No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters

by Ursula K. Le Guin

I can’t believe the army thinks that way, that it’s making uniforms ugly in order to encourage us to think war is ugly. Perhaps the fatigue uniform reflects an attitude they aren’t conscious of and would never admit, a change less in the nature of war than in our national attitude to it, which is neither glamorizing nor realistic but simply uncaring. We pay very little attention to our wars or to the people fighting them.

Right or wrong, in the 1940s we honored our servicemen. We were in that war with them. Most of them were draftees, some quite unwilling ones, but they were our soldiers and we were proud of them. Right or wrong, since the 1950s and particularly since the 1970s, we began putting whichever war was on at the moment out of sight and out of mind, and with it the men and women fighting it. These days they’re all volunteers. Yet—or therefore?—we disown them. We give them pro forma praise as our brave defenders, send them over to whichever country we’re fighting in now, keep sending them back over, and don’t think about them. They aren’t us. They aren’t people we really want to see. Like the people in jails, the people in loony bins. Like clowns that aren’t funny, from a third-rate circus we wouldn’t think of going to.

shall we talk about how much we pay, how we are bankrupting our future, to keep that circus going? No. That’s not something we talk about. Not in Congr...

An organism that settles on a single survival stratagem and ceases to seek and find others—ceases to adapt—is at high risk.

We go on mechanically repeating the behaviors that caused the sickness: we bail out the bankers, we resume offshore drilling, we pay polluters to pollute, because without them how is our economy to grow? Yet increasingly, all economic growth benefits only the rich, while most people grow poorer.

What I’m working hard to imagine or remember is a country whose president asked his people not to eat beef on Tuesdays or chicken on Thursdays because there were people starving in Europe. The Second World War had left the European economy as well as its cities pretty much in ruins, and this president thought Americans would a) see the connection between meat and grain, and b) be willing to forgo a luxury element of their diet in order to give away a more essential food to hungry foreigners on another continent, some of whom we’d been killing, and some of whom had been killing us, two years earlier.

But still: can you imagine any president, now, asking the American people to deprive themselves of meat once or twice a week in order to stockpile grain to ship to hungry foreigners on another continent, some of them no doubt terrorists? Or asking us to refrain from meat now and then to provide more grain to programs and food banks for the 20,000,000 Americans living in “extreme poverty” (which means malnutrition and hunger) right now? Or, actually, asking us to do without anything for any reason?

An education that gave me a sense of the continuity of human life and thought keeps me from dividing time into Now (Us—the last few years) and Then (Them—history). A glimmer of the anthropological outlook keeps me from believing that life was ever simple for anybody, anywhere, at any time.

I have watched my country accept, mostly quite complacently, along with a lower living standard for more and more people, a lower moral standard. A moral standard based on advertising.

democracy is propaganda.

It gets harder to deny that when, for instance, during a campaign, not only aspirants to the presidency but the president himself hides or misrepresents known facts, lies deliberatel...

What was appalling to me about Obama’s false figures and false promises in the first debate was that they were unnecessary. If he’d told the truth, he would have supported his candidacy better, as well as putting Romney’s faked figures and evasive vagueness to shame. He would have given us a moral choice instead of a fudge-throwing match.

consumers capable of hearing only what we want to hear, incapable of judgment, indifferent to fact.

if citizens can’t be asked to refrain from steak on Tuesdays, how can industries and corporations be asked to refrain from the vast and immediate profits they make from destabilizing the climate and destroying the environment?

there’s a literature written for both kids and adults in which human society is reduced to the opposition Kids Good/Creative, Adults Bad/Dead Inside. Here the child heroes are not only rebellious but are in all ways superior to their hidebound, coercive society and the stupid, insensitive, mean-minded adults that surround them. They may find friendship with other children, and understanding from a wise, grandparently type of another skin color or from people marginal to or outside their society. But they have nothing to learn from adults of their own people, and those elders have nothing to teach them. Such a child is always right, and wiser than the adults who repress and misunderstand him. Yet the super-perceptive, wise child is helpless to escape. He is a victim. Holden Caulfield is a model of this child. Peter Pan is his direct ancestor.

It seems to me the Super-Perceptive Child Victim of Self-Pity has something in common with the Inner Child: they’re lazy. It’s so much easier to blame the grownups than to be one.

