The Left Hand of Darkness (Hainish Cycle, #4)

by Ursula K. Le Guin

Strictly extrapolative works of science fiction generally arrive about where the Club of Rome arrives: somewhere between the gradual extinction of human liberty and the total extinction of terrestrail life.

Open your eyes; listen, listen. That is what the novelists say. But they don’t tell you what you will see and hear. All they can tell you is what they have seen and heard, in their time in this world, a third of it spent in sleep and dreaming, another third of it spent in telling lies.

Is it any wonder that no truly respectable society has ever trusted its artists? But our society, being troubled and bewildered, seeking guidance, sometimes puts an entirely mistaken trust in its artists, using them as prophets and futurologists.

The only truth I can understand or express is, logically defined, a lie. Psychologically defined, a symbol. Aesthetically defined, a metaphor.

In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it. Finally, when we’re done with it, we may find—if it’s a good novel—that we’re a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changed a little, as if by having met a new face, crossed a street we never crossed before. But it’s very hard to say just what we learned, how we were changed.

The future, in fiction, is a metaphor. A metaphor for what? If I could have said it non-metaphorically, I would not have written all these words, this novel; and Genly Ai would never have sat down at my desk and used up my ink and typewriter ribbon in informing me, and you, rather solemnly, that the truth is a matter of the imagination.

the product of centuries of paranoia on a grand scale.

The tragedy is so old that its horror has leached away and only a certain air of faithlessness and melancholy clings to the stones and shadows of the house.

tried to, but my efforts took the form of self-consciously seeing a Gethenian first as a man, then as a woman, forcing him into those categories so irrelevant to his nature and so essential to my own.

Karhiders. I know what a king was, Earth’s own history is full of them, but I had no experiential feel for privilege—no tact.

“I believe you,” said the stranger, the alien alone with me, and so strong had my access of self-alienation been that I looked up at him bewildered.

“No, I don’t mean love, when I say patriotism. I mean fear. The fear of the other. And its expressions are political, not poetical: hate, rivalry, aggression. It grows in us, that fear. It grows in us year by year. We’ve followed our road too far.

One voice speaking truth is a greater force than fleets and armies, given time; plenty of time;

If asked why not, they answer “Why?” Like asking Terrans why all our vehicles must go so fast; we answer “Why not?”

Late the next day we had got down there and were creeping along that same snow-slope, very softly, not sneezing, lest we bring down the avalanche.

Legends of prediction are common throughout the whole Household of Man. God speaks, spirits speak, computers speak. Oracular ambiguity or statistical probability provides loopholes, and discrepancies are expunged by Faith.

I hadn’t yet convinced any Karhider of the existence of telephathic communication; they wouldn’t believe it till they “saw” it: my position exactly, regarding the Foretellers of the Handdara.

We have NAFAL ships and instantaneous transmission and mindspeech, but we haven’t yet tamed hunch to run in harness; for that trick we must go to Gethen.

“To exhibit the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question.”

Some rise to present danger, not I. My gift is forethought. Threatened closely I grow stupid, and sit on a bag of sand wondering if a man could swim to Orgoreyn.

And in the end, the dominant factor in Gethenian life is not sex or any other human thing: it is their environment, their cold world. Here man has a crueler enemy even than himself.

Their tenderness towards their children struck me as being profound, effective, and almost wholly unpossessive. Only in that unpossessiveness does it perhaps differ from what we call the “maternal” instinct.

One of the most dangerous is the implication that civilization, being artificial, is unnatural: that it is the opposite of primitiveness. . . .

In this curious lack of distinction between the general and specific applications of the word, in the use of it for both the whole and the part, the state and the individual, in this imprecision is its precisest meaning.

I felt as if I had come out of a dark age, and wished I had not wasted two years in Karhide. This, now, looked like a country ready to enter the Ekumenical Age.

The system of extended-family clans, of Hearths and Domains, though still vaguely discernible in the Commensal structure, was “nationalized” several hundred years ago in Orgoreyn. No child over a year old lives with its parent or parents; all are brought up in the Commensal Hearths.

thought of the cold tin tubs of East Karhide that I had chattered and shuddered in last summer, the ice-ringed basin in my Erhenrang room. Was that elegance? Long live comfort!

This is because all Orgota are employees of the state; the state must find employment for all citizens, and does so. This, at least, is the accepted explanation, though like most economic explanations it seems, under certain lights, to omit the main point.

He was quiet, subdued, reduced—a banished man living off his wits in a foreign land.

I stood benumbed. The man was like an electric shock—nothing to hold on to and you don’t know what hit you.

The old Law of Cultural Embargo stood against the importation of analyzable, imitable artifacts at this stage, and so I had nothing with me except the ship and ansible, my box of pictures, the indubitable peculiarity of my body, and the unprovable singularity of my mind.

If you play against your own side you’ll lose the whole game. That’s what these fellows with no patriotism, only self-love, can’t see.

I think they fear the Envoy, much as Argaven and most of the Court did; with this difference, that Argaven thought him mad, like himself, while they think him a liar, like themselves.

He is infinitely a stranger, and I a fool, to let my shadow cross the light of the hope he brings us.

But I think we shall have trouble learning how to lie, having for so long practiced the art of going round and round the truth without ever lying about it, or reaching it either.

To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.

It is a terrible thing, this kindness that human beings do not lose. Terrible, because when we are finally naked in the dark and cold, it is all we have.

They were as sexless as steers. They were without shame and without desire, like the angels. But it is not human to be without shame and without desire.

WHEN OBSLE AND YEGEY BOTH LEFT TOWN, AND Slose’s doorkeeper refused me entrance, I knew it was time to turn to my enemies, for there was no more good in my friends. I went to Commissioner Shusgis, and blackmailed him.

Again he nodded. “I think we might make it,” he said, with that complete simplicity I had so long taken for irony.

Yet he added, scrupulous, “A man who doesn’t detest a bad government is a fool. And if there were such a thing as a good government on earth, it would be a great joy to serve it.”

It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.

To match his frailty and strength, he has a spirit easy to despair and quick to defiance: a fierce impatient courage.

it’s extraordinary that you arrived at any concept of evolution, faced with that unbridgeable gap between yourselves and the lower animals.

Light is the left hand of darkness and darkness the right hand of light. Two are one, life and death, lying together like lovers in kemmer, like hands joined together, like the end and the way.

If it is compared to kemmer, then does that mean it is ephemeral when a situation is one side vs the other?

I’ve been here two years. . . . You don’t know. In a sense, women are more alien to me than you are.

Happiness has to do with reason, and only reason earns it. What I was given was the thing you can’t earn, and can’t keep, and often don’t even recognize at the time; I mean joy.

I hated the harsh, intricate, obstinate demands that he made on me in the name of life.

I had been afraid to give it. I had not wanted to give my trust, my friendship to a man who was a woman, a woman who was a man.

So that intimacy of mind established between us was a bond, indeed, but an obscure and austere one, not so much admitting further light (as I had expected it to) as showing the extent of the darkness.