“They go on…they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.”
Ursula K. LeGuin has died. For those who have read her work, there is a silence, a stillness, a pause in the world of books and writing and stories. It is a reverent quiet, an acknowledgement of the power of a writer whose work transcended genre and spoke all who love good writing. A respectful, head bowed recognition of the passing of someone who was a master of her chosen form.
I came to LeGuin’s work through teaching. After reading the reviews of A Wizard of Earthsea I thought it might be a welcome alternative to the ubiquitous Tolkien texts (read movies, not books, sadly) that were flooding the cultural space, and I was right. The wizard Ged’s journey, with Earthsea’s internal logic and holistic magic, was just enough Harry Potter/Lord of the Rings to captivate the adolescent boys and girls who craved spells and dragons and carnage, and, once hooked, they ended up being won over. Many kids over the last few years have spoken of their infatuation with LeGuin, often moving on to the other books in the trilogy.
So I went from there to one of her best known short works, “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.” I’m not sure what I can say about this story, other than it consistently blows kids away. They hate it for its brutal moral quandary it presents to the reader, as if holding up an uneasy mirror into our own souls. They protest and accuse me of making them read inappropriate texts, even though the actual textual details of Omelas are nothing they haven’t seen tenfold on basic cable, and that’s why the story works. It makes kids uncomfortable because they all too easily can see themselves in the citizens of Omelas, willing to make the unholy bargain for their own comfort and happiness. And if they are really quiet and thoughtful, they see that this was the point she was trying to make all along, that “to hear one must be silent.” If you haven’t read this story, for God’s sake get to it! It’s short. It’s worth it!
The magic of Ursula K. LeGuin, like all great writers, is that, no matter where their stories are set, there is a solid connection to our world– our souls– and in that connection we learn something about ourselves. Sometimes what we learn we don’t much like. Just ask Ged. With her passing we lose some of that magic, and that is sad. But there are other wizards out there, plying their trade in the darkness, fighting shadows and revealing what we are too afraid to admit about ourselves. Thank God for that, and thank God for LeGuin’s prose.
As for Ursula LeGuin, she famously wrote in The Left Hand of Darkness that “it is good to have an end to journey toward, but it is the journey that matters in the end.” I hope her next journey is shaping up nicely, because her journey here was something special.
Leave a Reply