"Light and darkness met, and joined, and were one."

[jazzfish]

I first read A Wizard of Earthsea sometime in elementary school, I no longer recall exactly when, and followed it up with The Tombs of Atuan and The Farthest Shore. I adored Tombs wholeheartedly and reread it often: it's an adventure story and a rescue narrative in which the main characters save each other, and the culture and that twisty map of the Tombs drew me in. I found (still find) Shore to be dry and depressing and generally a slog to get through.

Wizard, though. There was something there, something behind the densely poetic language and the confusing ending that kept drawing me back. "Only in silence the word, only in dark the light, only in dying life, bright the hawk's flight on the empty sky." Or the wizard Vetch's sister Yarrow: "And when you're starving on the waste water between the far isles you'll think of that cake and say Ah! had I not stolen that cake I might eat it now, alas!-- I shall eat my brother's, so he may starve with you--" "Thus is Equilibrium maintained," Ged remarked.

I have a vague recollection that somewhere in The Farthest Shore, when Ged and Arren visit the raft-people, Le Guin talks about the festival of Sunreturn. The internet tells me Sunreturn gets mentioned throughout the books, though only ever in passing. Regardless. Something about the name spoke to me, stayed with me.

And now the sun is up, as up as it gets in Rain City in the winter, and maybe a little earlier than yesterday. The light and the warmth come back if we can hold on and wait.

Happy Sunreturn.

Comments

[malkingrey]

Wow. Somebody else who likes The Tombs of Atuan! (And like you, the later books left me cold -- by that time, I think her message was overshadowing her story, which is always a bad idea, at least in my opinion -- but A Wizard of Earthsea made the top of my head come off the first time I read it.)

[jazzfish]

I very much disliked Tehanu when I read it on release, and warmed up to it only very slightly during a university class on Le Guin. I *did* enjoy Tales From Earthsea; given the right world and author I'm a sucker for explicit worldbuilding, which is mostly what that was. The Other Wind I have fond if vague memories of as well.

Tombs, though. Wow. And Wizard, though for different reasons. Wizard is one of those books where I have no idea what it did to me, or how I imprinted on it, because I came to it way too young to be able to approach it in any way critically. Which is probably the best way.

[malkingrey]

That's how I imprinted on The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Nobody told me it was supposed to be full of Christian symbolism and allegory, so when I hit the Stone Table and my mind started noticing that this stuff over here was like some of the stuff we talked about in Sunday School over there, my head kind of exploded, in the good, "Wow, I didn't know you could do that sort of thing with a story!" kind of way. For the longest time, it was like this nifty thing in the book that nobody else knew about but me.