No Time to Spare Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  A Note at the Beginning

  Going over Eighty

  In Your Spare Time

  The Sissy Strikes Back

  The Diminished Thing

  Catching Up, Ha Ha

  The Annals of Pard

  Choosing a Cat

  Chosen by a Cat

  The Lit Biz

  Would You Please Fucking Stop?

  Readers’ Questions

  Kids’ Letters

  Having My Cake

  Papa H

  A Much-Needed Literary Award

  TGAN and TGOW

  TGAN Again

  The Narrative Gift as a Moral Conundrum

  It Doesn’t Have to Be the Way It Is

  Utopiyin, Utopiyang

  The Annals of Pard

  The Trouble

  Pard and the Time Machine

  Trying to Make Sense of It

  A Band of Brothers, a Stream of Sisters

  Exorcists

  Uniforms

  Clinging Desperately to a Metaphor

  Lying It All Away

  The Inner Child and the Nude Politician

  A Modest Proposal: Vegempathy

  Belief in Belief

  About Anger

  The Annals of Pard

  An Unfinished Education

  An Unfinished Education, Continued

  Doggerel for My Cat

  Rewards

  The Circling Stars, the Sea Surrounding: Philip Glass and John Luther Adams

  Rehearsal

  Someone Named Delores

  Without Egg

  Nôtre-Dame de la Faim

  The Tree

  The Horsies Upstairs

  First Contact

  The Lynx

  Notes from a Week at a Ranch in the Oregon High Desert

  Read More from Ursula LeGuin

  About the Author

  Connect with HMH

  Footnotes

  Copyright © 2017 by Ursula K. Le Guin

  Introduction copyright © 2017 by Karen Joy Fowler

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  hmhco.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  ISBN 978-1-328-66159-3

  Cover design by Martha Kennedy

  Cover photograph © David & Myrtille / Arcangel

  eISBN 978-1-328-66103-6

  v1.1017

  The illustration on page 154 is by the author.

  To Vonda N. McIntyre, with love

  Introduction

  MANY YEARS AGO I recall seeing a cartoon in The New Yorker. Two men, one a seeker, the other a sage, sit on a ledge in front of a mountain cave, surrounded by cats. “The meaning of life is cats,” the sage is telling the seeker. Thanks to the magic of the Internet, I can pinpoint the year of publication as 1996 and the cartoonist as Sam Gross.

  The cartoon came back into my mind while reading this collection. I thought that if I climbed the mountain up to the cave of the wise Ursula Le Guin and posed the predictable question, I might get this very same answer. Or not. Le Guin is not predictable. She might say instead that “old age is for anyone who gets there.” Or that “fear is seldom wise and never kind.” Or she might tell me that “the grave is without egg.”

  For the seeker, the answer is less important than what the seeker does with the answer. I don’t know what the important part is for the sage. Le Guin suggests that it just might be breakfast.

  Today the trip to the Le Guin cave is less arduous but no less dangerous than the archetypal climb to the mountaintop. You must cross the Wikipedian swamp, with its uncertain footing. Tiptoe by any and all comments sections so as not to wake the trolls. Remember, if you can see them, they can see you! Avoid the monster YouTube, that great eater of hours. Make your way instead to the wormhole known as Google and slide on through. Land at Ursula Le Guin’s website and go directly to the blog to see her most recent postings.

  But first read this book.

  Here you will find an archive of meditations on many things: aging; exorcism; the need for ritual, especially when performed without specific belief; how a mistake on the Internet can never be corrected; live music and literate children; Homer, Sartre, and Santa Claus. Le Guin is not the sort of sage who demands agreement and obeisance. Anyone who has ever read her books knows this. The musings that follow merely show you what she herself has been thinking about.

