No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters

by Ursula K. Le Guin

I’VE LOST FAITH in the saying “You’re only as old as you think you are,” ever since I got old. It is a saying with a fine heritage. It goes right back to the idea of the Power of Positive Thinking, which is so strong in America because it fits in so well with the Power of Commercial Advertising and with the Power of Wishful Thinking, aka the American Dream.

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.

Old age generally involves pain and danger and inevitably ends in death. The acceptance of that takes courage. Courage deserves respect.

He is a vivid little creature.

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

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 I know that to me words are things, almost immaterial but actual and real things, and that I like them. I like their most material aspect: the sound of them, heard in the mind or spoken by the voice. And right along with that, inseparably, I like the dances of meaning words do with one another, the endless changes and complexities of their interrelationships in sentence or text, by which imaginary worlds are built and shared. Writing engages me in both these aspects of words, in an inexhaustible playing, which is my lifework.

Dystopia is not tragedy.

art is bigger than notions of black or white, male or female, American or non. 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. Three cheers and Amen to that.

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.

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

At present we seem only to write dystopias.

Maybe the prolonged “festival of cruelty” going on in our literature and movies is an attempt to get rid of repressed anger by expressing it, acting it out symbolically. Kick everybody’s ass all the time! Torture the torturer! Describe every agony! Blow up everything over and over!

To be exact, I don’t think a tree can see, but it may be aware of light and darkness, of insideness and outsideness. In any case it looks right with the sky over it or through its branches. Before we decorated it, it stood there, sturdy, plain dark green, a complicated higher organism, a very definite presence in the room. When we had an artificial tree, its nonentity made me realize what I feel about a living tree, not only the splendid, big, tall Christmas trees we used to have when I was a child and when my children were children, but a little one too—that it is as much a presence in a room as a person or an animal. An unmoving presence that says nothing, but is there. A very taciturn visitor from Norway, perhaps. Speaking no English, entirely undemanding, wanting nothing but a drink of water every few days. Restful. A pleasure to look at. Holding darkness in it, a forest darkness, in the green arms held out so calmly, steadily, without effort.

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.