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radiantfractureI have been wanting to make a journal entry. I certainly did not want to sit down today to write about the death of Ursula K. Le Guin.
She had a long life, but I would wish it prolonged indefinitely by means magical or scientific or both, if that didn't sound like the beginning of a morality tale she would have enjoyed attentively critiquing.
Le Guin was (just barely "was", now, hardly "was" at all1) a great writer, critical thinker, public intellectual and imagine-er. The Left Hand of Darkness (and the other Gethen stories), The Dispossessed, and other of her novels -- each was important to me as a dialogue about culture, about humanity, about how and why we organize ourselves one way and not another, about what we value and how we create meaning together.
Not that I always felt uncritical about her -- sometimes I wanted her to carry her ideas farther, sometimes I was frustrated by the limits she set or assumed, sometimes the thought experiment did not come off -- but whenever I read her work, I knew that I was in the presence of an enormous intellect, a vast curiosity, a limitless compassion.
I do not want her to have crossed already into the country of Was, but there she is, map in hand. I do not think she would be sentimental enough to look back or wave goodbye.
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1. I wish English had a more elegant formation for the tense "has just been" -- for something that was so recently the case that you still feel it to be present, though you know it is not.
She had a long life, but I would wish it prolonged indefinitely by means magical or scientific or both, if that didn't sound like the beginning of a morality tale she would have enjoyed attentively critiquing.
Le Guin was (just barely "was", now, hardly "was" at all1) a great writer, critical thinker, public intellectual and imagine-er. The Left Hand of Darkness (and the other Gethen stories), The Dispossessed, and other of her novels -- each was important to me as a dialogue about culture, about humanity, about how and why we organize ourselves one way and not another, about what we value and how we create meaning together.
Not that I always felt uncritical about her -- sometimes I wanted her to carry her ideas farther, sometimes I was frustrated by the limits she set or assumed, sometimes the thought experiment did not come off -- but whenever I read her work, I knew that I was in the presence of an enormous intellect, a vast curiosity, a limitless compassion.
I do not want her to have crossed already into the country of Was, but there she is, map in hand. I do not think she would be sentimental enough to look back or wave goodbye.
{rf}
1. I wish English had a more elegant formation for the tense "has just been" -- for something that was so recently the case that you still feel it to be present, though you know it is not.
no subject
Date: 2018-01-24 06:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-01-24 06:37 am (UTC)That is well said.
no subject
Date: 2018-01-24 11:26 am (UTC)+1
Date: 2018-01-24 04:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-01-24 11:58 am (UTC)She also, as you say, could present other cultures in a way that made sense and drew you into them.
no subject
Date: 2018-01-24 12:54 pm (UTC)I'm grieving a lot today.