  But all function beautifully as launchings into your own thoughts. Sometimes the shingle on the cave says that the sage is out. On these occasions, the topic of the day is proposed by Cat instead. “Think about beetles,” Cat suggests, and so I do. Thinking about beetles proves surprisingly expansive, especially when told to do so by the good cat with the bad paws. I think about cats and their adorable murderous ways. I think about the troubled human/other interface. Somewhere inside us, I think, we all carry the Mowgli dream—that the other animals will see and accept us as one among them. And then we fail this dream when the wrong animals ask it of us. We think we wish to join the wild animals in the jungle but will not tolerate the wild animals in our kitchens. There are too many ants, we think, reaching for the spray, when it is equally true that there are too many humans.

  In another essay, in another book, Le Guin has said that so-called realism centers the human. Only the literature of the fantastic deals with the nonhuman as of equal interest and importance. In this and so many other ways, fantasy is the more subversive, the more comprehensive, the more intriguing literature. These two issues combined—our inability to deal with our own numbers and our insistence that we are what matters most—may well be the finish of us. And with these thoughts, I arrive at the end of the world, where I tire finally of thinking about beetles and go back to thinking about Le Guin.

  For all the decades of her career, Le Guin has been defending the imagination and all the stories that rise from it. I myself have been finding my way up the mountain my entire adult life, to get her answers to questions I didn’t even know I was asking. Since I am now headed toward seventy, this is a long time. I count among the world’s great gifts to me the fact that I know her personally, that I’ve spent many hours in her company. But if I only (only! ha!) had the books, the gift would still be such a great one.

  I think that she’s currently having a moment, a moment of recognition and appreciation. This particular moment (she’s had others) is partly about her deep, foundational impact on a generation of writers like me. At the beginning of this collection, she speaks of discovering José Saramago’s blog and thinking, Oh, I see! Can I do it too? Which is precisely how her own work has functioned for so many of us—as an example, a freeing from convention and expectation, an invitation into a larger world than the one we see.

  But to my mind, all of Le Guin’s moments, all the recognition and admiration, fall short of her actual accomplishments. I can think of no other writer in the entirety of history who has created the number of worlds that she has, never mind their complexity and intricacy. Where other writers secure their legacy with a single book, she’s written a dozen worthy of that. And her very last novel, Lavinia, is surely among her great works. She has been both prolific and potent. She has been both playful and powerful. She has, in her life and her work, always been a force for good, an acute social critic, necessary more now than ever as we watch the evil turn the world is taking. We who
followed her both as readers and writers are the lucky ones. We not only love her; we need her.

  What you will find in these pages here is a more casual Le Guin, a Le Guin at home. Some of the issues that have obsessed her throughout her career—the fatal model of growth capitalism; sisterhood and the ways in which it differs from the male fraternal; the denigration and misunderstandings of genre, science, and belief—continue to appear, but they’ve been sanded back to their absolute essentials. It is particularly pleasurable here to watch the lively way her mind works, and how a posting whose trappings initially seem merely sportive becomes deeply consequential.

  Le Guin has always been marvelous on the natural world. She is one of the most noticing people I’ve ever met, always paying attention to the birdsong in the background, the leaf on the tree. Her essay here on the rattlesnake and then the one about the lynx work on me like poetry, sparking expanding emotions I can’t quite identify or have no words for.

  I should make up the words! Le Guin would. (Google “Fibble, Game of.”) So I should say that when I read Le Guin writing about birds or beasts, about particular animals with histories and personalities and singular behaviors, or when I read Le Guin on trees and rivers and all the vanishing beauties of the world, I feel transpaced. I feel other-awed. I feel tongue-gaped.

  Tongue-gapedly,

  KAREN JOY FOWLER

  A Note at the Beginning

  October 2010

  I’VE BEEN INSPIRED by José Saramago’s extraordinary blogs, which he posted when he was eighty-five and eighty-six years old. They were published this year in English as The Notebooks. I read them with amazement and delight.

