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1 | Book: | The Dispossessed | Author: | Ursula K. (Kroeber) Le Guin | Book reference: | https://files.libcom.org/files/Le%20Guin%20-%20The%20Dispossessed.pdf | |
2 | chapter | main ideas | notes and thoughts | quote 1 | quote 2 | additional quotes | |
3 | 1 | Shevek goes from Anarres to Urras, which is controversial in his own planet. On the spaceship "Mindful", in conversation with Dr. Kimoe who helps him transition, he discovers many differences between their worlds - including Urrasti hierarchies, economy and religion. He references the writings of Odo. Both planets share ancestry. Upon arrival, he is received like a celebrity. At the end of the chapter when Shevek arrrives at a university he says: "'Well, you have me,' he said. He smiled. 'You have your anarchist. What are you going to do with him?'" (pg. 31) | I especially liked how Shevek refers to relationships between men and women -> they each have parts that are useful (in his words), but they don't have a hierarchical relationship. They seem to partner with a single person, but sexual relations seem less loaded: "It was strange that even sex, the source of so much solace, delight, and joy for so many years, could overnight become an unknown territory where he must tread carefully and know his ignorance; yet it was so." (pg. 24) We also learn he seems to have partnered with a woman, Takver, who works with fish and loves animals. | " 'You admit no religion outside the churches, just as you admit no morality outside the laws.' " [Shevek to Dr. Kimoe] (pg. 21) | "This matter of superiority and inferiority must be a central one in Urrasti social life. If to respect himself Kimoe had to consider half the human race as inferior to him, how then did women manage to respect themselves—did they consider men inferior? And how did all that affect their sex lives?" (pg. 24) | ||
4 | 2 | The chapter goes through Shevek's life, since he was a toddler. We learn his mother was posted in a specialized working post in Abbenay where his father can't follow, although it is apparent he misses her. Shevek is raised in the community, but he has a close bond with his father with whom he shares a love of numbers (both parents are engineers). Shevek doesn't always fit in well with the rest of the group. As a teenager, he learns about prisons, and with Tirin, one of his best friends, and others, they agree to lock and mistreat one of their peers (Kadagv) in an act that humiliates him and leaves them ashamed. Shevek then goes to work in a far off camp in hard labor, develops an affection for one woman (Gimar) who is already partnered, gets in a fight with a man (Shevet), and discovers sexual pleasure with another (Beshun). The chapter ends with Shevek back at the institute working on advanced physics and advised by a mentor to go to Abbenay. At his farewell party he says brotherhood begins in shared pain, as we transcend suffering. | The chapter is full of interesting observations about Anarres, including how people talk, without the possessive, how acts are shared, and how they are both repudiated and fascinated by Urras and their world of propretarians and profiteering. There is an emphasis on how there is no ownership or "egoizing." The father, Palat, is sweet, and somewhat present, but the mother, Rulag, seems to have left for good. We learn that there were people who lived in Anarres before Odo led a group in exodus, and that they have their own culture (which Gimar knows). We learn that "like all children of Anarres he had had sexual experience freely with both boys and girls, but he and they had been children; he had never got further than the pleasure he assumed was all there was to it." (pg. 57) One of his friends (Bedap) has a homosexual partner and that is noncontroversial in Anarres. The one who seems like his best friend (Tirin) boasts about the number of younger girls with whom he partners. Odo is revealed to be a woman and Shevek highlights how he thinks anarchism comes naturally to women. | "You shall not go down twice to the same river, nor can you go home again. That he knew; indeed it was the basis of his view of the world. Yet from that acceptance of transcience he evolved his vast theory, wherein what is most changeable is shown to be fullest of eternity, and your relationship to the river, and the river's relationship to you and to itself, turns out to be at once more complex and more reassuring than a mere lack of identity. You can go home again, the General Temporal Theory asserts, so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been." (pg. 59-60) | "He saw that the brightest of the girls, like Rovab, were equally casual and wary; in the labs and work crews or in the dormitory common rooms, they behaved as good comrades and nothing else. The girls wanted to complete their training and start their research or find a post they liked, before they bore a child; but they were no longer satisfied with adolescent sexual experimentation. They wanted a mature relationship, not a sterile one; but not yet, not quite yet. These girls were good companions, friendly and independent. The boys Shevek's age seemed stuck in the end of a childishness that was running a bit thin and dry. They were overintellectual. They didn't seem to want to commit themselves either to work or to sex." (pg. 60) | ||
5 | 3 | Shevek is settling in Urras and holds conversations with other scientists at the university, which can be lively and interesting, as well as highlighting some of the contrasts in their societies, such as the place of women. Anarres is far more egalitarian, but in Urras women are not allowed to be scientists, and it seems even sexual relations are commodified. Shevek is handed the Seo Oen prize as the youngest recipient (29 when he wrote the Principles). The Urrasti scientists lie in disbelief that Shevek is not sent or authorized by a government: "[My own initiative] is the only initiative I acknowledge," Shevek said, smiling, in dead earnest." (pg. 81) In the later part, Shevek explores some of the surrounding countryside, and Nio Esseia - a major city (the captial of A-Io). He visits Odo's tomb there with its epitaph: "Laia Asieo Odo; 698-769; To be whole is to be part; true voyage is return." (pg. 88) Shevek also visits the Space Research Foundation and is amazed by the spaceships built. He sees the Fort in Drio where Odo was imprisoned, from a distance. | One comical moment, when the scientists are speaking about General Temporal Theory, they mention "the work on relativity theory by an alien physicist, Ainsetain of Terra", which clearly refers to Einstein's theories, which are "several hundred years old," but with fresh ideas (pg. 75). In the same page, later, Atro - the senior scientist - says "'Never pay any attention to doctors, my dear fellow.'" I admire how Shevek presents himself to others as a beggar, and teaches me the humility neede to come with empty hands as a beggar: "I am, you know, the Beggarman," he said to the old man, as he had said to Dr. Kimoe on the Mindful. "I could not bring money, we do not use it. I could not bring gifts, we use nothing that you lack. So I come, like a good Odonian, 'with empty hands.' " (pg. 74) | "I have been here for a long time, the room said to Shevek, and I am still here. What are you doing here? He had no answer. He had no right to all the grace and bounty of this world, earned and maintained by the work, the devotion, the faithfulness of its people. Paradise is for those who make Paradise. He did not belong. He was a frontiersman, one of a breed who had denied their past, their history. The Settlers of Anarres had turned their backs on the Old World and its past, opted for the future only. But as surely as the future becomes the past, the past becomes the future. To deny is not to achieve. The Odonians who left Urras had been wrong, wrong in their desperate courage, to deny their history, to forgo the possibility of return. The explorer who will not come back or send back his ships to tell his tale is not an explorer, only an adventurer, and his sons are born in exile. He had come to love Urras, but what good was his yearning love? He was not part of it. Nor was he part of the world of his birth... He was alone, here, because he came from a self-exiled society. He had always been alone on his own world because he had exiled himself from his society. The Settlers had taken one step away. He had taken two. He stood by himself, because he had taken the metaphysical risk. And he had been fool enough to think that he might serve to bring together two worlds to which he did not belong." (pg. 93) | "It is of the nature of idea to be communicated: written, spoken, done. The idea is like grass. It craves light, likes crowds, thrives on crossbreeding, grows better for being stepped on." (pg. 76) | "A whole series of receptions in his honor was held there. He did not enjoy these much, they were not at all his idea of a party. Everyone was very polite and talked a great deal, but not about anything interesting; and they smiled so much they looked anxious. But their clothes were gorgeous, indeed they seemed to put all the lightheartedness their manner lacked into their clothes, and their food, and all the different things they drank, and the lavish furnishings and ornaments of the rooms in the palaces where the receptions were held." (pg. 87) | |
