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| ==== The Left Hand Of Darkness ==== | ==== The Left Hand Of Darkness ==== |
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| [[Reading notes]] from The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin | [[Reading notes]] from The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin |
| ====2. The Place Inside the Blizzard==== | ====2. The Place Inside the Blizzard==== |
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| | <blockquote>In those days, as now, full brothers were permitted to keep kemmer until one of them should bear a child, but after that they must separate; so it was never permitted them to vow kemmering for life. Yet this they had done.</blockquote> |
| In those days, as now, full brothers were permitted to keep kemmer until one of them should bear a child, but after that they must separate; so it was never permitted them to vow kemmering for life. Yet this they had done. | |
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| ====3. The Mad King==== | ====3. The Mad King==== |
| <blockquote>“The Ekumen will wait till you open it, sir. It will force nothing on you. I was sent alone, and remain here alone, in order to make it impossible for you to fear me.”</blockquote> | <blockquote>“The Ekumen will wait till you open it, sir. It will force nothing on you. I was sent alone, and remain here alone, in order to make it impossible for you to fear me.”</blockquote> |
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| <blockquote>As they say in Ekumenical School, when action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep | <blockquote>As they say in Ekumenical School, when action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep</blockquote> |
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| ====5. The Domestication of Hunch==== | ====5. The Domestication of Hunch==== |
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| “That we shall die.” | <blockquote>“That we shall die.”</blockquote> |
| </blockquote> | |
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| <blockquote>But on Gethen nothing led to war. Quarrels, murders, feuds, forays, vendettas, assassinations, tortures and abominations, all these were in their repertory of human accomplishments; but they did not go to war. They lacked, it seemed, the capacity to mobilize. They behaved like animals, in that respect; or like women. They did not behave like men, or ants. At any rate they never yet had done so | <blockquote>But on Gethen nothing led to war. Quarrels, murders, feuds, forays, vendettas, assassinations, tortures and abominations, all these were in their repertory of human accomplishments; but they did not go to war. They lacked, it seemed, the capacity to mobilize. They behaved like animals, in that respect; or like women. They did not behave like men, or ants. At any rate they never yet had done so |
| ====7. The Question of Sex==== | ====7. The Question of Sex==== |
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| It seems likely that they were an experiment. The thought is unpleasant. But now that there is evidence to indicate that the Terran Colony was an experiment, the planting of one Hainish Normal group on a world with its own proto-hominid autochthones, the possibility cannot be ignored. Human genetic manipulation was certainly practiced by the Colonizers; nothing else explains the hilfs of S or the degenerate winged hominids of Rokanan; will anything else explain Gethenian sexual physiology? Accident, possibly; natural selection, hardly. Their ambisexuality has little or no adaptive value.</blockquote> | <blockquote>It seems likely that they were an experiment. The thought is unpleasant. But now that there is evidence to indicate that the Terran Colony was an experiment, the planting of one Hainish Normal group on a world with its own proto-hominid autochthones, the possibility cannot be ignored. Human genetic manipulation was certainly practiced by the Colonizers; nothing else explains the hilfs of S or the degenerate winged hominids of Rokanan; will anything else explain Gethenian sexual physiology? Accident, possibly; natural selection, hardly. Their ambisexuality has little or no adaptive value.</blockquote> |
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| <blockquote>somer-kemmer cycle</blockquote> | <blockquote>somer-kemmer cycle</blockquote> |
| ====8. Another Way into Orgoreyn==== | ====8. Another Way into Orgoreyn==== |
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| Compare the torrent and the glacier. Both get where they are going</blockquote> | <blockquote>Compare the torrent and the glacier. Both get where they are going</blockquote> |
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| <blockquote>He talked much about pride of country and love of the parentland, but little about shifgrethor, personal pride or prestige</blockquote> | <blockquote>He talked much about pride of country and love of the parentland, but little about shifgrethor, personal pride or prestige</blockquote> |
| ====12. On Time and Darkness==== | ====12. On Time and Darkness==== |
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| And in the Center there is no time past and no time to come. In all time past it is. In all time to come it is. It has not been nor yet will it be. It is. It is all. | <blockquote>And in the Center there is no time past and no time to come. In all time past it is. In all time to come it is. It has not been nor yet will it be. It is. It is all.</blockquote> |
