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The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
by Ursula K. Le Guin
2nd read
“The Moon stood high over the Northsetting Regional Institute of the Noble and Material Sciences. Four boys of fifteen or sixteen sat on a hilltop between patches of scratchy ground-holum and looked down at the Regional Institute and up at the Moon. “Peculiar,” said Tirin. “I never thought before…” Comments from the other three on the self-evidence of this remark. “I never thought before,” said Tirin unruffled, “of the fact that there are people sitting on a hill, up there, on Urras, looking at Anarres, at us, and saying, ‘Look, there’s the Moon.’ Our earth is their Moon; our Moon is their earth.” “Where, then, is Truth?” declaimed Bedap, and yawned. “In the hill one happens to be sitting on,” said Tirin.
/
“Suffering is a misunderstanding,” Shevek said, leaning forward, his eyes wide and light… “It exists,” Shevek said, spreading out his hands. “It’s real. I can call it a misunderstanding, but I can’t pretend that it doesn’t exist, or will ever cease to exist. Suffering is the human condition on which we live. And when it comes, you know it. you know it as the truth. Of course it’s right to cure diseases, to prevent hunger and injustice, as the social organism does. But no society can change the nature of existence. We can’t prevent suffering. This pain and that pain, yes, but not Pain. A society can only relieve social suffering, unnecessary suffering. The rest remains. The root, the reality. All of us here are going to know grief; if we live fifty years, we’ll have known pain for fifty years. And in the end we’ll die. That’s the condition we’re born on. I’m afraid of life! There are times I—I am very frightened. Any happiness seems trivial. And yet, I wonder if it isn’t all a misunderstanding—this grasping after happiness, this fear of pain… If instead of fearing it and running from it, one could…get through it, go beyond it. There is something beyond it. it’s the self that suffers, and there’s a place where self—ceases. I don’t know how to say it. but I believe that the reality—the truth that I recognize in suffering as I don’t in comfort and happiness—that the reality of pain is not pain. If you can get through it. if you can endure it all the way.
“The reality of our life is in love, in solidarity,” said a tall, soft-eyed girl. “Love is the true condition of human life.” Bedap shook his head. “No, Shev’s right,” he said. “Love is just one of the ways through, and it can go wrong, and miss. Pain never misses. But therefore we don’t have much choice about enduring it! we will, whether we want to or not.”
“But we won’t! One in a hundred, one in a thousand, goes all the way, all the way through. The rest of us keep pretending we’re happy or else just go numb. We suffer, but not enough. and so we suffer for nothing.”
“What are we supposed to do,” said Tirin, “go hit our heads with hammers for an hour every day to make sure we suffer enough?”
“You’re making a cult of pain,” another said. “An Odonian’s goals is positive, not negative. Suffering is dysfunctional, except as a bodily warning against danger. Psychologically and socially it’s merely destructive.”
What motivated Odo but an exceptional sensitivity to suffering—her own and others’?” Bedap retorted.
“But the whole principle of mutual aid is designed to prevent suffering!”
Shevek was sitting on the table, his long legs dangling, his face intense and quiet. “Have you ever seen anybody die? There was a man when I was in a camp in Southeast. It was the first time I saw anything like this. There was some defect in the aircar engine, it crashed lifting off and caught fire. They got him out burned all over. He lived about two hours. He couldn’t have been saved; there was no reason for him to live that long, no justification for those two hours. We were waiting for them to fly in anesthetics from the coast. I stayed with him, along with a couple of girls. We’d been there loading the plane. There wasn’t a doctor. You couldn’t do anything for him, except just stay there, be with him. He was in shock but mostly conscious. He was in terrible pain, mostly from his hands. You couldn’t touch him to comfort him, the skin and flesh would come away at your touch, and he’d scream. You couldn’t do anything for him. There was no aid to give. Maybe he knew we were there, I don’t know. It didn’t do him any good. You couldn’t do anything for him. Then I saw…you see…I saw that you can’t do anything for anybody. We can’t save each other. Or ourselves.”
“What have you left, then? Isolation and despair! You’re denying brotherhood, Shevek!” The tall girl cried.
“No—no, I’m not. I’m trying to say what I think brotherhood really is. It begins—it begins in shared pain.”
“Then where does it end?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know yet.”
/
Invitations to receptions, dedications, openings, and so forth were delivered to Shevek daily. He went to some, because he had come to Urras on a mission and must try to fulfill it: he must urge the idea of brotherhood, he must represent, in his own person, a solidarity of the Two Worlds. He spoke, and people listened to him speak and said, “How true.”
He wondered why the government did not stop him from speaking. Chifoilisk must have exaggerated, for his own purposes, the extend of the control and censorship they could exert. He talked pure anarchism, and they did not stop him. But did they need to stop him? It seemed that he talked to the same people every time: well dressed, well fed, well mannered, smiling. Were they the only kind of people on Urras? “It is pain that brings men together,” Shevek said standing up before them, and they nodded and said, “How true.”
