“Things don’t have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What’s the function of a galaxy? I don’t know if our life has a purpose and I don’t see that it matters. What does matter is that we’re a part. Like a thread in a cloth or a grass-blade in a field. It is and we are. What we do is like wind blowing on the grass. […] We’re in the world, not against it. […] The world is, no matter how we think it ought to be. You have to be with it. You have to let it be.”
Ged also spoke low, to use his friend’s true name: “No matter, Estarriol. But this is myself, and I am glad to see you…”
[Estarriol] heard, perhaps, something more than simple gladness in his voice. He had not yet let go of Ged’s shoulder, and he said now, in the True Speech, “In trouble and from darkness you come, Ged, yet your coming is joy to me.”
️✨❄️
I’m reading the Earthsea books for the first time… super recommend the first one to anyone in need of a heartfelt story of discovery and self acceptance… wow
The Hero’s Journey: Ged Sparrowhawk (A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin), by Paulina Sieczkowska, 2018.
Illustration work created as a part of artist’s additional diploma at the Academy of Fine Arts in Katowice, Poland.
The Hero’s Journey project is based upon the concept known within the comparative mythology and the narratology fields as the Monomyth, first introduced by Joseph Campbell. Within the project, author searches for the examples of various cultural texts, and examines how they fit within the structure, interpreting them through the narrative and psychological lenses. One of the featured works shows the journey of Ged Sparrowhawk, protagonist of the novel A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin, and his transformation from the ambitious yet overly proud young adept of magic, into the responsible and powerful wizard and a man who is whole and independent.
“Immature people crave and demand moral certainty: This is bad, this is good. Kids and adolescents struggle to find a sure moral foothold in this bewildering world; they long to feel they’re on the winning side, or at least a member of the team. To them, heroic fantasy may offer a vision of moral clarity. Unfortunately, the pretended Battle Between (unquestioned) Good and (unexamined) Evil obscures instead of clarifying, serving as a mere excuse for violence — as brainless, useless, and base as aggressive war in the real world.”
Ursula K Le Guin at it again, being right as always
The only unrealistic part about the dialogue in chapter one of The Word for World is Forest is that it’s an infodump. The weird thing about what Captain Davidson says is in reality nobody walks up to a co-worker to “As You Know…” settler-colonialist ideology.
okay i mentioned this when i was yelling about art and math brains, and also in the last post that I was hollering about this fuckin’ book on, but Ursula K Le Guin was fucking rightinThe Left Hand of Darkness, because when you get down to it, actually, yeah:
sexism, and bigotry towards what a society sees as “sexual perversions”, and nationalism, and us-versus-them mindsets as justification for violence, and aaaall of that is basically the same shit
and it’s usually intertwined, and when you start deconstructing one part of it (like sexism) another part (like gender or patriotism) tends to be easier to peel away, or even just floats off naturally.
And I can’t stop thinking about how fucking right she was, because like yeah, of course things start going to shit when you start viewing this pine tree as being inherently different from that pine tree just because some dude drew a border separating them and now they exist in different countries, and shouldn’t we be more in love with the trees we like for the tree’s sake, not because of who owns it or what land it exists on, but because we love the tree itself?
Or the hillsides?
Or the sunsets?
Maybe that doesn’t make much sense if you haven’t read the book, but shouldn’t we??
And then shouldn’t we love the features and behaviors we see in people, not because we see them as symptomatic of some ephemeral, loosely defined matrix of gender or sex or personality type, but because we love the features, regardless of who they’re on, and because we love the behaviors, regardless of who’s behind them?
Which doesn’t mean that you can’t only get turned on by only women or men or nonbinary folks, because yeah as far as i’m concerned, being attracted to only one portion of the population due to characteristics beyond that person’s control is just a Thing for some people, even if it’s not one that I fully get. Nor does it mean that you can’t hate a politician for their actions and therefore feel suspicious of their fellow political leaders, or anything else that’s a function of our crazy pattern matching brains and it’s instinct to keep us alive.
But like….at some point, you have to step back and realize that you’ve lost the original thread while creating this pattern. You’ve lost sight of the behavior/feature/hillside that you love and mistaken it for this larger whole that we created, this conceptualizationof sex and gender and sexuality and acceptability and patriotism and personhood.
I think that’s rotten, because a whole lot of us are wasting our time turning our backs on hillsides or albums or books or people or jobs because at some point, we got told or taught to view them as existing in a box that we, for some reason, feel like we can’t touch anymore.
“Immature people crave and demand moral certainty: This is bad, this is good. Kids and adolescents struggle to find a sure moral foothold in this bewildering world; they long to feel they’re on the winning side, or at least a member of the team. To them, heroic fantasy may offer a vision of moral clarity. Unfortunately, the pretended Battle Between (unquestioned) Good and (unexamined) Evil obscures instead of clarifying, serving as a mere excuse for violence — as brainless, useless, and base as aggressive war in the real world.”