6 | 4 | Chapter four starts with Shevek traveling towards Abbenay as he starts his work with Sabul at the Central Institute of the Sciences in the physics syndic. This is exemplified by dessert, which in the rest of Anarres is enjoyed dessert once or twice a decad (week?), but in Abbenay it was available in excess every day. The chapter also relates how Sabul tells Shevek to learn Iotic, and new worlds in physics open up. Shevek learns that Sabul is a farce - most of his work is translations of Urrasti physicists into Pravic, and he co-signs Shevek's work without contributing: "Sabul had ceased to be a functioning physicist years ago; his high reputation was built on expropriations from other minds. Shevek was to do the thinking, and Sabul would take the credit." (pg. 118) Shevek decides to publish a manuscript on a topic Sabul dislikes (and championed by a different, older physicist, Gvarab) - Reversibility and wants to send it to the physicist Atro in Urras. After discussion, Sabul accepts. Shevek falls very ill and is sent to a hospital, where he is visited by his mother ("the mother") - Rulag. She is kind, but also distant in many ways. It seems she cared for Palat, and raised Shevek in his first years, but cared more for her work. She wants to help Shevek settle into Abbenay, but he is upset by her visit and wants her to leave - which she does. | The chapter introduces some of the history of Anarres - including how it was colonized, initially for mineral extraction, and then was given to the International Society of Odonians to pacify them. The chapter describes the harsh terrain, how Odonian society was established, and persistently hints at how in spite of the egalitarianism by design in Anarres, Abbenay seems to be wealthier and a center of power: "as they said in the analogic mode, you can’t have a nervous system without at least a ganglion, and preferably a brain. There had to be a center." (pg. 99) Le Guin shows that Anarres is ultimately still a mining colony of Urras. Although Anarres is self-governing, it is ultimately poorer and could never defend itself against Urras. They are allowed their independence as long as they provide Anarres with mineral wealth, and Anarres gives Urras some manufactured goods. The descriptions of Shevek as lonely and enjoying his solitude speak to me. There are interesting depictions of how anathema to Anarresti society the concept of privacy is (excess without a function - unless privacy is used for copulation or bodily functions). I was touched by his mother Rulag, and his relationship with his father who we learn, died sacrifcing himself to save children from a school that was collapsing after an earthquake. | "the principle of organic economy was too essential to the functioning of the society not to affect ethics and aesthetics profoundly. “Excess is excrement,” Odo wrote in the Analogy. “Excrement retained in the body is a poison.” Abbenay was poisonless: a bare city, bright, the colors light and hard, the air pure. It was quiet. You could see it all, laid out as plain as spilt salt. Nothing was hidden. The squares, the austere streets, the low buildings, the unwalled workyards, were charged with vitality and activity." (pg. 101) | "There were a good many solitaries and hermits on the fringes of the older Anarresti communities, pretending that they were not members of a social species. But for those who accepted the privilege and obligation of human solidarity, privacy was a value only where it served a function." (pg. 113) | "Most young Anarresti felt that it was shameful to be ill: a result of their society’s very successful prophylaxy, and also perhaps a confusion arising from the analogic use of the words “healthy” and “sick.” They felt illness to be a crime, if an involuntary one. To yield to the criminal impulse, to pander to it by taking pain relievers, was immoral. They fought shy of pills and shots. As middle age and old age came on, most of them changed their view. The pain got worse than the shame." (pg. 120-121) | |
7 | 5 | Shevek settles into life in Urras as a professor, keenly and insightfully observing the society around him. He has good income, teaches, and has freedom and time to do his research, but finds it all stifling. He goes shopping and is overwhelmed by the "5th Avenue" feel of selling overpriced goods for manufactured needs. Chifoilisk, a grumpy physicist has a private conversation with Shevek, in which he tries to convince Shevek to go to Thu, saying it is a more worthy society, similar to his own, and asking him not to give the revelations of his physics to the government in A-Io, with their capitalist exploitative tendencies. Chifoilisk reveals he is an agent of his government, says that Saio Pae is an agent of A-Io, and disappears shortly after their conversation. Shevek also visits Atro, the senior physicist, whom Shevek respects, but observes many "racist" tendencies towards beings from other planets. The chapter ends as Shevek asks to be invited inside people's homes, and Oiie does so. Shevek enjoys experiencing a real home where people let their guard down, he can talk to a woman (Oiie's wife) and children (Oiie's children). The chapter ends with Shevek dreaming of Takver (his wife) as they tread a barren desert heading towards a wall. | Some of my favorite quotes are in this chapter as Shevek remarks on economics, a society of consumer capitalism, where endless pricey goods are produced for manufactured needs. His interactions with Chifoilisk reveal that he is not as naïve as people think he is, and is equally critical of centralized socialist planning. He basks in the simple life where people can be free. Additionally, Shevek gives thoughtful insights on anarchism and how it is perceived in A-Io - which is not far from how the philosophy is perceived in Western universities. '"Do they expect students not to be anarchists?" he said. "What else can the young be? When you are on the bottom, you must organize from the bottom up!"' (pg. 127) "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." (pg. 144) | "He tried to read an elementary economics text; it bored him past endurance, it was like listening to somebody interminably recounting a long and stupid dream. He could not force himself to understand how banks functioned and so forth, because all the operations of capitalism were as meaningless to him as the rites of a primitive religion, as barbaric, as elaborate, and as unnecessary. In a human sacrifice to deity there might be at least a mistaken and terrible beauty; in the rites of the moneychangers, where greed, laziness, and envy were assumed to move all men's acts, even the terrible became banal. Shevek looked at this monstruous pettiness with contempt, and without interest. He did not admit, he could not admit, that in fact it frightened him." (pg. 130-131) | "Saemtenevia Prospect was two miles long, and it was a solid mass of people, traffic, and things: things to buy, things for sale. Coats, dresses, gowns, robes, trousers, breeches, shirts, blouses, hats, shoes, stockings, scarves, shawls, vests, capes, umbrellas, clothes to wear while sleeping, while swimming, while playing games, while at an afternoon party, while at an evening party, while at a party in the country, while traveling, while at the theater, while riding horses, gardening, receiving guests, boating, dining, hunting—all different, all in hundreds of different cuts, styles, colors, textures, materials. Perfumes, clocks, lamps, statues, cosmetics, candles, pictures, cameras, games, vases, sofas, kettles, puzzles, pillows, dolls, colanders, hassocks, jewels, carpets, toothpicks, calendars, a baby’s teething raffle of platinum with a handle of rock crystal, an electrical machine to sharpen pencils, a wristwatch with diamond numerals; figurines and souvenirs and kickshaws and mementos and gewgaws and bric-a-brac, everything either useless to begin with or ornamented so as to disguise its use; acres of luxuries, acres of excrement." (pg. 131) | "Here you think that the incentive to work is finances, need for money or desire for profit, but where there’s no money the real motives are clearer, maybe. People like to do things. They like to do them well. People take the dangerous, hard jobs because they take pride in doing them, they can—egoize, we call it—show off?—to the weaker ones. Hey, look, little boys, see how strong I am! You know? A person likes to do what he is good at doing. . . . But really, it is the question of ends and means. After all, work is done for the work’s sake. It is the lasting pleasure of life. The private conscience knows that. And also the social conscience, the opinion of one’s neighbors. There is no other reward, on Anarres, no other law. One’s own pleasure, and the respect of one’s fellows. That is all. When that is so, then you see the opinion of the neighbors becomes a very mightly force." (pg. 149) | |