  I never wanted to blog before. I’ve never liked the word blog—I suppose it is meant to stand for bio-log or something like that, but it sounds like a sodden tree trunk in a bog, or maybe an obstruction in the nasal passage (Oh, she talks that way because she has such terrible blogs in her nose). I was also put off by the idea that a blog ought to be “interactive,” that the blogger is expected to read people’s comments in order to reply to them and carry on a limitless conversation with strangers. I am much too introverted to want to do that at all. I am happy with strangers only if I can write a story or a poem and hide from them behind it, letting it speak for me.

  So though I have contributed a few bloglike objects to Book View Café, I never enjoyed them. After all, despite the new name, they were just opinion pieces or essays, and writing essays has always been tough work for me and only occasionally rewarding.

  But seeing what Saramago did with the form was a revelation.

  Oh! I get it! I see! Can I try too?

  My trials/attempts/efforts (that’s what essays means) so far have very much less political and moral weight than Saramago’s and are more trivially personal. Maybe that will change as I practice the form, maybe not. Maybe I’ll soon find it isn’t for me after all, and stop. That’s to be seen. What I like at the moment is the sense of freedom. Saramago didn’t interact directly with his readers (except once). That freedom, also, I’m borrowing from him.

  Part One

  * * *

  Going over Eighty

  In Your Spare Time

  October 2010

  I GOT A questionnaire from Harvard for the sixtieth reunion of the Harvard graduating class of 1951. Of course my college was Radcliffe, which at that time was affiliated with but wasn’t considered to be Harvard, due to a difference in gender; but Harvard often overlooks such details from the lofty eminence where it can consider all sorts of things beneath its notice. Anyhow, the questionnaire is anonymous, therefore presumably gender-free; and it is interesting.

  The people who are expected to fill it out are, or would be, almost all in their eighties, and sixty years is time enough for all kinds of things to have happened to a bright-eyed young graduate. So there’s a polite invitation to widows or widowers to answer for the deceased. And Question 1c, “If divorced,” gives an interesting set of little boxes to check: Once, Twice, Three times, Four or more times, Currently remarried, Currently living with a partner, None of the above. This last option is a poser. I’m trying to think how you could be divorced and still none of the above. In any case, it seems unlikely that any of those boxes would have been on a reunion questionnaire in 1951. You’ve come a long way, baby! as the cigarette ad with the bimbo on it used to say.

  Question 12: “In general, given your expectations, how have your grandchildren done in life?” The youngest of my grandchildren just turned four. How has he done in life? Well, very well, on the whole. I wonder what kind of expectations you should have for a four-year-old. That he’ll go on being a nice little boy and learn pretty soon to read and write is all that comes to my mind. I suppose I’m supposed to expect him to go to Harvard, or at least to Columbia like his father and great-grandfather. But being nice and learning to read and write seem quite enough for now.

  Actually, I don’t exactly have expectations. I have hopes, and fears. Mostly the fears predominate these days. When my kids were young I could still hope we might not totally screw up the environment for them, but now that we’ve done so, and are more deeply sold out than ever to profiteering industrialism with its future-horizon of a few months, any hope I have that coming generations may have ease and peace in life has become very tenuous, and has to reach far, far forward into the dark.

  Question 13: “What will improve the quality of life for the future generations of your family?”—with boxes to rank importance from 1 to 10. The first choice is “Improved educational opportunities”—fair enough, Harvard being in the education business. I gave it a 10. The second is “Economic stability and growth for the U.S.” That stymied me totally. What a marvelous example of capitalist thinking, or nonthinking: to consider growth and stability as the same thing! I finally wrote in the margin, “You can’t have both,” and didn’t check a box.

  The rest of the choices are: Reduction of the U.S. debt, Reduced dependence on foreign energy, Improved health-care quality and cost, Elimination of terrorism, Implementation of an effective immigration policy, Improved bipartisanship in U.S. politics, Export democracy.

