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The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin (1969) (read in 2025)

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<n>Standard disclaimer<fn></n> <img attachment="left_hand_of_darkness_by_ursula_k._le_guin_book_cover.webp" align="right" caption="Book Cover">You will often hear this book described as a feminist masterpiece. I honestly can't figure out why. It is about so much more than feminism, though it is also about that. I think it is a masterpiece, though. It is a wholly realized world, limned with light brushstrokes onto which the reader hangs their own detail, unlike so many modern books where every last detail is included, to avoid the reader having to fill in anything themselves. Instead, Le Guin has a light hand, wielding an incredible skill that was perhaps enhanced by having had to write everything either longhand or on a typewriter. She is a masterful writer. The foreword was very, very good, as was the 50th-anniversary introduction written by Le Guin herself, in which she distilled her original intent with the book in a way that is clearer than the book itself manages. Without these introductions, I might have missed the significance of Kemmer---the sexual expression of the people of the planet Gethen/Winter that occurs once every month, in which the body arbitrarily chooses a gender and goes into hormonal overdrive, seeking to mate---because there was so much more going on in the book. <bq caption="Page xii">Le Guin created her worlds with an anthropologist’s eye not only for language, but for rituals, myths, and influence of geography on culture. Gethen feels too replete with persuasive details to be made up. [...] the true antagonists of The Left Hand of Darkness are very human bigotry, politicking and the harshness of the Gethenian climate. What action sequences there are occur offstage, or are handled with undramatic brevity. They serve as location shifters, not as adrenaline tweakers. Future tech plays a minimal role in Le Guin’s science fiction, and there is no exotic alien megafauna.</bq> Instead of action or future tech, Le Guin focuses on helping you see what this world looks like. At the same time, an reasonably aware reader will be unable to avoid drawing comparisons to our world. For example, the following sequence is replete with new information but provides it in a way---enveloped in familiar scenes---that allows the reader to build a view of this alien world, to learn the terms, all without seeming pedantic or overly descriptive. <bq caption="Page 47">It was not the answer Herbor had hoped, but it was the answer he got, and having a patient heart he went home to Charuthe with it, through the snows of Grende. He came into the Domain and into the strong-place and climbed the tower, and there found his kemmering Berosty sitting as ever blank and bleak by an ash-smothered fire, his arms lying on a table of red stone, his head sunk between his shoulders.</bq> You can see the characters, can't you? You have learned something about what things are called in this world, on this cold planet. Perhaps the word "kemmering" is the only one that you cannot discern from context. But perhaps, too, you might elicit the meaning "mate" or "partner". The next sequence is much longer but is completely representative of Le Guin's style in teaching us about this world, all without pedantry, all with information woven into tales about the world, told by characters in this world, each of which seems to be flowing naturally from the overarching story itself. She does not jar her readers with exposition. <bq caption="Page 49">My landlady, a voluble man, arranged my journey into the East. “If a person wants to visit Fastnesses he’s got to cross the Kargav. Over the mountains, into Old Karhide, to Rer, the old King’s City. Now I’ll tell you, a hearthfellow of mine runs a landboat caravan over the Eskar Pass and yesterday he was telling me over a cup of orsh that they’re going to make their first trip this summer on Getheny Osme, it having been such a warm spring and the road already clear up to Engohar and the plows will have the pass clear in another couple of days. Now you won’t catch me crossing the Kargav, Erhenrang for me and a roof over my head. But I’m a Yomeshta, praise to the nine hundred Throne-Upholders and blest be the Milk of Meshe, and one can be a Yomeshta anywhere. We’re a lot of newcomers, see, for my Lord Meshe was born 2,202 years ago, but the Old Way of the Handdara goes back ten thousand years before that. You have to go back to the Old Land if you’re after the Old Way.</bq> And then she can elicit sympathy from humans on this planet, her readers, with lovely, incredibly expressive, poetic sentences like this one. <bq caption="Page 115">It was all golden, all benign, that week of walking; and at night before I slept I would step out of the dark farmhouse or firelit Hearth-Hall where I was lodged and walk a way into the dry stubble to look up at the stars, flaring like far cities in the windy autumn dark.</bq> Are you not standing in that field with Genry? Are you not flung back to a time when you also walked out, from a warm, glowing hearth, into the dark to discover infinitude spread before you, either in the forests or waters stretching to the horizon or in the stars above? Do you not feel the cold air, waking your senses, inviting euphoria and epiphany? She dabbles in timeless aphorisms, like the one below, which any given era would argue applies more to itself than even the era in which it was written. <bq caption="Page 58">Legends of prediction are common throughout the whole Household of Man. God speaks, spirits speak, computers speak. Oracular ambiguity or statistical probability provides loopholes, and discrepancies are expunged by Faith.</bq> She does this as well in examining---or having Genry examine---the implications of the kemmer/somer cycle, in which there is no lasting male or female expression, in which biological duality does not exist---so that it does not imprint itself on culture, it does not bend all other anthropological activity to its will. <bq caption="Page 100">[...] The fact that everyone between seventeen and thirty-five or so is liable to be (as Nim put it) “tied down to childbearing,” implies that no one is quite so thoroughly “tied down” here as women, elsewhere, are likely to be—psychologically or physically. Burden and privilege are shared out pretty equally; everybody has the same risk to run or choice to make. Therefore nobody here is quite so free as a free male anywhere else.