8 | 6 | Shevek gradually builds a social life in Abbenay - first with a hoarding neighbor named Desar, who brings him food as he recovers from the hospital. Shevek discovers his passion for music: "he discovered, at last, his Art: the art that is made out of time. Somebody took him along to a concert at the Syndicate of Music. He went back the next night. He went to every concert, with his new acquaintances if possible, without if need be. The music was a more urgent need, a deeper satisfaction, than the companionship." (pg.155-156) Then he coincidentally meets Bedap, and although they argue a fair amount: "You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change. And that’s precisely what our society is doing!" (pg. 163) Eventually they become close friends, and Bedap's friends become Shevek's (including an avant-garde musician named Salas). Finally, he goes on a ten day hike to the mountains of Ne Theras with Bedap and some of his friends. Among those friends is Takver, who also studied at the Northsetting Institute with Shevek and Bedap a long time ago - but Shevek didn't remember her. Shevek and Takver soon profess their love for each other and a desire to form a lifelong bond together. They move in together and quickly settle into a rhythm of companionship and support. Shevek understands current happiness as a product of his past suffering: "unless the past and the future were made part of the present by memory and intention, there was, in human terms, no road, nowhere to go" (pg. 181). | The fluidity and naturalness of sex among Anarresti is displayed, for instance, when Takver has sex with Bedap, even though the former is mostly heterosexual, and the latter is mostly homosexual, because of the intense chemistry (fire) in their arguments, and because Bedap wanted it. Before Takver and Shevek partner, they both spoke about how they no longer had sex because it wasn't enjoyable, and Shevek shares he has only had sex with Bedap in the last year. Bedap embodies the rebellious spirit in this almost utopic society, criticizing how everyone has become conformist with norms. “It’s always easier not to think for oneself. Find a nice safe hierarchy and settle in. Don’t make changes, don’t risk disapproval, don’t upset your syndics. It’s always easiest to let yourself be governed.” (pg. 166) That even though there are not laws or rules, Odo's principles are treated as if they were such, and people's creative impulse is often stifled if it deviates from the norm. “Solidarity, yes! Even on Urras, where food falls out of the trees, even there Odo said that human solidarity is our one hope. But we’ve betrayed that hope. We’ve let cooperation become obedience. On Urras they have government by the minority. Here we have government by the majority. But it is government! The social conscience isn’t a living thing any more, but a machine, a power machine, controlled by bureaucrats!” (pg. 165) When they first start talking, and Shevek confesses his sadness and personal difficulties in Abbenay, he confesses he has considered suicide, which does not seem to be something that is deemed singularly awful in their society. | " ‘No. We have no government, no laws, all right. But as far as I can see, ideas never were controlled by laws and governments, even on Urras. If they had been, how would Odo have worked out hers? How would Odonianism have become a world movement? The archists tried to stamp it out by force, and failed. You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change. And that’s precisely what our society is doing! Sabul uses you where he can, and where he can’t, he prevents you from publishing, from teaching, even from working. Right? In other words, he has power over you. Where does he get it from? Not from vested authority, there isn’t any. Not from intellectual excellence, he hasn’t any. He gets it from the innate cowardice of the average human mind. Public opinion! That’s the power structure he’s part of, and knows how to use. The unadmitted, inadmissible government that rules the Odonian society by stifling the individual mind.’ " (pg. 163) " 'If you can see a thing whole,” he 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.' " (pg. 187) | “Shev, did you ever think that what the analogic mode calls ‘disease,’ social disaffection, discontent, alienation, that this might analogically also be called pain—what you meant when you talked about pain, suffering? And that, like pain, it serves a function in the organism?” “No!” Shevek said, violently. “I was talking in personal, in spiritual terms.” “But you spoke of physical suffering, of a man dying of burns. And I speak of spiritual suffering! Of people seeing their talent, their work, their lives wasted. Of good minds submitting to stupid ones. Of strength and courage strangled by envy, greed for power, fear of change. Change is freedom, change is life—is anything more basic to Odonian thought than that? But nothing changes any more! Our society is sick. You know it. You’re suffering its sickness. Its suicidal sickness!” (pg. 164-165) "Intimacy after long solitude, the abruptness of joy, tried both Shevek’s stability and Takver’s. In the first few decads he had wild swings of elation and anxiety; she had fits of temper. Both were oversensitive and inexperienced. The strain did not last, as they became experts in each other. Their sexual hunger persisted as passionate delight, their desire for communion was daily renewed because it was daily fulfilled." (pg. 181) | "Nothing he did was understood. To put it more honestly, nothing he did was meaningful. He was fulfilling no necessary function, personal or social. In fact—it was not an uncommon phenomenon in his field—he had burnt out at twenty. He would achieve nothing further. He had come up against the wall for good." (pg. 159) " 'No, brother, I’m sane. What drives people crazy is trying to live outside reality. Reality is terrible. It can kill you. Given time, it certainly will kill you. The reality is pain—you said that! But it’s the lies, the evasions of reality, that drive you crazy. It’s the lies that make you want to kill yourself.' " (pg. 164) we forgot that the will to dominance is as central in human beings as the impulse to mutual aid is, and has to be trained in each individual, in each new generation. Nobody’s born an Odonian any more than he’s born civilized! But we’ve forgotten that. We don’t educate for freedom. Education, the most important activity of the social organism, has become rigid, moralistic, authoritarian. Kids learn to parrot Odo’s words as if they were laws—the ultimate blasphemy!” (pg. 166) They hugged each other, kissed, broke apart, hugged again. Shevek was overwhelmed by love. Why? He had not even much liked Bedap that last year at the Regional Institute. They had never written, these three years. Their friendship was a boyhood one, past. Yet love was there: flamed up as from shaken coal." (pg. 159-160) | |
9 | 7 | Shevek starts getting restless during his stay, as he feels sheltered from the non-wealthy inhabitants of Urras and their world: "he had been fascinated from the start by the Urrasti habit of wrapping everything up in clean, fancy paper or plastic or cardboard or foil. Laundry, books, vegetables, clothes, medicines, everything came inside layers and layers of wrappings. Even packets of paper were wrapped in several layers of paper. Nothing was to touch anything else. He had begun to feel that he, too, had been carefully packaged." (pg. 196) He meets Demaere Oiie's sister, Vea Doem Oiie, and there is chemistry between them. She offers to show him "the real Nio" Esseia when he next visits the city. There is also a revolution in Benbli - a poor nation in Urras, run by dicators, and it seems they will be crushed with the bombs and military aid of A-Io, which makes Shevek sick. " 'You put your petty miserable ‘laws’ to protect wealth, your ‘forces’ of guns and bombs, in the same sentence with the law of entropy and the force of gravity? I had thought better of your mind, Demaere!' " (pg. 200) Shevek decides he has to flee and decides to go to Nio Esseia, where he visits an art gallery and is disgusted by how expensive art is, and later contacts Vea. She agrees to meet with him and they spend the day together flirting and exploring. Shevek has to pay for everything and also finds the activities superficial, but enjoys her company. The chapter ends with a party at Vea's house, where Shevek gets drunk, and talks excessively, as do most people at the party: "But they were also behaving very emotionally, for Ioti—shouting, laughing loudly, interrupting each other. One pair was indulging in sexual foreplay in a corner. Shevek looked away, disgusted. Did they egoize even in sex? To caress and copulate in front of unpaired people was as vulgar as to eat in front of hungry people." (pgs. 222-223) Shevek later tries to have sex with Vea, who has to forcefully reject him, and then throws up and passes out in the middle of the party. Demaere and Pae take him home, and Pae steals a few papers from his desk. | There is chemistry between Shevek and Vea throughout the chapter that is seductive and intriguing. Part of it is all the formalities and rituals that Vea makes Shevek undertake, such as him having to pay for everything, open her doors, and behave in chivalrous fashion. "Women do exactly as they like. And they don’t have to get their hands dirty, or wear brass helmets, or stand about shouting in the Directorate, to do it.” “But what is it that you do?” “Why, run the men, of course! And you know, it’s perfectly safe to tell them that, because they never believe it. They say, ‘Haw haw, funny little woman!’ and pat your head and stalk off with their medals jangling, perfectly self-content.” “And you too are self-content?” “Indeed I am.” “I don’t believe it.” “Because it doesn’t fit your principles. Men always have theories, and things always have to fit them.” “No, not because of theories, because I can see that you are not content. That you are restless, unsatisfied, dangerous.”" (pg. 211-212) Another part is the subtle intensity of what is allowed between strangers: "A phrase Takver used came into his mind as he looked at Vea’s slender feet, decorated with little white shoes on very high heels. “A body profiteer,” Takver called women who used their sexuality as a weapon in a power struggle with men. To look at her, Vea was the body profiteer to end them all. Shoes, clothes, cosmetics, jewels, gestures, everything about her asserted provocation. She was so elaborately and ostentatiously a female body that she seemed scarcely to be a human being. She incarnated all the sexuality the Ioti repressed into their dreams, their novels and poetry, their endless paintings of female nudes, their music, their architecture with its curves and domes, their candies, their baths, their mattresses. She was the woman in the table." (pg. 209) "People do not usually gaze at one another intently at very close range, unless they are mothers with infants, or doctors with patients, or lovers." (pg. 213) All this ends with Shevek unwittingly becoming drunk. Vea brings him to a room and kisses him, and Shevek assumes she wants to have sex and forcefully tries to do it with her in this room, while everyone is just outside at the party. There is the contrast of all of Vea's flirting in the chapter with Shevek almost raping her. Fortunately it doesn't end that way. Nio Esseia resembles NYC in many ways, and the giant dome of the train station that reminds me of the Oculus by the WTC. | "It did not matter who governed, or thought they governed, the Benbilis: the politics of reality concerned the power struggle between A-Io and Thu. “The politics of reality,” Shevek repeated. He looked at Oiie and said, “That is a curious phrase for a physicist to use.” “Not at all. The politician and the physicist both deal with things as they are, with real forces, the basic laws of the world.” “You put your petty miserable ‘laws’ to protect wealth, your ‘forces’ of guns and bombs, in the same sentence with the law of entropy and the force of gravity? I had thought better of your mind, Demaere!” " (pg. 200) "“The law of evolution is that the strongest survives!” “Yes, and the strongest, in the existence of any social species, are those who are most social. In human terms, most ethical. You see, we have neither prey nor enemy, on Anarres. We have only one another. There is no strength to be gained from hurting one another. Only weakness.”" (pgs. 216-217) "The little timelessnesses added together make up time. And then on the big scale, the cosmos: well, you know we think that the whole universe is a cyclic process, an oscillation of expansion and contraction, without any before or after. Only within each of the great cycles, where we live, only there is there linear time, evolution, change. So then time has two aspects. There is the arrow, the running river, without which there is no change, no progress, or direction, or creation. And there is the circle or the cycle, without which there is chaos, meaningless succession of instants, a world without clocks or seasons or promises.”" (pg. 220) "“Well, I think it’s an easy way out of the difficulty. . . . Can one dismiss either being, or becoming, as an illusion? Becoming without being is meaningless. Being without becoming is a big bore. . . . If the mind is able to perceive time in both these ways, then a true chronosophy should provide a field in which the relation of the two aspects or processes of time could be understood.”" (pg. 220) "We don’t want purity, but complexity, the relationship of cause and effect, means and end. Our model of the cosmos must be as inexhaustible as the cosmos. A complexity that includes not only duration but creation, not only being but becoming, not only geometry but ethics. It is not the answer we are after, but only how to ask the question. . . .”" (pg. 222) | "Watching from the train window Shevek found his restless and rebellious mood ready to defy even the day’s beauty. It was an unjust beauty. What had the Urrasti done to deserve it? Why was it given to them, so lavishly, so graciously, and so little, so very little, to his own people? I’m thinking like an Urrasti, he said to himself. Like a damned propertarian. As if deserving meant anything. As if one could earn beauty, or life! He tried to think of nothing at all, to let himself be borne forward and to watch the sunlight in the gentle sky and the little sheep bouncing in the fields of spring." (pgs. 203-204) "Nio Esseia, a city of five million souls, lifted its delicate glittering towers across the green marshes of the Estuary as if it were built of mist and sunlight. As the train swung in smoothly on a long viaduct the city rose up taller, brighter, solider, until suddenly it enclosed the train entirely in the roaring darkness of an underground approach, twenty tracks together, and then released it and its passengers into the enormous, brilliant spaces of the Central Station, under the central dome of ivory and azure, said to be the largest dome ever raised on any world by the hand of man. Shevek wandered across acres of polished marble under that immense ethereal vault, and came at last to the long array of doors through which crowds of people came and went constantly, all purposeful, all separate. They all looked, to him, anxious." (pg. 204) "all the pictures in the museum had price tickets attached to their frames. He stared at a skillfully painted nude. Her ticket read 4,000 IMU. “That’s a Fei Feite,” said a dark man appearing noiselessly at his elbow. “We had five a week ago. Biggest thing on the art market before long. A Feite is a sure investment, sir.” “Four thousand units is the money it costs to keep two families alive for a year in this city,” Shevek said. The man inspected him and said drawling, “Yes, well, you see, sir, that happens to be a work of art.” “Art? A man makes art because he has to. Why was that made?” “You’re an artist, I take it,” the man said, now with open insolence. “No, I am a man who knows shit when he sees it!”" (pg. 206) | "“But what is more personal than a name no other living person bears?” “No one else? You’re the only Shevek?” “While I live. There were others, before me.”" (pg. 194) "It was quite possible that a general theory of temporality was an illusory goal. It was also possible that, though Sequency and Simultaneity might someday be unified in a general theory, he was not the man to do the job. He had been trying for ten years and had not done it. Mathematicians and physicists, athletes of intellect, do their great work young. It was more than possible—probable—that he was burnt out, finished. He was perfectly aware that he had had the same low moods and intimations of failure in the periods just before his monuments of highest creativity. He found himself trying to encourage himself with that fact, and was furious at his own naïveté. To interpret temporal order as causal order was a pretty stupid thing for a chronosophist to do. Was he senile already? He had better simply get to work on the small but practical task of refining the concept of interval. It might be useful to someone else." (pg. 202) "“So you threw out all the do’s and don’ts. But you know, I think you Odonians missed the whole point. You threw out the priests and judges and divorce laws and all that, but you kept the real trouble behind them. You just stuck it inside, into your consciences. But it’s still there. You’re just as much slaves as ever! You aren’t really free.”" (pg. 216) "“Why do you talk only in abstractions?” he inquired suddenly, wondering as he spoke why he was speaking, when he had resolved not to. “It is not names of countries, it is people killing each other. Why do the soldiers go? Why does a man go kill strangers?”" (pg. 223) | |
10 | 8 | The chapter is full of contrasts of beauty and hope with hopelessness and sorrow. It begins on a midsummer holiday with everyone celebrating with abundant food, but there is already mention of a scarcity of rain. Takver is pregnant and Shevek completes his manuscript on the Principles of Simultaneity, but they are also cold and hungry, as famine starts to spread because of the drought, and Sabul rejects Shevek's manuscript. Shevek agrees to make Sabul a co-author, and the book is printed, and he sends an original copy of the manuscript to Urras. Takver gives birth to Sadik (and only Shevek likes the name), and Shevek celebrates the beauty of life, where people demonstrate solidarity in the time of famine. Shevek accepts a volunteer posting far away for 60 days. They try to communicate with Takver, but it is ineffective. As the famine worsens, people show less solidarity as they grow hungry. When Shevek returns he learns that Takver has been sent to a very far off posting in a specialized location, Sabul fires him because they can only keep people who do "practical physics." Shevek tries to leave for a volunteer posting near Takver, but when it proves impossible, he accepts another one, "in the Southwest, in the Dust" (pg. 263) - thousands of kilometers from Takver. | Gaby was very pregnant, with our Shevek kicking inside her, so that Takver's pregnancy was moving. I enjoyed reading how she craved sweets during her pregnancy, how she found the hormonal moodiness and crying difficult, how she describes herself as a fish in water "inside the baby inside me." (pg. 232) The hardships and challenges endured in the Odonian society in Anarres are evident in this chapter, as the inhabitants struggle with famine. Initially there is more solidarity, but as hardships worsen, people are less kind to each other. As with many poor countries in this world (e.g., Nepal) it is clear that part of the reason for the poverty is a lack of resources and difficult conditions. The "voluntary" exigiencies of Anarresti society include not being able to communicate quickly and easily across distances, as even letters are seen as an unnecessary luxury. Monogamy is accepted, but the society does not accomodate much for those relationships, which is why Takver and Shevek can be separated to such an extent that they can't even communicate. Even Sadik's name shows how the social good takes precedence over Takver's choice for a name. Fractures in solidarity are evident: "He had gone eighty-odd hours now on two bowls of soup and one kilo of bread, and he had a right to make up for what he had missed, but he was damned if he would explain. Existence is its own justification, need is right. He was an Odonian, he left guilt to profiteers." (pg. 254) | "Takver was pregnant. Mostly she was sleepy and benign. “I am a fish,” she said, “a fish in water. I am inside the baby inside me.” But at times she was overtaxed by her work, or left hungry by the slightly decreased meals at commons." (pg. 232) "She ate all gratefully