Essays rife with insight, humor
Readers may be familiar with Ursula K. Le Guin from a variety of works: She writes the “Earthsea” fantasy series for young readers, the “Catwings” children’s picture books, science-fiction novels, poetry and essays. At age 88, Le Guin has also embraced blogging, posting thoughts and commentary from her home in Portland, Oregon.
Some of the best of her online writing — musings on subjects as far flung as military uniforms, stray cats and food pantries — is collected in the new book “No Time To Spare: Thinking About What Matters,” published last week.
The 41 essays — most just a few pages each — are crisply written, sometimes funny, often philosophical and always opinionated.
Le Guin muses on how military uniforms have changed since she was a child, noticing the smart American uniforms during World War II. No branch of the service was a match for the Navy, she writes: “the ■ gobs in their white tunics and pants and little round white hats in summer, and in winter, blue wool tunics with a sailor collar and pants with a thirteen-button, square flap fly, I kid you not. Cute little round butts looked terrific in that uniform.”
Today’s Army uniforms, she laments, are mostly “shapeless, muddy-looking spotted pajamas.” Are such uniforms an attempt to deglamorize war? No, she sighs, she can’t believe that the Army makes ugly uniforms to encourage us to think that war is ugly.
She ponders old age in the essay “The Diminished Thing,” arguing that old intelligence can have “breadth and depth of understanding.”
“No matter if the knowledge is intellectual or practical or emotional, if it concerns Alpine ecosystems or the Buddha nature or how to reassure a frightened child: when you meet an old person with that kind of knowledge, if you have the sense of a bean sprout you know you are in a rare and irreproducible presence.”
Her funniest essay is “A Modest Proposal: Vegempathy,” in which she suggests that plants — when uprooted, torn from the earth, slashed, chopped, mowed, ripped to pieces — suffer like animals, thus negating the self-righteous arguments of vegans and vegetarians. She would opt for Oganism — consuming only oxygen, a principled, albeit short-lived, approach to consumption.
Le Guin extends her greatest praise to those who supply and work at the Oregon Food Pantry, a warehouse so enormous she calls it a cathedral: “Notre-Dame de la Faim.”
“There are people who need help,” she writes. “There are people who deny it, saying that God helps those who help themselves and the poor and the unemployed are merely shiftless slackers sponging on a nanny government. There are people who don’t deny poverty, but they don’t want to know about it because it’s all so terrible and what can you do? And then there are people who help.”
She writes of her adopted cat Pard (short for Pardner), women’s issues, the concept of meaning in writing, the letters she receives from her child fans and the lies spewed by government leaders. She’s a fervid environmentalist and leans toward socialism.
The book’s essays were largely written between 2010 and 2014, so the politicians Le Guin takes to task include Barack Obama and George W. Bush. What, one wonders, would she write about Donald Trump? For the answer, go to ursulak leguin.com and read her spitfire blog post No. 123.