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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what moves you?

My Soul and Yours

I have been overwhelmed a lot this semester. I haven’t quite figured out how to balance family with a job that is where I live and that has contributed to a general sense of tired. Some parts of my job are a little annoying, and those parts have weighed me down lately. Recently, things were winding down, I just had some office work left and A TON of papers to grade. Right before the end of the semester, I was packing to go away for the weekend. I said to myself, “I need some Ursula Le Guin”. It had been awhile since I’d read one of her books and I thought that one might help bring me out of the pressure-cooker of stress and administrative tasks that I had been in. I went to my bookshelf and selected one that I had not read before, Orsinian Tales.

Of Le Guin’s writings, the books of The Earthsea Cycle are my favorite. Some of her SciFi books have moved me to tears. I have since finished Orsinian Tales and can say without a doubt that it is not her best work. It doesn’t have the magic that some of the others have. The book is set in a fictional country in the real world and revolves around various people’s responses to political turmoil, love, oppression, loss, etc. In my opinion, Le Guin doesn’t draw the reader into the real world with her stories as well as she draws the reader into worlds she has created. All the same, upon finishing the first of the short stories that comprise the book, I stood up in the hotel room in Chicago in a daze. I felt as though my soul was expanding to the point that I would envelop and consume the mere physical world around me. I felt like I could conquer important problems as well as the systems of our culture that produce important problems. I felt like all the little problems faded as I read and were distant static by the time I stood up.

As I read more stories that weekend and since, I've read one aloud to my wife; I’ve marked up the book like crazy; I’ve underlined and boxed moving sections; I’ve listed ideas for future blogs and conversations and discussion topics with my staff, I’ve drawn smiley faces and stars.
And I’ve wondered why this was what my soul needed.

I tried to write a list of the ideas and themes Le Guin touches on in Orsinian Tales.
Here is part of that list:
Freedom
Dignity
Wholeness of Self
Depth/weight of ideas or things – age
Love
Sacrifice
Regret
Fighting injustice
Humility
Honesty

Obviously, Le Guin’s skill as a writer is a big part of this. Not every story or discussion of freedom stirs my soul; for example, many movies attempt to be deep and moving and just fall flat. There is something special about how profound and evocative her writing is.

Now I have answered my question, at least in part. But I am still wondering about the experience of others.
What stirs your soul?
What makes you think you can conquer all your setbacks?
What makes you ignore your setbacks?
What makes you want to do great things?
What swells your sense of self, such that you feel that you are somehow a bigger human than you thought you were?

A particular movie? A book? Stories of historical heroes? Stories of mythical heroes? Meditation on forgiveness, on grace?

Let me know.
Comment.