He began to hate them and, realizing that, abruptly ceased accepting their invitations. But to do so was to accept failure and to increase his isolation. He wasn’t doing what he had come here to do. It was not that they cut him off, he told himself; it was that—as always—he had cut himself off from them. He was lonely, stiflingly lonely, among all the people he saw every day. The trouble was that he was not in touch. He felt that he had not touched anything, anyone, on Urras all these months.
/
“Why does it look so beautiful?” Takver said, lying beside Shevek under the orange blanket, the light out. Over them the Occupations of Uninhabited Space hung, dim; out the window the full Moon hung, brilliant. “When we know that it’s just a planet like this one, only with a better climate and worse people—when we know they’re all propertarians, and fight wars, and make laws, and eat while others starve, and anyhow are all getting older and having bad luck and getting rheumatic knees and corns on their toes just like people here…when we know all that, why does it still look so happy—as if life there must be so happy? I can’t look at the radiance and imagine a horrid little man with greasy sleeves and an atrophied mind like Sabul living on it; I just can’t.
“If you can see a thing whole,” Shevek said, “it seems that it’s always beautiful. Planets, lives… But close up, a world’s all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life’s a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death.”
“That’s all right for Urras. Let it stay off there and be the moon—I don’t want it! but I’m not going to stand up on a gravestone and look down on life and say, “O lovely!” I want to see it whole right in the middle of it, here, now. I don’t give a hoot for eternity.”
“It’s nothing to do with eternity,” Shevek said, grinning. “All you have to do to see life whole is to see it as mortal. I’ll die, you’ll die; how could we love each other otherwise? The sun’s going to burn out, what else keeps it shining?”
“Ah! Your talk, your damned philosophy!”
“Talk? It’s not talk. It’s not reason. It’s hand’s touch. I touch the wholeness, I hold it. Which is moonlight, which is Takver? How shall I fear death? When I hold in my hands the light—”
/
An Odonian undertook monogamy just as he might undertake a join enterprise in production, a ballet or a soap works. Partnership was a voluntarily constituted federation like any other. so long as it worked, it worked, and if it didn’t work it stopped being. It was not an institution but a function. It had no sanction but that of private conscious.
This was fully in accord with Odonian social theory. The validity of the promise, even promise of indefinite term, was deep in the grain of Odo’s thinking; though it might seem that her insistence on freedom to change would invalidate the idea of promise or vow, in fact the freedom made the promise meaningful. A promise is a direction taken, a self-limitation of choice. As Odo pointed out, if no direction is taken, if one goes nowhere, no change will occur. One’s freedom to choose and to change will be unused, exactly as if one were in jail, a jail of one’s own building, a maze in which no one way is better than any other. So Odo came to see the promise, the pledge, the idea of fidelity, as essential in the complexity of freedom.
/
Shevek had learned something about his own will these last four years. In its frustration he had learned its 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, therefore his best contribution to his 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 and reciprocity of society and individual became clear. Sacrifice might be demanded of the individual, but never compromised: 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 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. He also felt that a man who had this sense of responsibility about one thing was obliged to carry it through in all things. It was a mistake to see himself as its vehicle and nothing else, to sacrifice any other obligation to it. that sacrificiality was what Takver had spoken of recognizing in her in herself when she was pregnant, and hse has spoken with a degree of horror, of self-disgust, because she too was an Odonian, and the separation of means and ends was, to her too, false. For her as for him, there wasno end. There was process: process was all. You could go in a promising direction or you could go wrong, but you did not set out with te expectation of ever stoping anywhere. All responsiblties, all commitments thus understood took on substance and duration.
So his mutual commitment with Takver, their relationship, had remained thoroughly alive during their four years separation. They had both suffered from it, and suffered a good deal, but it had no occurred to either of them to escape the suffering by denying the commitment.
For after all, he thought now, lying in the warmth of Tkaver’s sleep, it was joy they were both after—the completeness of being. If you evade suffering you also evade the chance of joy. Pleasure you may get, or pleasures, but you will not be fulfilled. You will not know what it is to come home. Fulfillment, Shevek 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 way 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 the past and future, bidning time into a whole, is the root of human strength; there is no good to be done without it. So, looking back on the last four years, Shevek saw them not as wasted, but as part of the edifice that he and Takver were building with their lives. The thing about working with time, instead of against it, he thought, is that it is not wasted. Even pain counts.
--
this book made my brain explode and then ripped my heart out. Questions of loyalty, commitment, exploitation, ethical (or NOT) ethical politics, what "true" anarchism is, love for one's country vs propaganda, what it means to be truly free....how does Le Guin do it?? How does she fit so much into one book but still have it be so complete? I want to immediately start re-reading this tbh.