Children are by nature, by necessity, irresponsible, and irresponsibility in them, as in puppies or kittens, is part of their charm. Carried into adulthood it becomes a dire practical and ethical failing. Uncontrolled spontaneity wastes itself. Ignorance isn’t wisdom.

In order to see that our emperors have no clothes on, do we really have to wait for a child to say so? Or even worse, wait for somebody’s Inner Brat to pipe up? If so, we’re in for a lot of nude politicians.

The idea that only belief sees the world as wonderful, and the “cold hard facts” of science take all the color and wonder out of it, the idea that scientific understanding automatically threatens and weakens religious or spiritual insight, is just hokum.

Some of the hokum arises from professional jealousy, rivalry, and fear—priest and scientist competing for power and control of human minds.

In general, much of the hokum that arises today is rooted in fear. Fear of man. Fear of loss. Fear of lack. Fear of pain. Fear of the unknown. Fear of ourselves. There is one fear, though, that drives out all of the others. It is a fear that pales in comparison because, unlike the others, it is a fear that finds its roots in awe of Something that is truly fearful. All the rest are undeserving of our fear. This is worthy of all our fear because in Its hideous strength and ability to annihilate us - It withholds destruction. It loves us. It leads us. It draws us up under Its wings to shelter us from the storm. “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom.”

In the realm of the spirit, it appears that we can’t earn knowledge. We can only accept it as a gift: the gift of belief. Belief is a great word, and a believed truth too can be great and beautiful. It matters very greatly what one believes in.

I wish we could stop using the word belief in matters of fact, leaving it where it belongs, in matters of religious faith and secular hope. I believe we’d avoid a lot of unnecessary pain if we did so.

Indignation, forcibly expressed, is an appropriate response to injustice.

Anger continued on past its usefulness becomes unjust, then dangerous. Nursed for its own sake, valued as an end in itself, it loses its goal. It fuels not positive activism but regression, obsession, vengeance, self-righteousness. Corrosive, it feeds off itself, destroying its host in the process. The racism, misogyny, and counter-rationality of the reactionary right in American politics for the last several years is a frightening exhibition of the destructive force of anger deliberately nourished by hate, encouraged to rule thought, invited to control behavior. I hope our republic survives this orgy of self-indulgent rage.

A powerful statement and strong accusation. Is the right motivated by hate? Sometimes. As is the left. But I don’t know that it’s all the time and I don’t even know that what some on one side would call “hate” is actually hate in the hearts of the other side. One key word in this is “reactionary.” As we are moved by our anger at injustice to do something, to change reality, to create justice, are we only reacting and continuing to react? Or are we proactively seeking out justice? Are we striving for human flourishing? Some of the injustices we rail against today simply would not be if we had taken the words of the Golden Rule more seriously to begin with. It is, in fact, not a reactive but a proactive command to seek out our neighbor and love them as we would want to be loved. Far too often, we sit around waiting for someone to do something for us or to us, rather than going, seeking, and finding others and doing for them as we would have done for ourselves. Which of these more resembles Christ?

Certainly an outburst of anger can cleanse the soul and clear the air. But anger nursed and nourished begins to act like anger suppressed: it begins to poison the air with vengefulness, spitefulness, distrust, breeding grudge and resentment, brooding endlessly over the causes of the grudge, the righteousness of the resentment. A brief, open expression of anger in the right moment, aimed at its true target, is effective—anger is a good weapon. But a weapon is appropriate to, justified only by, a situation of danger.

If I’m in an angry mood and aware of it, I can ask myself, So what is it you’re afraid of?

Anger’s connection with hatred is surely very complicated, and I don’t understand it at all, but again fear seems to be involved. If you aren’t afraid of someone or something threatening or unpleasant, you can as a rule despise it, ignore it, or even forget it. If you fear it, you have to hate it. I guess hatred uses anger as fuel. I don’t know. I don’t really like going to this place.

My fears come down to fear of not being safe (as if anyone is ever safe) and of not being in control (as if I ever was in control). 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?

Anger indulged rouses anger. Yet anger suppressed breeds anger. What is the way to use anger to fuel something other than hurt, to direct it away from hatred, vengefulness, self-righteousness, and make it serve creation and compassion?

Cruelty is a human specialty, which human beings continue to practice, and perfect, and institutionalize, though we seldom boast about it.