Ursula K Le Guin at it again, being right as always
“For we each of us deserve everything, every luxury that was ever piled in the tombs of the dead kings, and we each of us deserve nothing, not a mouthful of bread in hunger. Have we not eaten while another starved? Will you punish us for that? Will you reward us for the virtue of starving while others ate? No man earns punishment, no man earns reward. Free your mind of the idea of deserving, the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think.”
the two most valid ursula k le guin quotes are the one that compares capitalism to the divine right of kings and the one about kirk being in love with spock
So long as we get to include “the constrained body knows and values the freedom of the mind” because that kind of marries both of yours
“Immature people crave and demand moral certainty: This is bad, this is good. Kids and adolescents struggle to find a sure moral foothold in this bewildering world; they long to feel they’re on the winning side, or at least a member of the team. To them, heroic fantasy may offer a vision of moral clarity. Unfortunately, the pretended Battle Between (unquestioned) Good and (unexamined) Evil obscures instead of clarifying, serving as a mere excuse for violence — as brainless, useless, and base as aggressive war in the real world.”
Ursula K Le Guin at it again, being right as always
Remember when Ursula K. Le Guin called JK Rowling a nasty basic bitch back in like, 2004? We should have listened
“This last is the situation, as I see it, between my A Wizard of Earthsea and J.K.Rowling’s Harry Potter. I didn’t originate the idea of a school for wizards — if anybody did it was T.H.White, though he did it in single throwaway line and didn’t develop it. I was the first to do that. Years later, Rowling took the idea and developed it along other lines. She didn’t plagiarize. She didn’t copy anything. Her book, in fact, could hardly be more different from mine, in style, spirit, everything. The only thing that rankles me is her apparent reluctance to admit that she ever learned anything from other writers. When ignorant critics praised her wonderful originality in inventing the idea of a wizards’ school, and some of them even seemed to believe that she had invented fantasy, she let them do so. This, I think, was ungenerous, and in the long run unwise.“
Q: Nicholas Lezard has written ‘Rowling can type, but Le Guin can write.’ What do you make of this comment in the light of the phenomenal success of the Potter books? I’d like to hear your opinion of JK Rowling’s writing style
UKL: I have no great opinion of it. When so many adult critics were carrying on about the “incredible originality” of the first Harry Potter book, I read it to find out what the fuss was about, and remained somewhat puzzled; it seemed a lively kid’s fantasy crossed with a “school novel”, good fare for its age group, but stylistically ordinary, imaginatively derivative, and ethically rather mean-spirited.
“After all, [the world] is on my side. That is, I’m a part of it. Not separate from it. I walk on the ground and the ground’s walked on by me, I breathe the air and change it, I am entirely interconnected with the world.”
“After all, [the world] is on my side. That is, I’m a part of it. Not separate from it. I walk on the ground and the ground’s walked on by me, I breathe the air and change it, I am entirely interconnected with the world.”
Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1969 novel The Left Hand of Darkness was a big deal in feminist science fiction for being one of the first widely popular and critically acclaimed works to do cool shit with sex and gender (which was certainly nothing new, but previous such works had rarely “taken off” the way LHoD did). It was criticized for referring to the genderfluid characters with the indefinite “he,” which was a la mode in style guides at the time, instead of using alternating or gender-neutral pronouns. In time Le Guin came to agree with this criticism; she considered her decision not to take things further one of her biggest literary regrets, stating that “I am haunted and bedeviled by the matter of the pronouns.”
I tell you this only because the phrase “I am haunted and bedeviled by the matter of the pronouns” is one I think about a lot.
“The daily routine of most adults is so heavy and artificial that we are closed off to much of the world. We have to do this in order to get our work done. I think one purpose of art is to get us out of those routines. When we hear music or poetry or stories, the world opens up again. We’re drawn in — or out — and the windows of our perception are cleansed, as William Blake said. The same thing can happen when we’re around young children or adults who have unlearned those habits of shutting the world out.”
it’s been a hot minute since ive actually posted anything study related, mostly bc once im done w my work i don’t want to look at it anymore. ive got just over a month left of this semester to push through before i begin my final year!
read ‘april in paris’ by ursula k le guin for the first time last week and it is such a bright little jewel of a story. not perfect but just right, all about how loneliness makes room for the magic of community or family or support. in the forward to the story le guin talks about how it was one of her first two published works, and she was thirty-two at the time which makes me feel a little less like a bug crawling around in the walls of my own unfinished fiction while i watch tv too much and avoid writing like. okay she was thirty-two . and she had such a long rich career . i’m not going to die unfulfilled maybe
The hellsite (affectionate) does as the hellsite (slightly less affectionate) wishes and we cannot for the life of us reblog @natalieironside ’s post found HERE.
Check it out. We’re sad we can’t add this to the thread. @staff help us out or something, idk.
EDIT: The typo is definitely not on purpose. We will be fixing it in post.
