No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters

by Ursula K. Le Guin

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

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.

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.

Let age be age. Let your old relative or old friend be who they are. Denial serves nothing, no one, no purpose.

Youth is so dramatic!

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?

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.

Art is not a horse race. Literature is not the Olympics. The hell with The Great American Novel. We have all the great novels we need right now—and right now some man or woman is writing a new one we won’t know we needed till we read it.

Fantasy not only asks “What if things didn’t go on just as they do?” but demonstrates what they might be like if they went otherwise—thus gnawing at the very foundation of the belief that things have to be the way they are.

To open a door that has been kept closed is an important act.

Our economy isn’t just in a recession. It is sick. As a result of uncontrolled economic (and population) growth, our ecology is sick, and getting sicker every day. We have disturbed the homeostasis of the earth, the ocean, and the atmosphere—not fatally to life on the planet; the bacteria will survive the corporation. But perhaps fatally to ourselves.

Indifference to what words actually say; willingness to accept a vapid truism as a useful, even revelatory concept; carelessness about where a supposed quotation comes from—that’s all part of what I like least about the Internet.

Belief has its proper and powerful existence in the domains of magic, religion, fear, and hope.

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.

As my great-aunt Betsy said of a woman who snubbed her, “I pity her poor taste.”

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).

Envy coexists only too easily with righteous disapproval. Indeed perhaps the two nasty creatures live off each other.

How rich we are in knowledge, and in all that lies around us yet to learn. Billionaires, all of us.