Actors are magicians. All stage people are magicians, the whole crew, on stage and behind it, working the lights and painting the set and all the rest. They collaborate methodically (ritual must be methodical, because it must be complete) in working magic. And they can do it with remarkably unlikely stuff. No cloaks, no magic wands or eyes of newt or bubbling alembics. Essentially they do it by limiting space, and moving and speaking within that space to establish and maintain a Secondary Creation.

Many people don’t even make the distinction, now that memoir takes the liberties of fiction without taking the imaginative risks, and fiction claims the authority of history without assuming the factual responsibilities.

so what? Why shouldn’t a highly successful writer hire help and say so? And what skin is it off my nose? Envy, of course, in the first place. I am envious of people who hire a servant with perfect assurance of righteousness. I envy self-confidence even as I dislike it. Envy coexists only too easily with righteous disapproval. Indeed perhaps the two nasty creatures live off each other.

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.

To have an egg and not to eat it was my privilege. To refuse to let him bring the egg was to interfere with his privilege, which was to bring me a complete and proper Viennese café breakfast.

The point of a soft-boiled egg is the difficulty of eating it, the attention it requires, the ceremony.

An egg spoon is a tiny implement that, like the Viennese breakfast, cannot be improved. Like all good tools, it gives pleasure by its pure aptness. It does one thing only, but does it perfectly, and nothing else can do it. Trying to eat an egg from the shell with a normal spoon is like mending a wristwatch with a hammer.

Eating an egg from the shell takes not only practice but resolution, even courage, possibly willingness to commit crime.

The more complete the attention, the more you actually taste the egg.

It wasn’t till I entered the interior, the cathedral proper, that I understood why they’d built the ceiling so high. As there should be, there are great doors to open into the sacred space. And as a sacred space will do, the first sight took my breath away. I stood silent. I remembered what the word awe means.

This is the Oregon Food Bank. Every box in the great cubical stacks between the aisles, every carton, every can, every bottle, every crate, holds food. Every carton, every can, every pound, every ounce of that food will be given to the people of Oregon who haven’t the money to buy what they need to live on. It is a cathedral, after all. The cathedral of hunger.

Or should I say the cathedral of generosity? Of compassion, or community, or caritas? It comes to the same thing. There are people who need help. There are people who deny it, saying that God helps those who help themselves and the poor and the unemployed are merely shiftless slackers sponging on a nanny government. There are people who don’t deny poverty, but they don’t want to know about it because it’s all so terrible and what can you do? And then there are people who help.

After all, the tree had already been cut from its root; its life with us was only a slow dying. A real Christmas tree, a cut tree, is a ritual sacrifice. Better not to deny the fact, but to accept and ponder it.

No wonder kids always ask, “Are we there yet?” Because they are there. It’s just the harried parents who aren’t, who have to have all this huge distance between things and have to drive and drive and drive to get to there. That makes no sense to a kid. Maybe that’s why they can’t see scenery. Scenery is between where they are.

As some parents manipulate their children’s beliefs, however well-meaningly, some politicians play more or less knowingly on people’s trust, persuading them to accept a deliberately fostered confusion of actuality with wishful thinking and fact with symbol.

To see a person who’s lived only two years in this world seeking and finding her way in it, perfectly trusting, having her trust rewarded with truth, and accepting it—that was a lovely thing to see. What it made me think about above all is how incredibly much we learn between our birthday and last day—from where the horsies live to the origin of the stars. How rich we are in knowledge, and in all that lies around us yet to learn. Billionaires, all of us.

During this time, the rattlesnake and I were alone together. Alone in all the world. We were held together by common fear—bonded. We were held in a spell—entranced. This time was outside ordinary time, and outside ordinary feelings; it involved danger for both of us; and it involved a bond between creatures who do not and cannot ordinarily relate to each other in any way. Each would naturally try not to relate—to just get away—or to kill in self-defense. In all these respects, I think it isn’t amiss to think of this time as sacred.

A teaching, a blessing, may come in strange ways, ways we do not expect, or control, or welcome, or understand. We are left to think it over.

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

we aren’t a solitary species. Like it or not, we are the Bandar-log. We are social by nature, and thrive only in community. It is entirely unnatural for a human being to live long completely alone. So when we get sick of crowds and yearn for space and silence, we build these semi-communities, pseudo-communities, in remote places.