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| | <blockquote>The rate of expansion (Hubble’s constant; Rerherek’s constant) can in fact be estimated from the observed amount of light in the night sky; the point here involved is that, if the universe were not expanding, the night sky would not appear to be dark.</blockquote> |
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| 6 July 2559 BE | ====13. Down on the Farm==== |
| 12. On Time and Darkness | |
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| The rate of expansion (Hubble’s constant; Rerherek’s constant) can in fact be estimated from the observed amount of light in the night sky; the point here involved is that, if the universe were not expanding, the night sky would not appear to be dark. | <blockquote>One’s magnetic and directional subsenses are all wrong on other planets; when the intellect won’t or can’t compensate for that wrongness, the result is a profound bewilderment, a feeling that everything, literally, has come loose.</blockquote> |
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| 6 July 2559 BE | |
| 13. Down on the Farm | |
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| One’s magnetic and directional subsenses are all wrong on other planets; when the intellect won’t or can’t compensate for that wrongness, the result is a profound bewilderment, a feeling that everything, literally, has come loose. | <blockquote>Falling snow; new-fallen snow; long-fallen snow; snow after rain has fallen on it; refrozen snow… Orgota and Karhidish have a word for each of these. In Karhidish (which I know better than Orgota) they have by my count sixty-two words for the various kinds, states, ages, and qualities of snow; fallen snow, that is. There is another set of words for the varieties of snowfall; another for ice; a set of twenty or more that define what the temperature range is, how strong a wind blows, and what kind of precipitation is occurring, all together.</blockquote> |
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| | <blockquote>They were without shame and without desire, like the angels. But it is not human to be without shame and without desire.</blockquote> |
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| | <blockquote>Being so strictly denned and limited by nature, the sexual urge of Gethenians is really not much interfered with by society: there is less coding, channeling, and repressing of sex there than in any bisexual society I know of. Abstinence is entirely voluntary; indulgence is entirely acceptable. Sexual fear and sexual frustration are both extremely rare. This was the first case I had seen of the social purpose running counter to the sexual drive. Being a suppression, not merely a repression, it produced not frustration, but something more ominous, perhaps, in the long run: passivity..</blockquote> |
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| 6 July 2559 BE | ====14. The Escape==== |
| 13. Down on the Farm | |
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| Falling snow; new-fallen snow; long-fallen snow; snow after rain has fallen on it; refrozen snow… Orgota and Karhidish have a word for each of these. In Karhidish (which I know better than Orgota) they have by my count sixty-two words for the various kinds, states, ages, and qualities of snow; fallen snow, that is. There is another set of words for the varieties of snowfall; another for ice; a set of twenty or more that define what the temperature range is, how strong a wind blows, and what kind of precipitation is occurring, all together. | <blockquote>My greatest error was, as you say, in not making myself clear to you. I am not used to doing so. I am not used to giving, or accepting, either advice or blame.</blockquote> |
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| 6 July 2559 BE | ====15. To the Ice==== |
| 13. Down on the Farm | |
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| They were without shame and without desire, like the angels. But it is not human to be without shame and without desire. | <blockquote>He knew, as do many Gethenians, the caloric and nutritive value of each food; he knew his own requirements under various conditions, and how to estimate mine pretty closely. Such knowledge has high survival-value, on Winter.</blockquote> |
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| | <blockquote>“Curiosity, adventure.” He hesitated and smiled slightly. “The augmentation of the complexity and intensity of the field of intelligent life,” he said, quoting one of my Ekumenical quotations</blockquote> |
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| | <blockquote>“Very few Orgota know how to cook. Hate Orgoreyn? No, how should I? How does one hate a country, or love one? Tibe talks about it; I lack the trick of it. I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply? What is love of one’s country; is it hate of one’s uncountry? Then it’s not a good thing. Is it simply self-love? That’s a good thing, but one mustn’t make a virtue of it, or a profession… Insofar as I love life, I love the hills of the Domain of Estre, but that sort of love does not have a boundary-line of hate. And beyond that, I am ignorant, I hope.”</blockquote> |
