while I acted in specific protest. But I do have sympathy for his distrust of allowing himself to be identified as something other than himself. 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.

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. The question remains open.

In taking uncontrolled, unlimited, unceasing growth as the only recipe for economic health, we’ve dismissed the ideas of optimum size and keeping the organism in balance.

When slighted or patronized, I flare up in fury and attack, right then, right there. I have no guilt about that. But then so often it turns out to have been a misunderstanding—the disrespect was not intended, or was mere clumsiness perceived as a slight. And even if it was intended, so what? As my great-aunt Betsy said of a woman who snubbed her, “I pity her poor taste.”

I want to say clearly that I do not believe any animal is capable of being cruel. Cruelty implies consciousness of another’s pain and the intent to cause it. Cruelty is a human specialty, which human beings continue to practice, and perfect, and institutionalize, though we seldom boast about it. We prefer to disown it, calling it “inhumanity,” ascribing it to animals. We don’t want to admit the innocence of the animals, which reveals our guilt.

I came away from both these concerts marveling that while our republic tears itself apart and our species frantically hurries to destroy its own household, yet we go on building with vibrations in the air, in the spirit—making this music, this intangible, beautiful, generous thing.

I am opening my mouth now because I am too old to be lovable, but still incredulous when I hear people—adults!—mourning over the awful day they found out that Santa Claus wasn’t real. To me what’s awful is not—as it is usually presented—the “loss of belief.” What’s awful is the demand that children believe or pretend to believe a falsehood, and the guilty-emotion-laden short-circuiting of the mind that happens when fact is deliberately confused with myth, actuality with ritual symbol.