“The Moon stood high over the Northsetting Regional Institute of the Noble and Material Sciences. Four boys of fifteen or sixteen sat on a hilltop between patches of scratchy ground-holum and looked down at the Regional Institute and up at the Moon. “Peculiar,” said Tirin. “I never thought before…” Comments from the other three on the self-evidence of this remark. “I never thought before,” said Tirin unruffled, “of the fact that there are people sitting on a hill, up there, on Urras, looking at Anarres, at us, and saying, ‘Look, there’s the Moon.’ Our earth is their Moon; our Moon is their earth.” “Where, then, is Truth?” declaimed Bedap, and yawned. “In the hill one happens to be sitting on,” said Tirin.
/
“Suffering is a misunderstanding,” Shevek said, leaning forward, his eyes wide and light… “It exists,” Shevek said, spreading out his hands. “It’s real. I can call it a misunderstanding, but I can’t pretend that it doesn’t exist, or will ever cease to exist. Suffering is the human condition on which we live. And when it comes, you know it. you know it as the truth. Of course it’s right to cure diseases, to prevent hunger and injustice, as the social organism does. But no society can change the nature of existence. We can’t prevent suffering. This pain and that pain, yes, but not Pain. A society can only relieve social suffering, unnecessary suffering. The rest remains. The root, the reality. All of us here are going to know grief; if we live fifty years, we’ll have known pain for fifty years. And in the end we’ll die. That’s the condition we’re born on. I’m afraid of life! There are times I—I am very frightened. Any happiness seems trivial. And yet, I wonder if it isn’t all a misunderstanding—this grasping after happiness, this fear of pain… If instead of fearing it and running from it, one could…get through it, go beyond it. There is something beyond it. it’s the self that suffers, and there’s a place where self—ceases. I don’t know how to say it. but I believe that the reality—the truth that I recognize in suffering as I don’t in comfort and happiness—that the reality of pain is not pain. If you can get through it. if you can endure it all the way.
“The reality of our life is in love, in solidarity,” said a tall, soft-eyed girl. “Love is the true condition of human life.” Bedap shook his head. “No, Shev’s right,” he said. “Love is just one of the ways through, and it can go wrong, and miss. Pain never misses. But therefore we don’t have much choice about enduring it! we will, whether we want to or not.”
“But we won’t! One in a hundred, one in a thousand, goes all the way, all the way through. The rest of us keep pretending we’re happy or else just go numb. We suffer, but not enough. and so we suffer for nothing.”
“What are we supposed to do,” said Tirin, “go hit our heads with hammers for an hour every day to make sure we suffer enough?”
“You’re making a cult of pain,” another said. “An Odonian’s goals is positive, not negative. Suffering is dysfunctional, except as a bodily warning against danger. Psychologically and socially it’s merely destructive.”
What motivated Odo but an exceptional sensitivity to suffering—her own and others’?” Bedap retorted.
“But the whole principle of mutual aid is designed to prevent suffering!”
Shevek was sitting on the table, his long legs dangling, his face intense and quiet. “Have you ever seen anybody die? There was a man when I was in a camp in Southeast. It was the first time I saw anything like this. There was some defect in the aircar engine, it crashed lifting off and caught fire. They got him out burned all over. He lived about two hours. He couldn’t have been saved; there was no reason for him to live that long, no justification for those two hours. We were waiting for them to fly in anesthetics from the coast. I stayed with him, along with a couple of girls. We’d been there loading the plane. There wasn’t a doctor. You couldn’t do anything for him, except just stay there, be with him. He was in shock but mostly conscious. He was in terrible pain, mostly from his hands. You couldn’t touch him to comfort him, the skin and flesh would come away at your touch, and he’d scream. You couldn’t do anything for him. There was no aid to give. Maybe he knew we were there, I don’t know. It didn’t do him any good. You couldn’t do anything for him. Then I saw…you see…I saw that you can’t do anything for anybody. We can’t save each other. Or ourselves.”
“What have you left, then? Isolation and despair! You’re denying brotherhood, Shevek!” The tall girl cried.
“No—no, I’m not. I’m trying to say what I think brotherhood really is. It begins—it begins in shared pain.”
“Then where does it end?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know yet.”
/
Invitations to receptions, dedications, openings, and so forth were delivered to Shevek daily. He went to some, because he had come to Urras on a mission and must try to fulfill it: he must urge the idea of brotherhood, he must represent, in his own person, a solidarity of the Two Worlds. He spoke, and people listened to him speak and said, “How true.”
He wondered why the government did not stop him from speaking. Chifoilisk must have exaggerated, for his own purposes, the extend of the control and censorship they could exert. He talked pure anarchism, and they did not stop him. But did they need to stop him? It seemed that he talked to the same people every time: well dressed, well fed, well mannered, smiling. Were they the only kind of people on Urras? “It is pain that brings men together,” Shevek said standing up before them, and they nodded and said, “How true.”