but continued to crave sweets, and sweets were in short supply. When she was tired she was anxious and easily upset, and her temper flared at a word." (pg. 233) "“Don’t be sulky. Please don’t be sulky tonight. If one more thing goes wrong, I’ll cry. I’m sick of crying all the time. Damned stupid hormones! I wish I could have babies like the fish, lay the eggs and swim off and that’s the end of it. Unless I swam back and ate them. . . . Don’t sit and look like a statue like that I just can’t stand it.” She was slightly in tears, as she crouched by the breath of heat from the grating, trying to unfasten her boots with stiff fingers." (pg. 233) "“I used to want so badly to be different. I wonder why?” “There’s a point, around age twenty,” Bedap said, “when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.” “Or at least accept them with resignation,” said Shevek. “Shev is on a resignation binge,” Takver said. “It’s old age coming on. It must be terrible to be thirty.”" (pg. 244) | "Rationing was strict; labor drafts were imperative. The struggle to grow enough food and to get the food distributed became conclusive, desperate. Yet people were not desperate at all. Odo wrote: “A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart. The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skillful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well—this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection, and of sociality as a whole.” There was an undercurrent of joy, in that sense, in Abbenay that summer. There was a lightheartedness at work however hard the work, a readiness to drop all care as soon as what could be done had been done. The old tag of “solidarity” had come alive again. There is exhilaration in finding that the bond is stronger, after all, than all that tries the bond." (pg. 242) "I will not regret this separation. It has allowed me to see that I had begun to give less, as if I possessed you and you me and there was nothing more to be done. The real fact has nothing to do with ownership. What we do is assert the wholeness of Time." (pg. 247) "Please come back (with mathematical genius girl if necessary), separation is educational all right but your presence is the education I want. I am getting a half liter fruit juice plus calcium allotment a day because my milk was running short and S. yelled a lot. Good old doctors!! All, always, T." (pg. 248) | "Shevek got a great deal of pleasure from the baby. Having sole charge of her in the mornings (they left her in the nursery only while he taught or did volunteer work), he felt that sense of being necessary which is the burden and reward of parenthood." (pg. 243) "“Be quiet. I feel emotional.” Shevek raised his cup of fruit juice. “I want to say— What I want to say is this. I’m glad Sadik was born now. In a hard year, in a hard time, when we need our brotherhood. I’m glad she was born now, and here. I’m glad she’s one of us, an Odonian, our daughter and our sister. I’m glad she’s sister to Bedap. That she’s sister to Sabul, even to Sabul! I drink to this hope: that as long as she lives, Sadik will love her sisters and brothers as well, as joyfully, as I do now tonight. And that the rain will fall. . . .”" (pg. 245) "While he got hungrier, while the train sat hour after hour on the siding between a scarred and dusty quarry and a shut-down mill, he had grim thoughts about the reality of hunger, and about the possible inadequacy of his society to come through a famine without losing the solidarity that was its strength. It was easy to share when there was enough, even barely enough, to go round. But when there was not enough? Then force entered in; might making right; power, and its tool, violence, and its most devoted ally, the averted eye." (pg. 249-250) "Babies have a specially hard time, you see many with skin and eyes inflamed. I wonder if I would have noticed that half a year ago. One becomes keener with parenthood." (pg. 247) | |
11 | 9 | As Shevek wakes up with a hangover from the day with Vea, he develops a hangover of his past year in Urras and is filled with shame. That compels him to be clear and focused on what he should do now, finish his physics work, but not for the state. He establishes a rapport with Efor, his servant, and is increasingly disgusted by his colleagues - especially Pae. He works tirelessly and drawing from Ainsetain's work on relativity, he finds a solution to join Sequency and Simultaneity. Shevek becomes sick from working hard and Efor takes care of him. They speak about working people in Urras and their hard life, and secretly devise a plan for Shevek to flee to the Old Town of Nio Esseia (the working class areas). After fleeing surreptitiously, he arrives in Old Town, and as he searches for his contact (Tuio Maedda), he is shocked by the poverty and hardships there. Once he finds his contact, Shevek decides to support the workers who are going on strike because of the war and inflation. Shevek writes texts in support which are published in clandestine pamphlets, joins the march of thousands (>100,000), sings with them, and delivers a speech. As he finishes, the police and army in helicopters and on the ground, start shooting and killing the protesters en masse. Shevek manages to flee with a Socialist companion who is shot. They hide in an empty warehouse as the military storms the streets, Shevek tries to heal his companion, but he dies from blood loss that night. | In spite of the shame Shevek felt from his night of excess drinking, it was heartening to see him pick himself up and decide that all he could do was think about what to do now: "then he was done with it. Even in this postalcoholic vale of tears, he felt no guilt. That was all done, now, and what must be thought about was, what must he do now? Having locked himself in jail, how might he act as a free man?" (pg. 265). Shevek is increasingly disgusted by how they would send the poor to die in far off lands, and how the elite justifies this war. This is the first chapter when we get descriptions of how the poor live, and how they describe their hospitals - closer to Orwell's "Down and Out in Paris and London" than poor hospitals in countries like Ecuador, today. The poverty he witnesses in Old Town is akin to what you'd see in New York, with people lying on the street, a man asking for money to drink, and general distrust of everyone. The mass strike on the Capitol is repressed brutally, and basically crushes any hope of real change in A-Io. | " “It is our suffering that brings us together. It is not love. Love does not obey the mind, and turns to hate when forced. The bond that binds us is beyond choice. We are brothers. We are brothers in what we share. In pain, which each of us must suffer alone, in hunger, in poverty, in hope, we know our brotherhood. We know it, because we have had to learn it. We know that there is no help for us but from one another, that no hand will save us if we do not reach out our hand. And the hand that you reach out is empty, as mine is. You have nothing. You possess nothing. You own nothing. You are free. All you have is what you are, and what you give. “I am here because you see in me the promise, the promise that we made two hundred years ago in this city—the promise kept. We have kept it, on Anarres. We have nothing but our freedom. We have nothing to give you but your own freedom. We have no law but the single principle of mutual aid between individuals. We have no government but the single principle of free association. We have no states, no nations, no presidents, no premiers, no chiefs, no generals, no bosses, no bankers, no landlords, no wages, no charity, no police, no soldiers, no wars. Nor do we have much else. We are sharers, not owners. We are not prosperous. None of us is rich. None of us is powerful. If it is Anarres you want, if it is the future you seek, then I tell you that you must come to it with empty hands. You must come to it alone, and naked, as the child comes into the world, into his future, without any past, without any property, wholly dependent on other people for his life. You cannot take what you have not given, and you must give yourself. You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.” " (pg. 292-293) | “To know that it exists, to know that there is a society without government, without police, without economic exploitation, that they can never say again that it’s just a mirage, an idealist’s dream! I wonder if you fully understand why they’ve kept you so well hidden out there at Ieu Eun, Dr. Shevek. Why you never were allowed to appear at any meeting open to the public. Why they’ll be after you like dogs after a rabbit the moment they find you’re gone. It’s not just because they want this idea of yours. But because you are an idea. A dangerous one. The idea of anarchism, made flesh. Walking amongst us.” (pg. 288) | "He did not know that this paralyzing humiliation was a chemical sequel to getting drunk, like the headache. Nor would the knowledge have made much difference to him. Shame—the sense of vileness and of self-estrangement—was a revelation." (pg. 264) "They owned him. He had thought to bargain with them, a very naïve anarchist’s notion. The individual cannot bargain with the State. The State recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself." (pg. 265) | |