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| | <blockquote>Ignorant, in the Handdara sense: to ignore the abstraction, to hold fast to the thing. There was in this attitude something feminine, a refusal of the abstract, the ideal, a submissiveness to the given, which rather displeased me.</blockquote> |
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| | <blockquote>“A man who doesn’t detest a bad government is a fool. And if there were such a thing as a good government on earth, it would be a great joy to serve it.”</blockquote> |
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| | <blockquote>It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end</blockquote> |
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| 6 July 2559 BE | ====16. Between Drumner and Dremegole==== |
| 13. Down on the Farm | |
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| Being so strictly denned and limited by nature, the sexual urge of Gethenians is really not much interfered with by society: there is less coding, channeling, and repressing of sex there than in any bisexual society I know of. Abstinence is entirely voluntary; indulgence is entirely acceptable. Sexual fear and sexual frustration are both extremely rare. This was the first case I had seen of the social purpose running counter to the sexual drive. Being a suppression, not merely a repression, it produced not frustration, but something more ominous, perhaps, in the long run: passivity. | <blockquote>“The Yomeshta would say that man’s singularity is his divinity.” “Lords of the Earth, yes. Other cults on other worlds have come to the same conclusion. They tend to be the cults of dynamic, aggressive, ecology-breaking cultures.</blockquote> |
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| | <blockquote>Well, in the Handdara … you know, there’s no theory, no dogma… Maybe they are less aware of the gap between men and beasts, being more occupied with the likenesses, the links, the whole of which living things are a part</blockquote> |
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| | <blockquote>Light is the left hand of darkness and darkness the right hand of light. Two are one, life and death, lying together like lovers in kemmer, like hands joined together, like the end and the way</blockquote> |
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| | <blockquote>Equality is not the general rule, then?</blockquote> |
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| 6 July 2559 BE | ====18. On the Ice==== |
| 14. The Escape | |
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| My greatest error was, as you say, in not making myself clear to you. I am not used to doing so. I am not used to giving, or accepting, either advice or blame. | <blockquote>Praise then darkness and Creation unfinished,”</blockquote> |
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| 6 July 2559 BE | <blockquote>Young children, and defectives, and members of un-evolved or regressed societies, can’t mindspeak. The mind must exist on a certain plane of complexity first. You can’t build up amino acids out of hydrogen atoms; a good deal of complexifying has to take place first: the same situation. Abstract thought, varied social interaction, intricate cultural adjustments, esthetic and ethical perception, all of it has to reach a certain level before the connections can be made—before the potentiality can be touched at all.”</blockquote> |
| 15. To the Ice | |
| | <blockquote>So that intimacy of mind established between us was a bond, indeed, but an obscure and austere one, not so much admitting further light (as I had expected it to) as showing the extent of the darkness.</blockquote> |
| He knew, as do many Gethenians, the caloric and nutritive value of each food; he knew his own requirements under various conditions, and how to estimate mine pretty closely. Such knowledge has high survival-value, on Winter. | |
| | <blockquote>“It’s the Ekumen’s custom, and there are reasons for it. Though in fact I begin to wonder if I’ve ever understood the reasons. I thought it was for your sake that I came alone, so obviously alone, so vulnerable, that I could in myself pose no threat, change no balance: not an invasion, but a mere messenger-boy. But there’s more to it than that. Alone, I cannot change your world. But I can be changed by it. Alone, I must listen, as well as speak. Alone, the relationship I finally make, if I make one, is not impersonal and not only political: it is individual, it is personal, it is both more and less than political. Not We and They; not I and It; but I and Thou. Not political, not pragmatic, but mystical. In a certain sense the Ekumen is not a body politic, but a body mystic. It considers beginnings to be extremely important. Beginnings, and means. Its doctrine is just the reverse of the doctrine that the end justifies the means. It proceeds, therefore, by subtle ways, and slow ones, and queer, risky ones; rather as evolution does, which is in certain senses its model[…]</blockquote> |
| 6 July 2559 BE | |
| 15. To the Ice | |
| | |
| “Curiosity, adventure.” He hesitated and smiled slightly. “The augmentation of the complexity and intensity of the field of intelligent life,” he said, quoting one of my Ekumenical quotations | |
