"The sunlights differ, but there is only one darkness" 2006

This morning I finished reading The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin. It is another brilliant work, providing a perspective on political organization of societies much as The Left Hand of Darkness did for gender organization.

LeGuin writes about decisions, about habits, compromises, and choice. She is probably one of the best writers on the concept of freedom you could read.

Highly recommended. Here's a taste:

Fulfillment, Shevak thought, is a function of time. The search for pleasure is circular, repetitive, atemporal. The variety seeking of the spectator, the thrill hunter, the sexually promiscuous always ends in the same place. It has an end. It comes to the end and has to start over. It is not a journey and return, but a closed cycle, a locked room, a cell.

Outside the locked room is the landscape of time, in which the spirit may, with luck and courage, construct the fragile, makeshift, improbable roads and cities of fidelity: a landscape inhabitable by human beings.

It is not until an act occurs within the landscape of the past and future that it is a human act. Loyalty, which asserts the continuity of past and future, binding time into a whole, is the root of human strength; there is no good to be done without it.

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"The sunlights differ, but there is only one darkness"

This morning I finished reading The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin. It is another brilliant work, providing a perspective on political organization of societies much as The Left Hand of Darkness did for gender organization.

LeGuin writes about decisions, about habits, compromises, and choice. She is probably one of the best writers on the concept of freedom you could read.

Highly recommended. Here's a taste:

Fulfillment, Shevak thought, is a function of time. The search for pleasure is circular, repetitive, atemporal. The variety seeking of the spectator, the thrill hunter, the sexually promiscuous always ends in the same place. It has an end. It comes to the end and has to start over. It is not a journey and return, but a closed cycle, a locked room, a cell.

Outside the locked room is the landscape of time, in which the spirit may, with luck and courage, construct the fragile, makeshift, improbable roads and cities of fidelity: a landscape inhabitable by human beings.

It is not until an act occurs within the landscape of the past and future that it is a human act. Loyalty, which asserts the continuity of past and future, binding time into a whole, is the root of human strength; there is no good to be done without it.

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