He began to hate them and, realizing that, abruptly ceased accepting their invitations. But to do so was to accept failure and to increase his isolation. He wasn’t doing what he had come here to do. It was not that they cut him off, he told himself; it was that—as always—he had cut himself off from them. He was lonely, stiflingly lonely, among all the people he saw every day. The trouble was that he was not in touch. He felt that he had not touched anything, anyone, on Urras all these months.
/
“Why does it look so beautiful?” Takver said, lying beside Shevek under the orange blanket, the light out. Over them the Occupations of Uninhabited Space hung, dim; out the window the full Moon hung, brilliant. “When we know that it’s just a planet like this one, only with a better climate and worse people—when we know they’re all propertarians, and fight wars, and make laws, and eat while others starve, and anyhow are all getting older and having bad luck and getting rheumatic knees and corns on their toes just like people here…when we know all that, why does it still look so happy—as if life there must be so happy? I can’t look at the radiance and imagine a horrid little man with greasy sleeves and an atrophied mind like Sabul living on it; I just can’t.
“If you can see a thing whole,” Shevek said, “it seems that it’s always beautiful. Planets, lives… But close up, a world’s all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life’s a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death.”
“That’s all right for Urras. Let it stay off there and be the moon—I don’t want it! but I’m not going to stand up on a gravestone and look down on life and say, “O lovely!” I want to see it whole right in the middle of it, here, now. I don’t give a hoot for eternity.”
“It’s nothing to do with eternity,” Shevek said, grinning. “All you have to do to see life whole is to see it as mortal. I’ll die, you’ll die; how could we love each other otherwise? The sun’s going to burn out, what else keeps it shining?”
“Ah! Your talk, your damned philosophy!”
“Talk? It’s not talk. It’s not reason. It’s hand’s touch. I touch the wholeness, I hold it. Which is moonlight, which is Takver? How shall I fear death? When I hold in my hands the light—”
/
An Odonian undertook monogamy just as he might undertake a join enterprise in production, a ballet or a soap works. Partnership was a voluntarily constituted federation like any other. so long as it worked, it worked, and if it didn’t work it stopped being. It was not an institution but a function. It had no sanction but that of private conscious.
This was fully in accord with Odonian social theory. The validity of the promise, even promise of indefinite term, was deep in the grain of Odo’s thinking; though it might seem that her insistence on freedom to change would invalidate the idea of promise or vow, in fact the freedom made the promise meaningful. A promise is a direction taken, a self-limitation of choice. As Odo pointed out, if no direction is taken, if one goes nowhere, no change will occur. One’s freedom to choose and to change will be unused, exactly as if one were in jail, a jail of one’s own building, a maze in which no one way is better than any other. So Odo came to see the promise, the pledge, the idea of fidelity, as essential in the complexity of freedom.
/
Shevek had learned something about his own will these last four years. In its frustration he had learned its 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, therefore his best contribution to his 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 and reciprocity of society and individual became clear. Sacrifice might be demanded of the individual, but never compromised: 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 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. He also felt that a man who had this sense of responsibility about one thing was obliged to carry it through in all things. It was a mistake to see himself as its vehicle and nothing else, to sacrifice any other obligation to it. that sacrificiality was what Takver had spoken of recognizing in her in herself when she was pregnant, and hse has spoken with a degree of horror, of self-disgust, because she too was an Odonian, and the separation of means and ends was, to her too, false. For her as for him, there wasno end. There was process: process was all. You could go in a promising direction or you could go wrong, but you did not set out with te expectation of ever stoping anywhere. All responsiblties, all commitments thus understood took on substance and duration.
So his mutual commitment with Takver, their relationship, had remained thoroughly alive during their four years separation. They had both suffered from it, and suffered a good deal, but it had no occurred to either of them to escape the suffering by denying the commitment.
For after all, he thought now, lying in the warmth of Tkaver’s sleep, it was joy they were both after—the completeness of being. If you evade suffering you also evade the chance of joy. Pleasure you may get, or pleasures, but you will not be fulfilled. You will not know what it is to come home. Fulfillment, Shevek 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 way 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 the past and future, bidning time into a whole, is the root of human strength; there is no good to be done without it. So, looking back on the last four years, Shevek saw them not as wasted, but as part of the edifice that he and Takver were building with their lives. The thing about working with time, instead of against it, he thought, is that it is not wasted. Even pain counts.
--
this book made my brain explode and then ripped my heart out. Questions of loyalty, commitment, exploitation, ethical (or NOT) ethical politics, what "true" anarchism is, love for one's country vs propaganda, what it means to be truly free....how does Le Guin do it?? How does she fit so much into one book but still have it be so complete? I want to immediately start re-reading this tbh.