Ursula Le Guin recently passed away, just as I was reading a collection of her blog posts in this book, No Time to Spare. It's been a very long time since I read her work as a child and likely time for me to revisit with my children. I remember them as a dream...light, cloud, magic and uncertainty.
The blog posts are clear, funny and sharp.
Here are some entries that most resonated for me...we can always question why...
September 2011...TGAN and TGOW
"But now - for all its faults - I'd say The Grapes of Wrath....what's beautiful and powerful in this novel is its LANGUAGE, the art that not only show us what the author saw but lets us share, as directly as emotion can be shared, his passionate grief, indignation, and love."
June 2011...It doesn't have to be the way it is
"There is nothing to fear in fantasy unless you are afraid of the freedom of uncertainty. This is why it's hard for me to imagine anyone who likes science can dislike fantasy. Both are based so profoundly on the admission of uncertainty, the welcoming acceptance of unanswered questions...
All Galileo said, all Darwin said, was "It doesn't have to be the way we thought it was.""
September 2011...Clinging desperately to a metaphor
Unless the people benefit, economic growth is a subsidy for the rich - Richard Falk, 'Post Mubarak Revolutionary Chances', Al Jazeera, 22 February 2011
"It's as silly for me to write abut economics as it would be for most economists to write about the use of enjambment in iambic pentameter. But they don't live in a library, and I do live in an economy..
So: I want to ask how economists can continue to speak of growth as a positive economic goal...why do we never question the system itself, so as to find ways to get around it or out of it?"
October 2012...Lying it all away
"I wish the ideals of respecting truth and sharing the goods hadn't become so foreign to my country that my country begins to seem foreign to me."
October 2014...The inner child and the nude politician
"Nature, says Wordsworth, offers us endless reminders of the eternal, and we are most open to them in our childhood. Though we lose the openness in adult life, when "custom" lies upon us "with a weight/heavy as frost, and deep almost as life," still we can keep faith with
"Those shadowy recollections,
Which, be they what they may,
Are yet the fountain-light of all our day,
Are yet a master-light of all our seeing;
Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make
Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal Silence; truths that wake
to perish never."
...we live a full human life not by stopping at any stage, but by becoming all that is in us to become."
January 2011 The Horsies Upstairs
"To me what's awful is not - as is usually presented - the "loss of belief". What's awful is the demand that children believe or pretend to believe in a falsehood, and the guilty-emotion-laden-short-circuiting of the mind that happens when fact is deliberately confused with myth, actuality with ritual symbol"
Comments