12 | 10 | Shevek returns from his years working to find Takver in the town where she's living, with Sadik. Their reunion is touching, as it had been unclear it would happen, or how it would go, but it gives a sense of the deep bond between them. "Shevek looked at Takver; she returned the look. She had aged more than four years. She had never had very good teeth, and now had lost two, just back of the upper eyeteeth, so that the gaps showed when she smiled. Her skin no longer had the fine taut surface of youth, and her hair, pulled back neatly, was dull. Shevek saw clearly that Takver had lost her young grace, and looked a plain, tired woman near the middle of her life. He saw this more clearly than anyone else could have seen it. He saw everything about Takver in a way that no one else could have seen it, from the standpoint of years of intimacy and years of longing. He saw her as she was." (pg. 307) "They went back to Domicile Eight, Room 3, and there their long desire was fulfilled. They did not even light the lamp; they both liked making love in darkness. The first time they both came as Shevek came into her, the second time they struggled and cried out in a rage of joy, prolonging their climax as if delaying the moment of death, the third time they were both half asleep, and circled about the center of infinite pleasure, about each other’s being, like planets circling blindly, quietly, in the flood of sunlight, about the common center of gravity, swinging, circling endlessly." (pg. 312-313) The bond is not limited to Shevek and Takver, but also Sadik: "They wanted me to put her in the nursery there full time. They said I was being propertarian about the child and not contributing full strength to the social effort in the crisis. They were right, really. But they were so righteous. None of them understood about being lonely. They were all groupers, no characters." (pg. 310) "“It was time Sadik went, it’s good for her living with the other children. She was getting shy. She was very good about going there, very stoical. Little children are stoical. They cry over bumps, but they take the big things as they come, they don’t whine like so many adults.”" (pg. 311) They both decide to go to Abbenay where Shevek will continue his research and start his own printing syndicate to print the works that are discouraged in Anarres as a free person: "“No. The fact is, neither of us made up our mind. Neither of us chose. We let Sabul choose for us. Our own, internalized Sabul—convention, moralism, fear of social ostracism, fear of being different, fear of being free! Well, never again. I learn slowly, but I learn.” “What are you going to do?” asked Takver, a thrill of agreeable excitement in her voice. “Go to Abbenay with you and start a syndicate, a printing syndicate. Print the Principles, uncut. And whatever else we like. Bedap’s Sketch of Open Education in Science, that the PDC wouldn’t circulate. And Tirin’s play. I owe him that. He taught me what prisons are, and who builds them. Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I’m going to go fulfill my proper function in the social organism. I’m going to go unbuild walls.”" (pg. 323) | The last two chapters ended rather tragically, so it was nice to be rejuvenated with this note of optimism. The simple love of a couple, the desire to push forward together for some greater good is moving and inspiring. It was beautiful to find hope and commitment, as it seemed Takver had found a different partner initially. "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 not occurred to either of them to escape the suffering by denying the commitment." (pg. 325) The relationship between Shevek and Takver made me think of my own relationship with Gaby: "When they were alone, evenings, Sadik was often the subject of their talk. Takver was somewhat overabsorbed in the child, for want of other intimacies, and her strong common sense was obscured by maternal ambitions and anxieties. This was not natural to her; neither competitiveness nor protectiveness was a strong motive in Anarresti life. She was glad to talk her worries out and get rid of them, which Shevek’s presence enabled her to do. The first nights, she did most of the talking, and he listened as he might have listened to music or to running water, without trying to reply. He had not talked very much, for four years now; he was out of the habit of conversation. She released him from that silence, as she had always done. Later, it was he who talked the most, though always dependent on her response." (pg. 316) It is a chapter about believing in these ideas: love, free will, commitment, integrity, hope. "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 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 the future that it is a human act. Loyalty, which asserts the continuity of past and future, binding 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." (pg. 325-326) | “You’re a partnered man, then,” he said. There was a simplicity in the way he said it that the driver liked, and he answered, “Eighteen years.” “Just starting.” “By damn, I agree with that! Now that’s what some don’t see. But the way I see it, if you copulate around enough in your teens, that’s when you get the most out of it, and also you find out that it’s all pretty much the same damn thing. And a good thing, too! But still, what’s different isn’t the copulating; it’s the other person. And eighteen years is just a start, all right, when it comes to figuring out that difference. At least, if it’s a woman you’re trying to figure out. A woman won’t let on to being so puzzled by a man, but maybe they bluff. . . . Anyhow, that’s the pleasure of it. The puzzles and the bluffs and the rest of it. The variety. Variety doesn’t come with just moving around. I was all over Anarres, young. Drove and loaded in every Division. Must have known a hundred girls in different towns. It got boring. I came back here, and I do this run every three decads year in year out through this same desert where you can’t tell one sandhill from the next and it’s all the same for three thousand kilos whichever way you look, and go home to the same partner—and I never been bored once. It isn’t changing around from place to place that keeps you lively. It’s getting time on your side. Working with it, not against it.” (pg. 301) "“The right end, but the wrong means! I thought about it for a long time, at Rolny, Shev. I’ll tell you what was wrong. I was pregnant. Pregnant women have no ethics. Only the most primitive kind of sacrifice impulse. To hell with the book, and the partnership, and the truth, if they threaten the precious fetus! It’s a racial preservation drive, but it can work right against community; it’s biological, not social. A man can be grateful he never gets into the grip of it. But he’d better realize than a woman can, and watch out for it. I think that’s why the old archisms used women as property. Why did the women let them? Because they were pregnant all the time—because they were already possessed, enslaved!”" (pg. 322) "That sacrificiality was what Takver had spoken of recognizing in herself when she was pregnant, and she had 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 was no 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 the expectation of ever stopping anywhere. All responsibilities, all commitments thus understood took on substance and duration." (pg. 325) "For after all, he thought now, lying in the warmth of Takver’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." (pg. 325) | " “A syndic, fellow I’ve known for years, he did just that, north of here, in ’66. They tried to take a grain truck off his train. He backed the train, killed a couple of them before they cleared the track, they were like worms in rotten fish, thick, he said. He said, there’s eight hundred people waiting for that grain truck, and how many of them might die if they don’t get it? More than a couple, a lot more. So it looks like he was right. But by damn! I can’t add up figures like that. I don’t know if it’s right to count people like you count numbers. But then, what do you do? Which ones do you kill?” “The second year I was in Elbow, I was worklister, the mill syndicate cut rations. People doing six hours in the plant got full rations—just barely enough for that kind of work. People on half time got threequarter rations. If they were sick or too weak to work, they got half. On half rations you couldn’t get well. You couldn’t get back to work. You might stay alive. I was supposed to put people on half rations, people that were already sick. I was working full time, eight, ten hours sometimes, desk work, so I got full rations: I earned them. I earned them by making lists of who should starve.” The man’s light eyes looked ahead into the dry light. “Like you said, I was to count people.” “You quit?” “Yes, I quit. Went to Grand Valley. But somebody else took over the lists at the mills in Elbow. There’s always somebody willing to make lists.” “Now that’s wrong,” the driver said, scowling into the glare. He had a bald brown face and scalp, no hair left between cheeks and occiput, though he wasn’t past his middle forties. It was a strong, hard, and innocent face. “That’s dead wrong. They should have shut the mills down. You can’t ask a man to do that. Aren’t we Odonians? A man can lose his temper, all right. That’s what the people who mobbed trains did. They were hungry, the kids were hungry, been hungry too long, there’s food coming through and it’s not for you, you lose your temper and go for it. Same thing with the friend, those people were taking apart the train he was in charge of, he lost his temper and put it in reverse. He didn’t count any noses. Not then! Later, maybe. Because he was sick when he saw what he’d done. But what they had you doing, saying this one lives and that one dies—that’s not a job a person has a right to do, or ask anybody else to do.” “It’s been a bad time, brother,” the passenger said gently, watching the glaring plain where the shadows of water wavered and drifted with the wind. " (pg. 302-304) | "“Listen, Takver. I thought the same thing, exactly. We always say that. You said it—you should have refused to go to Rolny. I said it as soon as I got to Elbow: I’m a free man, I didn’t have to come here! . . . We always think it, and say it, but we don’t do it. We keep our initiative tucked away safe in our mind, like a room where we can come and say, ‘I don’t have to do anything, I make my own choices, I’m free.’ And then we leave the little room in our mind, and go where PDC posts us, and stay till we’re reposted.”" (pg. 320) "“What are you getting at?” Takver grumbled, retiring further under the blanket. “Well, this. That we’re ashamed to say we’ve refused a posting. That the social conscience completely dominates the individual conscience, instead of striking a balance with it. We don’t cooperate—we obey. We fear being outcast, being called lazy, dysfunctional, egoizing. We fear our neighbor’s opinion more than we respect our own freedom of choice. You don’t believe me, Tak, but try, just try stepping over the line, just in imagination, and see how you feel. You realize then what Tirin is, and why he’s a wreck, a lost soul. He is a criminal! We have created crime, just as the propertarians did. We force a man outside the sphere of our approval, and then condemn him for it. We’ve made laws, laws of conventional behavior, built walls all around ourselves, and we can’t see them, because they’re part of our thinking. Tir never did that. I knew him since we were ten years old. He never did it, he never could build walls. He was a natural rebel. He was a natural Odonian—a real one! He was a free man, and the rest of us, his brothers, drove him insane in punishment for his first free act.”" (pg. 321) "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 a 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 compromise: 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. All this Shevek had thought out, in these terms, for his conscience was a completely Odonian one. He was therefore 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." (pg. 324) | |
13 | 11 | One of the shortest chapters (it's about half as long as most of the others and the second shortest one), it begins by describing Rodarred, the seat of the Council of World Governments (CWG). It has something of New York with diplomats from around the world, and forests shadowed by much taller buildings. But there's also something European in the description with the old buildings that had stood for hundreds of years (Brussels perhaps?). It begins with Shevek arriving, exhausted, seeking assylum, which he is quickly granted. Much of the chapter is the conversation between him and Keng, the Terran ambassador about the differences in their worlds. Shevek is grateful for the people who risked their lives to help him get there, but is done with Urras. He wants to give away his theory of simmultaneity to all people and all planets and return to Anarres: " “No. I don’t want to stay here. I am no altruist! If you would help me in this too, I might go home. Perhaps the Ioti would be willing to send me home, even. It would be consistent, I think: to make me disappear, to deny my existence. Of course, they might find it easier to do by killing me or putting me in jail for life. I don’t want to die yet, and I don’t want to die here in Hell at all. Where does your soul go, when you die in Hell?” He laughed; he had regained all his gentleness of manner. “But if you could send me home, I think they would be relieved. Dead anarchists make martyrs, you know, and keep living for centuries. But absent ones can be forgotten.” “I thought I knew what ‘realism’ was,” Keng said. She smiled, but it was not an easy smile. “How can you, if you don’t know what hope is?” “Don’t judge us too hardly, Shevek.” “I don’t judge you at all. I only ask your help, for which I have nothing to give in return.” “Nothing? You call your theory nothing?” “Weigh it in the balance with the freedom of one single human spirit,” he said, turning to her, “and which will weigh heavier? Can you tell? I cannot.” " (pg. 341) The theory may allow the construction of the ansible, for instantaneous communication between worlds. | Keng's description of how humans destroyed Earth (Terras) with violence and pollution, so the population of 9 billion reduced to maybe 5% of that and is only now at half a billion, with polluted skies and soil, and an absence of forests is sad. It also probably reflects the doomsayers of the 70s, including the ecological movement that was protesting against the increasingly polluted skies, and Paul Ehrlich's "The Population Bomb" who spoke about the cataclysm of overpopulation. UKLG says that humans could only survive with absolute centralization and state control, akin to Soviet style central planning. The ambassador, Keng, is from Delhi, and it is notable that Terrans are much smaller and less hairy than Cetians (from Anarres and Urras), and that all seem to be descended from the Hainish, an altruistic people who populated most of the planets in the galaxy. In fact, the Terrans are only able to travel through space and are in Urras, thanks to the Hainish. Keng has a humbling description of Urras (compared with Shevek's criticisms): " "Let me tell you how this world seems to me. To me, and to all my fellow Terrans who have seen the planet, Urras is the kindliest, most various, most beautiful of all the inhabited worlds. It is the world that comes as close as any could to Paradise.” She looked at him calmly and keenly; he said nothing. “I know it’s full of evils, full of human injustice, greed, folly, waste. But it is also full of good, of beauty, vitality, achievement. It is what a world should be! It is alive, tremendously alive—alive, despite all its evils, with hope. Is that not true?” " (pg. 337) UKLG uses a nice metaphor about being hopeful as Shevek looks out one "window": "Shevek got up and went over to the window, one of the long horizontal window slits of the tower. There was a niche in the wall below it, into which an archer would step up to look down and aim at assailants at the gate; if one did not take that step up one could see nothing from it but the sunwashed, slightly misty sky. Shevek stood below the window gazing out, the light filling his eyes." (pg. 339) | " “My world, my Earth, is a ruin. A planet spoiled by the human species. We multiplied and gobbled and fought until there was nothing left, and then we died. We controlled neither appetite nor violence; we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first. There are no forests left on my Earth. The air is grey, the sky is grey, it is always hot. It is habitable, it is still habitable, but not as this world is. This is a living world, a harmony. Mine is a discord. You Odonians chose a desert; we Terrans made a desert. . . . We survive there as you do. People are tough! There are nearly a half billion of us now. Once there were nine billion. You can see the old cities still everywhere. The bones and bricks go to dust, but the little pieces of plastic never do— they never adapt either. We failed as a species, as a social species. We are here now, dealing as equals with other human societies on other worlds, only because of the charity of the Hainish. They came; they brought us help. They built ships and gave them to us, so we could leave our ruined world. They treat us gently, charitably, as the strong man treats the sick one. They are a very strange people, the Hainish; older than any of us; infinitely generous. They are altruists. They are moved by a guilt we don’t even understand, despite all our crimes. They are moved in all they do, I think, by the past, their endless past. Well, we had saved what could be saved, and made a kind of life in the ruins, on Terra, in the only way it could be done: by total centralization. Total control over the use of every acre of land, every scrap of metal, every ounce of fuel. Total rationing, birth control, euthanasia, universal conscription into the labor force. The absolute regimentation of each life toward the goal of racial survival. We had achieved that much, when the Hainish came. They brought us . . . a little more hope. Not very much. We have outlived it. . . . We can only look at this splendid world, this vital society, this Urras, this Paradise, from the outside. We are capable only of admiring it, and maybe envying it a little. Not very much.” " (pg. 338-339) | "The revolutionists in Nio, they come from that same tradition. They weren’t just striking for better wages or protesting the draft. They are not only socialists, they are anarchists; they were striking against power. You see, the size of the demonstration, the intensity of popular feeling, and the government’s panic reaction, all seemed very hard to understand. Why so much commotion? The government here is not despotic. The rich are very rich indeed, but the poor are not so very poor. They are neither enslaved nor starving. Why aren’t they satisfied with bread and speeches? Why are they supersensitive? . . . Now I begin to see why. But what is still inexplicable is that the government of A-Io, knowing this libertarian tradition was still alive, and knowing the discontent in the industrial cities, still brought you here. Like bringing the match to the powder mill!” “I was not to be near the powder mill. I was to be kept from the populace, to live among scholars and the rich. Not to see the poor. Not to see anything ugly. I was to be wrapped up in cotton in a box in a wrapping in a carton in a plastic film, like everything here. There I was to be happy and do my work, the work I could not do on Anarres. And when it was done I was to give it to them, so they could threaten you with it.” (pg. 333) “We left with empty hands, a hundred and seventy years ago, and we were right. We took nothing. Because there is nothing here but States and their weapons, the rich and their lies, and the poor and