The Dispossessed (Hainish Cycle, #6)

by Ursula K. Le Guin

To die is to lose the self and rejoin the rest. He had kept himself, and lost the rest.

“I never thought before,” said Tirin unruffled, “of the fact that there are people sitting on a hill, up there, on Urras, looking at Anarres, at us, and saying, ‘Look, there’s the Moon.’ Our earth is their Moon; our Moon is their earth.” “Where, then, is Truth?” declaimed Bedap, and yawned. “In the hill one happens to be sitting on,” said Tirin.

You can go home again, the General Temporal Theory asserts, so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.

“The reality of our life is in love, in solidarity,” said a tall, soft-eyed girl. “Love is the true condition of human life.”

It is of the nature of idea to be communicated: written, spoken, done. The idea is like grass. It craves light, likes crowds, thrives on crossbreeding, grows better for being stepped on.

Shevek had no idea what they were talking about. He scratched his head. “Are all the scientists here men, then?” “Scientists?” Oiie asked, incredulous. Pae coughed. “Scientists. Oh, yes, certainly, they’re all men. There are some female teachers in the girls’ schools, of course. But they never get past Certificate level.” “Why not?” “Can’t do the math; no head for abstract thought; don’t belong. You know how it is, what women call thinking is done with the uterus! Of course, there’s always a few exceptions, God-awful brainy women with vaginal atrophy.”

Laia Asieo Odo 698—769 To be whole is to be part; true voyage is return.

I have been here for a long time, the fort said, and I am still here.

I have been here for a long time, the room said to Shevek, and I am still here. What are you doing here?

The explorer who will not come back or send back his ships to tell his tale is not an explorer, only an adventurer, and his sons are born in exile.

Like all the students and professors, he had nothing to do but his intellectual work, literally nothing. The beds were made for them, the rooms were swept for them, the routine of the college was managed for them, the way was made plain for them. And no wives, no families. No women at all. Students at the University were not permitted to marry. Married professors usually lived during the five class days of the seven-day week in bachelor quarters on campus, going home only on weekends. Nothing distracted.

Here you think that the incentive to work is finances, need for money or desire for profit, but where there’s no money the real motives are clearer, maybe. People like to do things. They like to do them well. People take the dangerous, hard jobs because they take pride in doing them, they can—egoize, we call it—show off?—to the weaker ones. Hey, look, little boys, see how strong I am! You know? A person likes to do what he is good at doing. . . . But really, it is the question of ends and means. After all, work is done for the work’s sake. It is the lasting pleasure of life. The private conscience knows that.

You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change.

“It’s always easier not to think for oneself. Find a nice safe hierarchy and settle in. Don’t make changes, don’t risk disapproval, don’t upset your syndics. It’s always easiest to let yourself be governed.”

“If you can see a thing whole,” he said, “it seems that it’s always beautiful. Planets, lives. . . . But close up, a world’s all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life’s a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death.”

want to see it whole right in the middle of it, here, now. I don’t give a hoot for eternity.” “It’s nothing to do with eternity,” said Shevek, grinning, a thin shaggy man of silver and shadow. “All you have to do to see life whole is to see it as mortal. I’ll die, you’ll die; how could we love each other otherwise? The sun’s going to burn out, what else keeps it shining?”

A strike is what we need, a general strike, and massive demonstrations. Like the Ninth Month Strike that Odo led,” he added with a dry, strained smile. “We could use an Odo now. But they’ve got no Moon to buy us off with this time. We make justice here, or nowhere.”

Do you know that when people here want to wish each other luck they say, ‘May you get reborn on Anarres!’ To know that it exists, to know that there is a society without government, without police, without economic exploitation, that they can never say again that it’s just a mirage, an idealist’s dream!

“The demonstration is going to be absolutely nonviolent,” Maedda said with sudden violence. “Even the SWU have accepted that!” “I haven’t accepted it, Tuio. I’m not going to let my face get knocked in or my brains blown out by the black-coats. If they hurt me, I’ll hurt back.” “Join them, if you like their methods. Justice is not achieved by force!” “And power isn’t achieved by passivity.”

“The means are the end. Odo said it all her life. Only peace brings peace, only just acts bring justice! We cannot be divided on that on the eve of action!”

“It is our suffering that brings us together. It is not love. Love does not obey the mind, and turns to hate when forced. The bond that binds us is beyond choice. We are brothers. We are brothers in what we share. In pain, which each of us must suffer alone, in hunger, in poverty, in hope, we know our brotherhood. We know it, because we have had to learn it. We know that there is no help for us but from one another, that no hand will save us if we do not reach out our hand. And the hand that you reach out is empty, as mine is. You have nothing. You possess nothing. You own nothing. You are free. All you have is what you are, and what you give.

he now understood why the army was organized as it was. It was indeed quite necessary. No rational form of organization would serve the purpose. He simply had not understood that the purpose was to enable men with machine guns to kill unarmed men and women easily and in great quantities when told to do so. Only he still could not see where courage, or manliness, or fitness entered in.

He taught me what prisons are, and who builds them. Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I’m going to go fulfill my proper function in the social organism. I’m going to go unbuild walls.”

If you evade suffering you also evade the chance of joy. Pleasure you may get, or pleasures, but you will not be fulfilled. You will not know what it is to come home.

Fulfillment, Shevek thought, is a function of time. The search for pleasure is circular, repetitive, atemporal. The variety seeking of the spectator, the thrill hunter, the sexually promiscuous, always ends in the same place. It has an end. It comes to the end and has to start over. It is not a journey and return, but a closed cycle, a locked room, a cell.

Loyalty, which asserts the continuity of past and future, binding time into a whole, is the root of human strength; there is no good to be done without it.

The thing about working with time, instead of against it, he thought, is that it is not wasted. Even pain counts.

Things change, change. You cannot have anything. . . . And least of all can you have the present, unless you accept with it the past and the future.

“For we each of us deserve everything, every luxury that was ever piled in the tombs of the dead kings, and we each of us deserve nothing, not a mouthful of bread in hunger. Have we not eaten while another starved? Will you punish us for that? Will you reward us for the virtue of starving while others ate? No man earns punishment, no man earns reward. Free your mind of the idea of deserving, the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think.”