Her worlds challenged us

Ursula K. Le Guin's death at age 88 was announced Tuesday. In the 1970s, her sci-fi/fantasy novels, particularly The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed, and The Lathe of Heaven, served as prompts that helped me wrestle with the big questions: what sort of world should we be striving to build and how should we live? She was visionary rather than didactic; she could seize, shake, and tickle a mind that was open to her creations. What worlds these were!

Until a recent tip from my friend Ronni, I had no idea that Le Guin had been blogging. In December I was thrilled to pick up a new little book made up of some of her blog posts from the last half decade, No Time to Spare. She wasn't sure about this new medium.

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).

These are blog posts, not all are brilliant or consequential, though often thought provoking and disturbing. There is the requisite blogy measure of description of her relationship to Pard, the cat, and other animals. And there is wisdom.

Le Guin the social observer and social critic is sharply present here. The U.S. forever wars of the 21st century don't impress her. She remembers World War II as a unifying, though unwelcome, national project. She remembers draftees, however willing or unwilling, marching off to war in their spiffy uniforms. Not so today:

... I wonder very much about the effect of the camo-pajama uniform on most civilians. I find it not only degrading but disturbing that we dress up our soldiers in clothes suitable to jail or the loony bin, setting them apart not by looking good, looking sharp, but by looking like clowns from a broken-down circus.

... Perhaps the fatigue uniform reflects an attitude they aren’t conscious of and would never admit, a change less in the nature of war than in our national attitude to it, which is neither glamorizing nor realistic but simply uncaring. We pay very little attention to our wars or to the people fighting them.

... Right or wrong, since the 1950s and particularly since the 1970s, we began putting whichever war was on at the moment out of sight and out of mind, and with it the men and women fighting it.

Le Guin was a proud advocate for women's liberation, but she was never quite sure about the positioning and tactics of some of her sisters in the first blush of Second Wave feminism. Early in this last decade, she wrote some reflections on anger that seem all the more generally relevant in our current choleric moment.

Anger is a useful, perhaps indispensable tool in motivating resistance to injustice. But I think it is a weapon—a tool useful only in combat and self-defense. ... Anger points powerfully to the denial of rights, but the exercise of rights can’t live and thrive on anger. It lives and thrives on the dogged pursuit of justice.

... Anger continued on past its usefulness becomes unjust, then dangerous. Nursed for its own sake, valued as an end in itself, it loses its goal. It fuels not positive activism but regression, obsession, vengeance, self-righteousness. Corrosive, it feeds off itself, destroying its host in the process.

She knew a thing or two. The things she knew were never simple. We are the better because she shared them.