No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters

by Ursula K. Le Guin

that the other animals will see and accept us as one among them. And then we fail this dream when the wrong animals ask it of us. We think we wish to join the wild animals in the jungle but will not tolerate the wild animals in our kitchens. There are too many ants, we think, reaching for the spray, when it is equally true that there are too many humans.

In another essay, in another book, 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. In this and so many other ways, fantasy is the more subversive, the more comprehensive, the more intriguing literature. These two issues combined—our inability to deal with our own numbers and our insistence that we are what matters most—may well be the finish of us. And with these thoughts, I arrive at the end of the world, where I tire finally of thinking about beetles and go back to thinking about Le Guin.

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.”