Goodbye To My Home

A break from the series I've been doing, a reflection on my recent move:

I cried when Candice and I moved out of our first home.  We had lived there for over four years and made so many memories there and spent so much time with friends that, though we were moving to an exciting new place, it was hard to leave. 

I start by explaining this because I want to make it clear what leaving Bowman House was like.

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To See The Sky

This post continues my theme of drawing wisdom from Ursula Le Guin’s Orsinian Tales.  You can check out some of my previous posts for a more detailed summary of the book or the Wikipedia page.

The story I have come to as the subject of this posts is one of my favorite in the book.  It is one that I felt bolstered up with joy and exhilaration after reading.  It is one I completely remembered though I first read it a while ago now, and yet I still reread it to write this post.

I wanted to experience it again. 

The story is called An die Muzik, I just want to attempt to summarize it here and perhaps I’ll write another post later in order to dive into the details.

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A Wondrous Critique

This post continues my theme of drawing wisdom from UrsulaLe Guin’s Orsinian Tales.  You can check out some of my previous posts for a more detailed summary of the book or the Wikipedia page.

This post is a little different for me because the subject of the quote I want to expound upon is politics.  I usually don’t pay much attention to politics, much less write about political issues.  Maybe this is more of a social issue.  I suppose when you engage social issues, you’re going to run into politics sooner or later.

This is taken from the story A Week in the Country.  This is something a man’s grandfather says to him.  Remember, the setting is an oppressed [fictional] Eastern European country.

“What would we do with freedom if we had it, Kosta?  What has the West done with it?  Eaten it.  Put it in its belly.  A great wondrous belly, that’s the West.  With a wise head on top of it, a man’s head, with a man’s mind and eyes-but the rest all belly.  He can’t walk any more.  He sits at table eating, eating, thinking up machines to bring him more food, more food.  Throwing food to the black an yellow rats under the table so they won’t gnaw down the walls around him.  There he sits, and here we are, with nothing in our bellies but air, air and cancer, air and rage.  We can still walk.  So we’re yoked.  Yoked to the foreign plow.  When we smell food we bray and kick. –Are we men, though, Kosta? I doubt it.”

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Get Used To It

This post continues my theme of drawing wisdom from Ursula Le Guin’s Orsinian Tales.  You can check out some of my previous posts for a more detailed summary of the book.

The story Brothers and Sisters follows two brothers and their sister.  Without explaining the story, I again want to share a little of Le Guin’s eloquence in character development.  This post is from the same story as my last one, and the idea is only subtly different.

Le Guin describes the sister, Rosanna, listening to a conversation between her brother and a lady friend of his:

Rosanna, by the hearth, listened to them talk.  She sat silent, heavy and her shoulders stooped, though of late she had been learning again to hold herself erect as she had when she was a child, a year ago. They say one gets used to being a millionaire; so after a year or two a human being begins to get used to being a woman…

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I Am Unfinished

This post continues my theme of drawing wisdom from Ursula Le Guin’s Orsinian Tales.  You can check out some of my previous posts for a more detailed summary of the book.

The story Brothers and Sisters follows two brothers and their sister and their interactions with each other and the people of the town.  Without explaining the story, I want to share a little of Le Guin’s eloquence in character development.

She describes the characters.  The oldest brother is a man.  The second, Stefan,  is a young man.  And their sister is thirteen, just growing up, just learning how to interact with other people, figuring out how to carry herself.  Le Guin describes her interactions with Stefan:

Usually she and Stefan quarreled, touching each other where each was raw, unfinished.

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Graceful Dismissal

This post continues my theme of drawing wisdom from Ursula Le Guin’s Orsinian Tales.  You can check out some of my previous posts for a more detailed summary of the book and the story I’m presently drawing from, Conversations at Night.  Suffice to say it’s a story of unlikely love forming despite all sorts of adversity. 

They are in a poor part of a poor country.  They are economically and politically oppressed.  They feel trapped within their society.  The people around them do not have ample opportunities to make it in life and they have less. He is blind so he cannot fulfill his duty as a man to support a woman. Their families encourage them both to find other people.

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Truth without Irony

I’d like to continue my reflective commentary on Ursula Le Guin’s Orsinian Tales by making a few more observations about the fourth tale: Conversations at Night.

As I noted before, the story is about two people who live in a time and location of oppression. They are poor and struggling and yet they find each other. The man, Sanzo, was blinded in an accident at work, thus limiting his options and possibilities even more severely. Their love begins when the woman, Lisha, begins visiting him to read to him.

I would like to focus on another of the truths Le Guin showcases in the story.

In a conversation between Lisha and her mother the following dialogue occurs:

“The man is blind, Alitsia!”“I know,” the girl said, without irony.

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Out and Back In

The fourth story in Orsinian Tales is Conversations at Night. This story is marked up and underlined more than any other in the book. Le Guin introduces us to two characters who are not supposed to love each other. They are in a poor country; they do not have options in general. They are the poor working class of the city without privileges available to those in the upper part of town. Beyond the common hardships, the man has been blinded by an accident in the mine. Somehow, they begin to love each other, then they begin to realize it, then they decide to overcome.

The characters go on a walk early in the story. They walk to the better part of town, to the nice buildings, to the parks. They talk, they enjoy each other, then they return. Le Guin writes,

“They went back down the wide, calm streets, back into their world. There the streets were noisy and jammed with people coming home from the mills”

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Past the Guards

I wrote last about an Ursula Le Guin book, Orsinian Tales. I’d like to elaborate on what made the stories in that book meaningful to me and, hopefully, open it up for others to relate.

The first story in the book is called The Fountains. Le Guin introduces us to a day in the life of a scientist from a politically oppressed country. He is in France for a summit or conference or some such thing, but he is accompanied by “students” or “bodyguards” whose hidden purpose is to ensure that he does not stray from the approved purpose of his trip. The character, Adam, is enraptured by the sights of the city, the gardens, and the fountains. He is moved by the beauty around him and he unintentionally leaves the company of the bodyguards who are with him.

I love how Le Guin describes it, she says “it was at this moment, though he was unaware of it, that he defected.”

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