  Since we’re supposed to be considering the life of future generations, it seems a strange list, limited to quite immediate concerns and filtered through such current right-wing obsessions as “terrorism,” “effective” immigration policy, and the “exportation” of “democracy” (which I assume is a euphemism for our policy of invading countries we don’t like and trying to destroy their society, culture, and religion). Nine choices, but nothing about climate destabilization, nothing about international politics, nothing about population growth, nothing about industrial pollution, nothing about the control of government by corporations, nothing about human rights or injustice or poverty . . .

  Question 14: “Are you living your secret desires?” Floored again. I finally didn’t check Yes, Somewhat, or No, but wrote in “I have none, my desires are flagrant.”

  But it was Question 18 that really got me down. “In your spare time, what do you do? (check all that apply).” And the list begins: “Golf . . .”

  Seventh in the list of twenty-seven occupations, after “Racquet sports” but before “Shopping,” “TV,” and “Bridge,” comes “Creative activities (paint, write, photograph, etc.).”

  Here I stopped reading and sat and thought for quite a while.

  The key words are spare time. What do they mean?

  To a working person—supermarket checker, lawyer, highway crewman, housewife, cellist, computer repairer, teacher, waitress—spare time is the time not spent at your job or at otherwise keeping yourself alive, cooking, keeping clean, getting the car fixed, getting the kids to school. To people in the midst of life, spare time is free time, and valued as such.

  But to people in their eighties? What do retired people have but “spare” time?

  I am not exactly retired, because I never had a job to retire from. I still work, though not as hard as I did. I have always b
een and am proud to consider myself a working woman. But to the Questioners of Harvard my lifework has been a “creative activity,” a hobby, something you do to fill up spare time. Perhaps if they knew I’d made a living out of it they’d move it to a more respectable category, but I rather doubt it.

  The question remains: When all the time you have is spare, is free, what do you make of it?

  And what’s the difference, really, between that and the time you used to have when you were fifty, or thirty, or fifteen?

  Kids used to have a whole lot of spare time, middle-class kids anyhow. Outside of school and if they weren’t into a sport, most of their time was spare, and they figured out more or less successfully what to do with it. I had whole spare summers when I was a teenager. Three spare months. No stated occupation whatsoever. Much of after-school was spare time too. I read, I wrote, I hung out with Jean and Shirley and Joyce, I moseyed around having thoughts and feelings, oh lord, deep thoughts, deep feelings . . . I hope some kids still have time like that. The ones I know seem to be on a treadmill of programming, rushing on without pause to the next event on their schedule, the soccer practice the playdate the whatever. I hope they find interstices and wriggle into them. Sometimes I notice that a teenager in the family group is present in body—smiling, polite, apparently attentive—but absent. I think, I hope she has found an interstice, made herself some spare time, wriggled into it, and is alone there, deep down there, thinking, feeling.

  The opposite of spare time is, I guess, occupied time. In my case I still don’t know what spare time is because all my time is occupied. It always has been and it is now. It’s occupied by living.

  An increasing part of living, at my age, is mere bodily maintenance, which is tiresome. But I cannot find anywhere in my life a time, or a kind of time, that is unoccupied. I am free, but my time is not. My time is fully and vitally occupied with sleep, with daydreaming, with doing business and writing friends and family on email, with reading, with writing poetry, with writing prose, with thinking, with forgetting, with embroidering, with cooking and eating a meal and cleaning up the kitchen, with construing Virgil, with meeting friends, with talking with my husband, with going out to shop for groceries, with walking if I can walk and traveling if we are traveling, with sitting Vipassana sometimes, with watching a movie sometimes, with doing the Eight Precious Chinese exercises when I can, with lying down for an afternoon rest with a volume of Krazy Kat to read and my own slightly crazy cat occupying the region between my upper thighs and mid-calves, where he arranges himself and goes instantly and deeply to sleep. None of this is spare time. I can’t spare it. What is Harvard thinking of? I am going to be eighty-one next week. I have no time to spare.