| | |
| 6 July 2559 BE | |
| 15. To the Ice | |
| | |
| “Very few Orgota know how to cook. Hate Orgoreyn? No, how should I? How does one hate a country, or love one? Tibe talks about it; I lack the trick of it. I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply? What is love of one’s country; is it hate of one’s uncountry? Then it’s not a good thing. Is it simply self-love? That’s a good thing, but one mustn’t make a virtue of it, or a profession… Insofar as I love life, I love the hills of the Domain of Estre, but that sort of love does not have a boundary-line of hate. And beyond that, I am ignorant, I hope.” | |
| | |
| 6 July 2559 BE | |
| 15. To the Ice | |
| | |
| Ignorant, in the Handdara sense: to ignore the abstraction, to hold fast to the thing. There was in this attitude something feminine, a refusal of the abstract, the ideal, a submissiveness to the given, which rather displeased me. | |
| | |
| 6 July 2559 BE | |
| 15. To the Ice | |
| | |
| “A man who doesn’t detest a bad government is a fool. And if there were such a thing as a good government on earth, it would be a great joy to serve it.” | |
| | |
| 6 July 2559 BE | |
| 15. To the Ice | |
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| It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end | |
| | |
| 6 July 2559 BE | |
| 16. Between Drumner and Dremegole | |
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| “The Yomeshta would say that man’s singularity is his divinity.” “Lords of the Earth, yes. Other cults on other worlds have come to the same conclusion. They tend to be the cults of dynamic, aggressive, ecology-breaking cultures. | |
| | |
| 6 July 2559 BE | |
| 16. Between Drumner and Dremegole | |
| | |
| Well, in the Handdara … you know, there’s no theory, no dogma… Maybe they are less aware of the gap between men and beasts, being more occupied with the likenesses, the links, the whole of which living things are a part | |
| | |
| 6 July 2559 BE | |
| 16. Between Drumner and Dremegole | |
| | |
| Light is the left hand of darkness and darkness the right hand of light. Two are one, life and death, lying together like lovers in kemmer, like hands joined together, like the end and the way | |
| | |
| 6 July 2559 BE | |
| 16. Between Drumner and Dremegole | |
| | |
| Equality is not the general rule, then? | |
| | |
| 7 July 2559 BE | |
| 18. On the Ice | |
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| Praise then darkness and Creation unfinished,” | |
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| 7 July 2559 BE | |
| 18. On the Ice | |
| | |
| Young children, and defectives, and members of un-evolved or regressed societies, can’t mindspeak. The mind must exist on a certain plane of complexity first. You can’t build up amino acids out of hydrogen atoms; a good deal of complexifying has to take place first: the same situation. Abstract thought, varied social interaction, intricate cultural adjustments, esthetic and ethical perception, all of it has to reach a certain level before the connections can be made—before the potentiality can be touched at all.” | |
| | |
| 7 July 2559 BE | |
| 18. On the Ice | |
| | |
| So that intimacy of mind established between us was a bond, indeed, but an obscure and austere one, not so much admitting further light (as I had expected it to) as showing the extent of the darkness. | |
| | |
| 7 July 2559 BE | |
| 18. On the Ice | |
| | |
| “It’s the Ekumen’s custom, and there are reasons for it. Though in fact I begin to wonder if I’ve ever understood the reasons. I thought it was for your sake that I came alone, so obviously alone, so vulnerable, that I could in myself pose no threat, change no balance: not an invasion, but a mere messenger-boy. But there’s more to it than that. Alone, I cannot change your world. But I can be changed by it. Alone, I must listen, as well as speak. Alone, the relationship I finally make, if I make one, is not impersonal and not only political: it is individual, it is personal, it is both more and less than political. Not We and They; not I and It; but I and Thou. Not political, not pragmatic, but mystical. In a certain sense the Ekumen is not a body politic, but a body mystic. It considers beginnings to be extremely important. Beginnings, and means. Its doctrine is just the reverse of the doctrine that the end justifies the means. It proceeds, therefore, by subtle ways, and slow ones, and queer, risky ones; rather as evolution does, which is in certain senses its model[…] | |
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| 7 July 2559 BE | ====19. Homecoming==== |
| 19. Homecoming | |
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| He glanced back at the sledge, a bit of refuse in the vast torment of ice and reddish rock. “It did well,” he said. His loyalty extended without disproportion to things, the patient, obstinate, reliable things that we use and get used to, the things we live by. He missed the sledge. | <blockquote>He glanced back at the sledge, a bit of refuse in the vast torment of ice and reddish rock. “It did well,” he said. His loyalty extended without disproportion to things, the patient, obstinate, reliable things that we use and get used to, the things we live by. He missed the sledge.</blockquote> |
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nik