The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin

I lack it utterly.Ĭommenting upon the fascinating vision of sexuality in “Left Hand,” Le Guin continues in gusto:

What moves me most in Ursula is the serenity. I am more my late mother than my late father. Is it that I am not enough open to my own female component? That seems not right. After hundreds of readings, I think I know what Krishna means by “dark inertia,” “passion,” and “lucidity,” but a dozen readings of the Le Guin-Seaton “Tao Te Ching” have left me muttering that I do not apprehend the water and stone of the Way. I myself always keep to hand a copy of “ The Bhagavad-Gita” as rendered by Barbara Stoler Miller, which I purchased in the autumn of 1986, the year of its publication. We corresponded about her understanding of the Tao, yet I had to confess my permanent difficulty in absorbing this way that is not a way.

Seaton, as “ A Book About the Way and the Power of the Way” (1997). Aesthetically defined, a metaphor.Īlways in Le Guin we hear reverberations of Lao Tzu’s “Tao Te Ching,” which she translated, with J. The only truth I can understand or express is, logically defined, a lie. In a fierce introduction to “The Left Hand of Darkness,” Le Guin charmingly remarks, “A novelist’s business is lying.” She adumbrates: The protagonist, Shevek, in “The Dispossessed,” is far more interesting than anyone in the earlier book, and yet he and his story manifest something of the ambivalence of Le Guin’s subtitle: “An Ambiguous Utopia.”

In one of her letters, Ursula remarked that writing “ The Dispossessed” was liberating for her, and she seemed to prefer it to “The Left Hand of Darkness.” Rereading both, I find myself torn between the two. Though I have written about “ The Left Hand of Darkness” before, in 1987 and again in 2000, I have forgotten what I said and do not want to consult it now, but, rather, make a fresh start on this marvellous romance. I hope, in tribute to her, that I live to edit her poems for the Library of America, thinking that she might have wanted me to do that. I replied after an interval, during which I was very ill, on January 23, 2018, not yet knowing that Ursula had died the day before.

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin