Le Guin knew smartest things about humanity
Ursula K. Le Guin is gone but not forgotten. Mariner Books presents her last outbound volume: “Words Are My Matter: Writings on Life and Books” (316 pp., $15.99 in paperback, 2019).
Notes her publisher: “Ursula K. Le Guin was born in Berkeley, California, in 1929 and died in Portland, Oregon, in 2018. She published more than sixty books of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, drama, children’s literature, and translation.”
There’s more: Le Guin received a National Book Award, seven Hugo awards and six Nebula awards.
She was never a poseur: the photograph on the back of her last book is a direct smile before — what else? — a shelf of books.
It is not too late to appreciate Le Guin’s straightforward voice offering good sense to discriminating authors.
She could also kid herself: “Please don’t ask me where I get my ideas from. I have managed to keep the address of the company where I buy my ideas a secret after all these years, and I’m not about to let people in on it now.”
Indeed, like many great performers, Le Guin made the hard thing look easy. But it wasn’t. Will never be.
“We really can’t go on letting good writers be disappeared and buried because they weren’t men, while writers who should be left to rot in peace are endlessly resurrected, the zombies of criticism and curriculum, because they weren’t women.”
Times change.
And Le Guin was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in early 2017, a little less than a year before she died. I have to say: justly so. So did she:
“What do we learn from women? My first huge generalization is that we learn to be human.
“Over the millennia, in all societies, right up to now in Oregon, women have supplied most of the basic instructions on how to walk, talk, eat, sing, pray, play with other children, and which adults we should respect, and what to fear, what to love – the basic skills, the basic rules. The whole amazing, complicated business of staying alive and being a member of a society.”
That embraces a lot.
“Every time you see a young mother with her kids in the supermarket, you see a life-scholar, a teacher teaching an incredibly complex curriculum. Whether she does it well or not so well doesn’t affect the rule:
“Most of the time, it’s she who does it.”
Thanks, Mom.