‘Because they were born in the house of flesh, therefore death follows at their heels. They are in the middle of time. In the beginning there was the sun and the ice, and there was no shadow. In the end when we are done, the sun will devour itself and shadow will eat light, and there will be nothing left but the ice and the darkness.’
According to this creation myth from ‘The Left Hand of Darkness’, the book that made Ursula Le Guin’s reputation among ‘serious’ literary critics, this is how we came to have shadows: we exist in the middle of time, where light and dark, life and death go hand in hand. We would be incomplete without our shadows, just as without our mortality we would be less (or more?) than human.
I happened to be about midway through ‘The Left Hand of Darkness’ when I learned that Ursula Le Guin had died at the age of 88 on 22nd January 2018. Out of a vague, foolish notion of tribute, I decided to finish the book the same day. I finished it shaken, and mourning twice over: once for her, and once for the character, Estraven.
My heart and mind are still full of the story as I write this. I could write, as I have written before, of the author’s illuminating intelligence or her immaculate style, or, more properly, the way she is able to marry both. I could extol the way her story subverts conventional, ‘manly’ heroics: like many a Hollywood film, the central character is an ‘outsider’, an isolated male with a noble purpose; yet, rather than succeeding in his quest through uncompromising individualism, he only reaches his goal because he learns to trust and love - utterly - a stranger. Their relationship is the heart of the novel, and changes both of them, as the narrator describes:
‘I thought it was for your sake that I came alone, so obviously alone, so vulnerable, that I could in myself pose no threat, change no balance: not an invasion, but a mere messenger-boy. But there’s more to it than that. Alone, I cannot change your world. But I can be changed by it. Alone, I must listen, as well as speak. Alone, the relationship I finally make, if I make one, is not impersonal and not only political: it is individual, it is personal, it is both more and less than political. Not We and They; not I and It; but I and Thou. Not political, not pragmatic, but mystical…[…]…So I was sent alone, for your sake? Or for my own? I don’t know.’
I could write about how much these lonely, loyal characters, redeemed by love, mean to me personally.
I like to think that Ursula Le Guin was like her books or her characters: idealistic but with her feet squarely planted on the ground. I will never know, first hand, now, but I take comfort in what she wrote, how she conjured the light and the darkness, and set them next to each other, like two hands pressing together. Her writing is blessedly human (and humane); I credit her with making me a better person.
At one point in the book, the narrator mentions how Estraven would utter an incantation each evening as he prepared for sleep. It seems a fitting epitaph for someone who, at least in her novels, seemed to look death and grief in the face, and offered the reader hard-won hope in return:
‘Praise then darkness and Creation unfinished.’
