Just finished reading: The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974) by Ursula K. Le Guin.
Anarchy rules, maybe.
I think I ought to start steering clear of politically charged, interplanetary sci-fi. (I’m thinking here of how I couldn’t finish Dune.) The subgenre just doesn’t seem to do anything for me. It could be that I’m just not into politics, i.e., all activities concerning questions of who is in charge of what and how those people make the rules.
But there were certain quotations I found beautiful or thought-provoking:
- “That vivid memory and the cool, vast touch of night wind awakened him. His soul came out of hiding” (narrator of Shevek).
- “Variety doesn’t come with just moving around. I was all over Anarres, young. Drove and loaded in every Division. Must have known a hundred girls in different towns. It got boring. I cam back here, and I do this run every three decades year in year out through this same desert where you can’t tell one sandhill from the next and it’s all the same for three thousand kilos whichever way you look, and go home to the same partner—and I never been bored once. It isn’t changing around from place to place that keeps you lively. It’s getting time on your side. Working with it, not against it” (train driver to Shevek, emphasis mine).
- “In sophisticated Abbenay there was more sense of the tension between the principle of non ownership and the impulse to self-adornment, and there a ring or pin was the limit of good taste. But elsewhere the deep connection between the aesthetic and the acquisitive was simply not worried about; people bedecked themselves unabashedly” (narrator about Sadik viewing a necklace; emphasis mine).
And I think the Holy Spirit or my subconscious mind is speaking: This is the fourth book out of the last fifteen I’ve read that at least touches on the simultaneous importance of self differentiation and a commitment to connection, community, and the common good, the others being Proverbs of Ashes, I and Thou, and A Failure of Nerve. I expected the Buber and the Friedman books to talk about this; I did not expect the Brock & Parker or this Le Guin book to do so. Here is Le Guin’s narrator describing the relevant realization on the part of her protagonist:
Shevek had learned something about his own will these last four years. In its frustration, he had learned strength. No social or ethical imperative equaled it. Not even hunger could repress it. The less he had, the more absolute became his need to be.
He recognized that need, in Odonian terms, as his “cellular function,” the analogic term for the individual’s individuality, the work he can do best, and therefore his best contribution to society. A healthy society would let him exercise that optimum function freely in the coordination of all such functions, finding its adaptability and strength. That was the central idea of Odo’s Analogy. That the Odonian society on Anarres had fallen short of the ideal did not, in his eyes, lessen his responsibility to it; just the contrary. With the myth of the State out of the way, the real mutuality of reciprocity of society and individual became clear. Sacrifice might be demanded of the individual, but never compromise: for though only the society could give security and stability, only the individual, the person, had the power of moral choice—the power of change, the essential function of life. The Odonian society was conceived as a permanent revolution, and revolution begins in the thinking mind.
[…]
He was therefore certain, by now, that his radical and unqualified will to create was, in Odonian terms, its own justification. His sense of primary responsibility towards his work did not cut him off from his fellows, from his society, as he had thought. It engaged him with them absolutely.