Ursula Kroeber Le Guin

[jazzfish]

There's a sense in which the idea of UKL being gone is just too much, like Bowie two years ago... and there's a sense in which it's inevitable and something I can accept. For a word to be spoken, there must be silence. Before, and after.

I can't think of anyone who's had as much impact on the direction of my thoughts.

I read the first three Earthsea books in elementary school, and reread the first two over and over, enjoying the atmosphere and the saving-each-other aspect of Tombs of Atuan and, I think, trying to understand the ending of Wizard. Neither is precisely a heroic tale, though Tombs at least looks like one. Wizard isn't about growing stronger or overcoming evil, it's about growing wiser and accepting your own darkness. I stumbled on the occasional Le Guin short story and liked them alright; I read Tehanu a couple of years after it came out and was pretty unimpressed.

And there things sat until fall 2003, when I talked my advisor into letting me replace "American Lit Before 1900" in my degree requirements with a seminar on Le Guin. I had a fantastic teacher in Len Hatfield and a number of interesting and engaging classmates, including my then-girlfriend Kelly. We read ... not quite everything she'd written, but certainly a more than representative sample. I enjoyed her early novels, and flipped out over the chance to dig deep into Earthsea (including the two later books, which I liked much better than Tehanu), and thoroughly lost myself in her big two SF novels, The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness. And we did an in-depth analysis of her picture books, A Ride on the Red Mare's Back and the Catwings tetrology, and dug into her poetry, and of course bounced around her short stories, which I maintain are the form in which she did her best work.

But it was two nonfictionish pieces that stuck with me. Her essay "The Child and the Shadow" ... resonated, and I still can't talk about it, though I cited it quite a lot in my final paper. And her translation of the Tao Te Ching came to me at exactly the right time: I'd thrown my life into utter chaos and was desperately casting about for something to hold onto, something to make sense of it. And I got a simple, clear, poetic explication of the principle that things are, not for any reason but that they are, and that's enough.

That's not even getting into the ways that class accelerated my transition from technolibertarian to, maybe 'social justice cleric' is the best descriptor these days.

I never met Ursula Le Guin. Kelly did, and got her to sign a copy of the Tao Te Ching for me, which is part of why I have three copies. (Four if you count the ebook. Five if you count the CDs that came with the third copy.) I don't know what I could have said to her, anyway.

To live til you die
Is to live long enough.

Comments

[wild_irises]

That last quotation is both chilling and apt.

[jazzfish]

I like it a lot. Like so much in her Tao Te Ching, it came to me at the right time. In this case, when my maternal grandfather died in 2005, the guy who pointed me to Tolkien and later gave me his copy of Asimov's Foundation trilogy.