The Word for World is Forest (Hainish Cycle, #5)

by Ursula K. Le Guin

“Te-whet,” said a distant bird.

vonnegut

“In that Applied History course I took in training for Far-out, it said that slavery never worked. It was uneconomical.” “Right, but this isn’t slavery, Ok baby. Slaves are humans. When you raise cows, you call that slavery? No. And it works.”

woof

“Try to learn his news, quickly. I wish he was a woman and would talk sense. . . .”

TRUEEE

There is a wish to kill in them, and therefore I saw fit to put them to death.”

Lyubov, who taught me, understood me when I showed him how to dream, and yet even so he called the world-time ‘real’ and the dream-time ‘unreal,’ as if that were the difference between them.”

In the forest, through the forest he comes, where leaves fall, where trees fall, a god that knows death, a god that kills and is not himself reborn.”

They make the forest into a dry beach”—her language had no word for ‘desert’—“

The Athshean word for world is also the word for forest.

The fact is, the only time a man is really and entirely a man is when he’s just had a woman or just killed another man. That wasn’t original, he’d read it in some old books; but it was true. That was why he liked to imagine scenes like that. Even if the creechies weren’t actually men.

Athshe, which meant the Forest, and the World. So Earth, Terra, meant both the soil and the planet, two meanings and one. But to the Athsheans soil, ground, earth was not that to which the dead return and by which the living live: the substance of their world was not earth, but forest. Terran man was clay, red dust. Athshean man was branch and root. They did not carve figures of themselves in stone, only in wood.

“They’re always pawing each other,” some of the colonists sneered, unable to see in these touch-exchanges anything but their own eroticism which, forced to concentrate itself exclusively on sex and then repressed and frustrated, invades and poisons every sensual pleasure, every humane response: the victory of a blinded, furtive Cupid over the great brooding mother of all the seas and stars, all the leaves of trees, all the gestures of men, Venus Genetrix. . . .

Only if you listened intently could you hear the rain, too multitudinous a music for one mind to grasp, a single endless chord played on the entire forest.

For if it’s all the rest of us who are killed by the suicide, it’s himself whom the murderer kills; only he has to do it over, and over, and over.

You know the people you’re studying are going to get plowed under, and probably wiped out. It’s the way things are. It’s human nature, and you must know you can’t change that. Then why come and watch the process? Masochism?” “I don’t know what ‘human nature’ is. Maybe leaving descriptions of what we wipe out is part of human nature.—Is it much pleasanter for an ecologist, really?”

Selver is my friend. Selver is a god.

A link: one who could speak aloud the perceptions of the subconscious. To ‘speak’ that tongue is to act. To do a new thing. To change or to be changed, radically, from the root. For the root is the dream. And the translator is the god.

It was not in Raj Lyubov’s nature to think, “What can I do?” Character and training disposed him not to interfere in other men’s business. His job was to find out what they did, and his inclination was to let them go on doing it. He preferred to be enlightened, rather than to enlighten; to seek facts rather than the Truth.

“What are they doing?” abruptly becomes, “What are we doing?” and then, “What must I do?”

“You’re speaking the truth you know,” Selver said, “I speak the truth I know. I accept your ignorance of the killings on Rieshwel; but you must accept my telling you that they were done.

“I don’t feel so good,” Davidson said. He said it again. Then he stopped saying it, for there was nobody to say it to. Then he realized he hadn’t said it anyway.

A tree falls in a forest

All the killing is done now. And the cutting of trees. There aren’t trees to cut on Rendlep. That’s the place you call Dump Island. Your people left no trees there, so you can’t make a boat and sail from it. Nothing much grows there any more, so we shall have to bring you food and wood to burn. There’s nothing to kill on Rendlep. No trees, no people. There were trees and people, but now there are only the dreams of them. It seems to me a fitting place for you to live, since you must live. You might learn how to dream there, but more likely you will follow your madness through to its proper end, at last.”

“Sometimes a god comes,” Selver said. “He brings a new way to do a thing, or a new thing to be done. A new kind of singing, or a new kind of death. He brings this across the bridge between the dream-time and the world-time. When he has done this, it is done. You cannot take things that exist in the world and try to drive them back into the dream, to hold them inside the dream with walls and pretenses. That is insanity. What is, is. There is no use pretending, now, that we do not know how to kill one another.”