Le Guin ponders being old
So, No Time is worth your time; review.
In 2010, around her 81st birthday, science fiction and fantasy writer Ursula K. Le Guin began blogging about her life, her work and (quite often) her cat.
A blogging octogenarian is the kind of thing we’re trained to see as endearing and cute, the stuff of bromides like “you’re only as old as you think you are.” But that’s the kind of sentiment Le Guin is eager to swat away in her witty, often deeply observed collection of posts, No Time to Spare (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 215 pp.,
She’s impatient with clichés about being forever young, as if the elderly possess strength they’ve plainly lost: “If I’m ninety and believe I’m forty-five, I’m headed for a very bad time trying to get out of the bathtub,” she writes.
She’s similarly frustrated with platitudes about our “inner child,” as if children alone have unfettered imagina- tions, and that “being a kid is great — so growing up is the pits.”
Le Guin comes at these assertions gently at first — her posts often kick off with an anecdote in the paper or a letter she received before getting at more substantive matters. That echoes her approach in fiction: Her series Earthsea is in part a religious critique in fantasy-novel dress, and she has smuggled hard questions about capitalism into interplanetary adventure novels like The Dispossessed. Which is why she has a tart retort for those who describe her work as escapist: “The direction of escape is toward freedom. So what is ‘escapism’ an accusation of ?”
And if her blog has a recurring theme, it’s her eagerness to question the words we often take for granted or dismiss. We misspeak when say we “believe” in the theory of evolution, she argues; it’s more correct to say we “accept” it.
The Great American Novel is a suspect concept because “greatness in the abstract, in general, is still thought of as the province of men.” Books and movies overloaded with a particular profanity trouble her not because she’s any kind of prude — her post on the subject uses the word itself more than two dozen times — but because of its “overtones of dominance, of abuse, of contempt, of hatred.”
At her fiercest, she’s fully persuasive at how consequential and dangerous such word choices are. Our habit of calling economic productivity “growth” comes at the expense of environmental destruction. A stray sentence in a Zadie Smith essay about how Smith has “someone” open her mail sparks a spirited essay about classism and how assistants are diminished when they’re unnamed.
Such considered ruminations don’t always sit comfortably with the book’s fluffier fare about soft-boiled eggs or her cat’s efforts to claw into her hard drive.
Le Guin has a well-ordered mind, but No Time to Spare is a more casual rummage sale of a book. (Last year’s Words Are My Matter collects her more substantive recent essays.)
But she’s never merely whimsical, and if she has arrived at a “crabby old age,” as she puts it, it has inspired her to be engagingly mindful of everything around her.