their misery. There is no way to act rightly, with a clear heart, on Urras. There is nothing you can do that profit does not enter into, and fear of loss, and the wish for power. You cannot say good morning without knowing which of you is ‘superior’ to the other, or trying to prove it. You cannot act like a brother to other people, you must manipulate them, or command them, or obey them, or trick them. You cannot touch another person, yet they will not leave you alone. There is no freedom. It is a box—Urras is a box, a package, with all the beautiful wrapping of blue sky and meadows and forests and great cities. And you open the box, and what is inside it? A black cellar full of dust, and a dead man. A man whose hand was shot off because he held it out to others. I have been in Hell at last. Desar was right; it is Urras; Hell is Urras.” (p 337) | " "But the ideas in my head aren’t the only ones important to me. My society is also an idea. I was made by it. An idea of freedom, of change, of human solidarity, an important idea. And though I was very stupid I saw at last that by pursuing the one, the physics, I am betraying the other. I am letting the propertarians buy the truth from me.” " (pg. 335) " “In the end, the truth usually insists upon serving only the common good,” Keng said. “In the end, yes, but I am not willing to wait for the end. I have one lifetime, and I will not spend it for greed and profiteering and lies. I will not serve any master.” " (pg. 336) “You don’t understand what time is,” he said. “You say the past is gone, the future is not real, there is no change, no hope. You think Anarres is a future that cannot be reached, as your past cannot be changed. So there is nothing but the present, this Urras, the rich, real, stable present, the moment now. And you think that is something which can be possessed! You envy it a little. You think it’s something you would like to have. But it is not real, you know. It is not stable, not solid—nothing is. Things change, change. You cannot have anything. . . . And least of all can you have the present, unless you accept with it the past and the future. Not only the past but also the future, not only the future but also the past! Because they are real: only their reality makes the present real. You will not achieve or even understand Urras unless you accept the reality, the enduring reality, of Anarres. You are right, we are the key. But when you said that, you did not really believe it. You don’t believe in Anarres. You don’t believe in me, though I stand with you, in this room, in this moment. . . . My people were right, and I was wrong, in this: We cannot come to you. You will not let us. You do not believe in change, in chance, in evolution. You would destroy us rather than admit our reality, rather than admit that there is hope! We cannot come to you. We can only wait for you to come to us.” (pg. 339-340) | |
14 | 12 | This is evidently the last chapter in Urras (other than the first chapter), when Shevek, Takver, Bedap, and others have formed a Syndicate of Initiative to publish "banned books" and to communicate with Anarres. Acrimony has surged between the PDC and many people in Urras towards Shevek and the Syndicate of Initiative. They disapprove of their communications with Anarres, them sharing their works of physics, and their will to pursue these despite widespread disapproval. The chapter begins with a PDC meeting where Bedap proposes allowing Anarresti from Benbili to come to Urras, as they had contacted them as members of 'The Odonian Society'. This idea is shot down, and so then Bedap and Shevek propose sending an Urrasti to Anarres. The chapter continues sharing how hated Shevek has become in some corners, which has made work very difficult for Takver, school and life for Sadik. They feel they should leave Abbenay, and Takver realizes that Shevek should go to Anarres, and tells him so. | It is surprising that during the PDC arguments, the strongest opposition and the biggest critic of the Syndicate of Initiative is Shevek's mother, Rulag. I had thought they might reconcile, but the opposite happened. They don't actively engage with each other, but they contradict each others point of view. The famous and beautiful line about freeing your thought from the notions of earning and deserving, that David Graeber quotes in "Debt" is shared in this chapter. I was surprised to see it delivered by a miner from a rural area, which made the statement (words from Odo) more effective and powerful. Bedap also has a sweet moment of reflection where he realizes the depth of meaning one can attain in life through partnering and growing a family. | " A thin, small, middle-aged man beside Trepil began speaking, at first so softly, in a voice hoarsened by the dust cough, that few of them heard him. He was a visiting delegate from a Southwest miners’ syndicate, not expected to speak on this matter. “. . . what men deserve,” he was saying. “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.” They were, of course, Odo’s words from the Prison Letters, but spoken in the weak, hoarse voice they made a strange effect, as if the man were working them out word by word himself, as if they came from his own heart, slowly, with difficulty, as the water wells up slowly, slowly from the desert sand. " (pg. 347-348) | " “You see,” he said, “what we’re after is to remind ourselves that we didn’t come to Anarres for safety, but for freedom. If we must all agree, all work together, we’re no better than a machine. If an individual can’t work in solidarity with his fellows, it’s his duty to work alone. His duty and his right. We have been denying people that right. We’ve been saying, more and more often, you must work with the others, you must accept the rule of the majority. But any rule is tyranny. The duty of the individual is to accept no rule, to be the initiator of his own acts, to be responsible. Only if he does so will the society live, and change, and adapt, and survive. We are not subjects of a State founded upon law, but members of a society founded upon revolution. Revolution is our obligation: our hope of evolution. ‘The Revolution is in the individual spirit, or it is nowhere. It is for all, or it is nothing. If it is seen as having any end, it will never truly begin.’ We can’t stop here. We must go on. We must take the risks.” " (pg. 348) | " People on both worlds were paying more attention to them than was really comfortable. When the enemy enthusiastically embraces you, and the fellow countrymen bitterly reject you, it is hard not to wonder if you are, in fact, a traitor. " (pg. 344) " “There have been no reprisals against your equipment or yourselves yet, largely, I believe, because we Odonians have become unused to the very idea of anyone’s adopting a course harmful to others and persisting in it against advice and protest. It’s a rare event. In fact, you are the first of us who have behaved in the way that archist critics always predicted people would behave in a society without laws: with total irresponsibility towards the society’s welfare. " (pg. 344-345) " “Of course not. The only security we have is our neighbors’ approval. An archist can break a law and hope to get away unpunished, but you can’t ‘break’ a custom; it’s the framework of your life with other people. We’re only just beginning to feel what it’s like to be revolutionaries, as Shev put it in the meeting today. And it isn’t comfortable.” " (pg. 352) | |
15 | 13 | The shortest chapter in the book, it ends as Shevek is returning in the Hainish ship, excited to come home. "The first mate of the Davenant, a Hainishman named Ketho" asks to join him in Urras, as he wants to explore the planet, and it is one of his duties. Once confirming it is of his own free will and that Ketho knows the challenges he will face, Shevek agrees and communicates it to the PDC and his Syndicate in Urras. The book ends with his anticipation for return. | I loved the book, and it's beautiful how it ends on a hopeful note. I also feel it's a love story in many ways. Shevek is a wonderful character and I love the many aspects of his personality. He is, perhaps, idealized a bit much, and I wish he was a bit more ordinary. He is the most brilliant scientist ever, a philosopher and revolutionary within his own radical nation, a wonderful partner and father, a compassionate and charitable man, an adventurer. That is what I liked least in the book, although I understand the benefits of using him as a vehicle to express potent ideas and thoughts. Still, it is one of my favorite books for the ideas, for the hope, and for the clear and non-judgemental eye with which it looks at our world and what it could be. | "It was our purpose all along—our Syndicate, this journey of mine—to shake up things, to stir up, to break some habits, to make people ask questions. To behave like anarchists!" (pg. 372-373) "Freedom is never very safe." (pg. 373) "“True journey is return. . . .’ ”" (pg. 374) "His hands were empty, as they had always been." (pg. 375) | "We have tried everything. Anarchism, with the rest. But I have not tried it. They say there is nothing new under any sun. But if each life is not new, each single life, then why are we born?" (pg. 373) "The sunlights differ, but there is only one darkness." (pg. 374) | "Therefore it was made spacious, humane, livable, for those who must live aboard it. Its style had neither the opulence of Urras nor the austerity of Anarres, but struck a balance, with the effortless grace of long practice. One could imagine leading that restricted life without fretting at its restrictions, contentedly, meditatively. They were a meditative people, the Hainish among the crew, civil, considerate, rather somber. There was little spontaneity in them." (pg. 369-370) |