No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters

by Ursula K. Le Guin

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.

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.

What a marvelous example of capitalist thinking, or nonthinking: to consider growth and stability as the same thing! I finally wrote in the margin, “You can’t have both,” and didn’t check a box.

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).

to the Questioners of Harvard my lifework has been a “creative activity,” a hobby, something you do to fill up spare time.

The question remains: When all the time you have is spare, is free, what do you make of it?

Sometimes I notice that a teenager in the family group is present in body—smiling, polite, apparently attentive—but absent.

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.

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.”

Positive thinking founded on denial may not be so great.

Old age isn’t a state of mind. It’s an existential situation.

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, you erase my life—me.

Americans, even when they pay pious lip service to Judeo-Christian rules of moral behavior, tend to regard moral behavior as a personal decision, above rules, and often above laws.

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.

if I wanted to be the center of the universe I’d have a dog.

Some writers, even ones who don’t actually write for a living, answer it “For money,” which certainly stops all further discussion, being the deadest of dead ends.

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.

Large, general questions about meaning, etc., can only be answered with generalities, which make me uncomfortable, because it is so hard to be honest when you generalize. If you skip over all the details, how can you tell if you’re being honest or not?

But any question, if it is limited, specific, and precise, can be answered honestly—if only with “I honestly don’t know, I never thought about it, now I have to think about it, thank you for asking!”

It’s scary to see a mind trapped in an endless repetition of violent acts without meaning or resolution, only escalation to keep the stimulus going.

the games of instantly rewarded destruction, in which the characters and action are ready-made “action figures” and the only goal is “winning,” are designed to be addictive, and therefore may be hard to outgrow or replace.

Compelled into an endless, meaningless feedback loop, the imagination is starved and sterilized.

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.

the necessity of choice when there is no middle way.

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.

By tragedy, mind and soul are grieved, enlarged, and exalted.

war is something human beings do and show no signs of stopping doing, and so it may be less important to condemn it or to justify it than to be able to perceive it as tragic. But once you take sides, you have lost that ability.

Is it our dominant religion that makes us want war to be between the good guys and the bad guys?

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 si...

It’s only in their spiritual suffering that the Indian heroes become suddenly, heartbreakingly, heart-changingly real.

“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.

I began quite a while ago to resist declarations of literary greatness in the sense of singling out any one book as TGAN, or even making lists of the Great American Books. Partly because the supposed categories of excellence omitting all genre writing, and the awards and reading lists and canons routinely and unquestioningly favoring work by men in the eastern half of the United States, made no sense to me. 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.

Lesser biographers and memoirists often invent a plot to foist onto their factual story—they don’t trust it to work by itself, so they make it untrustworthy.

It’s from his book entitled “Orthodoxy.”

A fully created imaginary world is a mental construct similar in many respects to a religious or other cosmology. This similarity, if noticed, can be deeply disturbing to the orthodox mind.

When a fundamental belief is threatened the response is likely to be angry or dismissive—either “Abomination!” or “Nonsense!” Fantasy gets the abomination treatment from religious fundamentalists, whose rigid reality-constructs shudder at contact with questioning, and the nonsense treatment from pragmatic fundamentalists, who want to restrict reality to the immediately perceptible and the immediately profitable. All fundamentalisms set strict limits to the uses of imagination, outside which the fundamentalist’s imagination itself runs riot, fancying dreadful deserts where God and Reason and the capitalist way of life are lost, forests of the night where tigers hang from trees by the tail, lighting the way to madness with their bright burning.

what does escape mean? Escape from real life, responsibility, order, duty, piety, is what the charge implies. But nobody, except the most criminally irresponsible or pitifully incompetent, escapes to jail. The direction of escape is toward freedom. So what is “escapism” an accusation of?

Upholders and defenders of a status quo, political, social, economic, religious, or literary, may denigrate or diabolize or dismiss imaginative literature, because it is—more than any other kind of writing—subversive by nature. It has proved, over many centuries, a useful instrument of resistance to oppression.

We can’t question reality directly, only by questioning our conventions, our belief, our orthodoxy, our construction of reality.

Every eutopia contains a dystopia, every dystopia contains a eutopia.

I HAVE COME to see male group solidarity as an immensely powerful force in human affairs, more powerful, perhaps, than the feminism of the late twentieth century took into account.

Key features, as Le Guin identifies them: - control (of self and others) - loyalty (to the group above all) - excluding (any who do not belong) - defend (the group against all threats) Highly developed “us vs. them” mentality which, in practice makes the group tight and cohesive, but potentially dangerous and destructive.

The power of male group solidarity must come from the control and channeling of male rivalry, the repression and concentration of the hormone-driven will to dominate that so often dominates men themselves. It is a remarkable reversal.

The destructive, anarchic energy of individual rivalry and competitive ambition is diverted into loyalty to group and leader and directed to more or less constructive social enterprise.

The existence and dominance of these hierarchic, organized, coherent, durable institutions goes back so far and has been so nearly universal that it’s mostly just called “how things are,” “the world,” “the division of labor,” “history,” “God’s will,” etc.

Denial is an effective weapon in the hands of fear.

All during the war, men in civvies were in the minority downtown. But the uniforms didn’t bring uniformity into the city.

If we cease to see war as an inherently noble and ennobling thing, we cease to put the warrior on a pedestal.