No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters

by Ursula K. Le Guin

But still it’s tiresome always having to think about it instead of just doing it.

The word has huge overtones of dominance, of abuse, of contempt, of hatred.

Meaning in art isn’t the same as meaning in science.

All I expect of a good potter is to go and make another good pot.

Why would anybody who’s written a book be afraid of reading one?

Writing is so immaterial, so mental an activity!

I like their most material aspect: the sound of them, heard in the mind or spoken by the voice.

like the dances of meaning words do with one another, the endless changes and complexities of their interrelationships in sentence or text,

This has been going on for two or three millennia. That is an amazingly long time for anything to mean anything to anybody.

It’s just people vs. people.

that a victory or a defeat in battle, or in any competition other than a purely moral one (whatever that might be), has nothing to do with who is morally better.

Might does not make right—right? Therefore right does not make might. Right?

Homer and Tolkien are both also notably honest about the difficulty of being a far-traveled hero who comes home. Neither Odysseus nor Frodo is able to stay there long.

President de Gaulle quickly pardoned him, with the magnificently Gallic observation that “you don’t arrest Voltaire.”

But I do have sympathy for his distrust of allowing himself to be identified as something other than himself.

His becoming a “Nobelist” would adulterate his authority as Sartre.

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.

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.

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.

Human beings don’t necessarily exist inside of (or correspond to) the neat racial, gendered or national boxes into which we often unthinkingly place them. It’s a mistake to ask literature to reinforce such structures. Literature tends to crack them. Literature is where we free ourselves.

Only in this view of the writer as a fully privileged male, a warrior, literature as a tournament, greatness as the defeat of others, can the idea of “the” great American novel exist.

Whatever the virtues of competitiveness, women are still deeply trained by society to be cautious about laying claim to greatness greater than the greatness of men.

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.

turns the story into a cobweb, a waltz, a vast symphonic structure in time (the novel in general) . . .

content with the sound of language and the pure play of fantasy with no particular end, and that’s the charm of it. But

A fully created imaginary world is a mental construct similar in many respects to a religious or other cosmology.

Dream is free of intellectual control; its narratives are irrational and unstable, and its aesthetic value is mostly accidental. Fantastic literature, like all the verbal arts, must satisfy the intellectual as well as the aesthetic faculty. Fantasy, odd as it sounds to say so, is a perfectly rational undertaking.

To ask these questions is to admit the contingency of reality, or at least to allow that our perception of reality may be incomplete, our interpretation of it arbitrary or mistaken.

The figure is static, but each half contains the seed of transformation. The symbol represents not a stasis but a process.

eudystopia

how to change the goals of human domination and unlimited growth to those of human adaptability and long-term survival is a shift from yang to yin, and so involves acceptance of impermanence and imperfection, a patience with uncertainty and the makeshift, a friendship with water, darkness, and the earth.

a flame of absolute, willful wildness.

But when women manage to join the institutions that excluded them, they mostly end up being co-opted by them, serving male ends, enforcing male values.

Cute little round butts looked terrific in that uniform.

A uniform, ever since the eighteenth century, when they first really started inventing them, has been known as a powerful aid to recruitment.

Right or wrong, in the 1940s we honored our servicemen. We were in that war with them.

An organism that settles on a single survival stratagem and ceases to seek and find others—ceases to adapt—is at high risk. And adaptability is our principle and most reliable gift.

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.

When did it become impossible for our government to ask its citizens to refrain from short-term gratification in order to serve a greater good?

Or, to put it less fancifully, 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?

A “blah blah blah, who cares, information is what I want it to be” attitude—a lazy-mindedness that degrades both language and thought.

It’s so much easier to blame the grownups than to be one.

we live a full human life not by stopping at any stage, but by becoming all that is in us to become.

We don’t know what the carrot feels.

The assumptions we make about all other living creatures are mostly self-serving.

Not a revealed truth, but an earned one.

Looking for positive sources or aspects of my own anger, I recognized one: self-respect.

I’m jealous of other writers who soar to success on wings of praise, I’m contemptuously angry at them, at the people who praise them—if I don’t like their writing.

a pervasive idea that anger is connected with fear.

Anger turned, perhaps, against the self, because fear—fear of being harmed, and fear of doing harm—prevents the anger from turning against the people or circumstances causing it.