</bq> <bq caption="Page 100">There is no division of humanity into strong and weak halves, protective/protected, dominant/submissive, owner/chattel, active/passive. In fact the whole tendency to dualism that pervades human thinking may be found to be lessened, or changed, on Winter.</bq> <bq caption="Page 101">A man wants his virility regarded, a woman wants her femininity appreciated, however indirect and subtle the indications of regard and appreciation. On Winter they will not exist. One is respected and judged only as a human being. It is an appalling experience.</bq> The story follows Genry Ai, a male Terran native on the planet Winter, an outlying planet that had been seeded with humans in a long and distant past. He is there to determine whether to extend an invitation to the planet into a federation called the Ekumen, a loose alliance of over 100 planets that work together toward common goals. <bq caption="Page 37">We are all men, you know, sir. All of us. All the worlds of men were settled, eons ago, from one world, Hain. We vary, but we’re all sons of the same Hearth. . .</bq> The Ekumen is very clearly more advanced than Winter in many ways. Winter does have some innovations that the Ekumen would find useful. They do not really know war---murder on an industrial scale. Disputes arise, of course, but they are nearly always settled without loss of life, or with very restricted loss of life. Some of the inhabitants of Winter have learned how to predict the future with an uncanny accuracy, although the precision of the answer depends on the acumen of the questioner. <bq caption="Page 71">We have NAFAL ships and instantaneous transmission and mindspeech, but we haven’t yet tamed hunch to run in harness; for that trick we must go to Gethen.</bq> Genry's journey takes him from the nation of Karhide (hierarchical/autocratic), where he had worked with Estraven, to the nation of Orgoreyn (communal/autocratic). After Estraven falls from favor, Genry feels the pressure of the mad king of Karhide and more-or-less flees to Orgoreyn, where he at first feels safer and more capable of performing his mission than he had at the end of his time in Karhide. Soon, though, the subterfuge and treachery of most of the 33 members of the council (Commensal) lead to the beginning of trials and tribulations for Genry that push him not only to physical collapse but beyond. He takes a truck with others, through the mountain passes, through the colds of winter, through privation (little to no food; little to no insulation). He is a prisoner amongst many other prisoners. They huddle for warmth at night; they share water. They let the very sick go. He arrives to an even bleaker existence at a prison. It is here that his self is nearly obliterated, not only physically but mentally, spiritually. It is hard to ignore the circumstances of history, in which an American author of the 1960s---smack-dab in the middle of the so-called Cold War---writes of a brutal, inhuman prison in the depths of a cold, northern desert, where prisoners are kept for political crimes, where they are pumped for information that they don't have. It is hard not to hear the world "gulag" screamed from every sentence. Estraven breaks Genry free from this prison by infiltrating it and using his "Dothe" strength (<iq>the voluntary summoning of the body’s full strength</iq>), planning a spectacular journey across the 800 miles of glacial wastelands to the north of both countries. They travel in conditions of extreme hardship, growing incredibly close as friends, discussing many things that seem quite relevant to humanity as it is on Earth, discussing the senselessness of clans or nations fighting each other rather than working together for common goals. <bq caption="Page 165">What does it matter which country wakens first, so long as we waken?</bq> <bq caption="Page 176">How does one hate a country, or love one? [...] I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply?</bq> They experience the euphoria of surviving a beautiful and uncaring nature that seems to seek to kill them at nearly every opportunity but, in reality, doesn't care either way whether they live or die. <bq caption="Page 182">Estraven stood there in harness beside me looking at that magnificent and unspeakable desolation. “I’m glad I have lived to see this,” he said. I felt as he did. It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end. It had not rained, here on these north-facing slopes. Snow-fields stretched down from the pass into the valleys of moraine. We stowed the wheels, uncapped the sledge-runners, put on our skis, and took off—down, north, onward, into that silent vastness of fire and ice that said in enormous letters of black and white DEATH, DEATH, written right across a continent. The sledge pulled like a feather, and we laughed with joy.</bq> This occasional euphoria is matched, of course, with despair, such as that engendered by the arrival of the unshadow, described as follows, <bq caption="Page 219">All brightness was gone, leaving nothing. We stepped out of the tent onto nothing. Sledge and tent were there, Estraven stood beside me, but neither he nor I cast any shadow. There was dull light all around, everywhere. When we walked on the crisp snow no shadow showed the footprint. We left no track. Sledge, tent, himself, myself: nothing else at all. No sun, no sky, no horizon, no world. A whitish-gray void, in which we appeared to hang.</bq> <bq caption="Page 223">No shadows. An even, white, soundless sphere: we moved along inside a huge frosted-glass ball. There was nothing inside the ball, and nothing was outside it.</bq> They are rescued from this nothingness by the appearance of nunataks, utterly unreassuring features of the landscape that nonetheless bring relief to those made desperate enough by the unshadow to seek it in even the most unsympathetic and otherwise foreboding features. <bq caption="Page 220">[...] we saw them plainly before sunset: nunataks, great scored and ravaged pinnacles of rock jutting up out of the ice, no more of them showing than shows of an iceberg above the sea: cold drowned mountains, dead for eons.</bq> Le Guin's poetic description should be the official definition of that word. Estraven is truly a remarkable character, a solid good, a source of wisdom and skill, a source of resolve and kindness. Genry is also very good but I felt I had the most in common with Estraven. When they are forced to finally abandon the sledge that had accompanied them, supported them without complaint throughout their 750-mile journey, Estraven laments it. <bq caption="Page 226">[...] He glanced back at the sledge, a bit of refuse in the vast torment of ice and reddish rock. “It did well,” he said. His loyalty extended without disproportion to things, the patient, obstinate, reliable things that we use and get used to, the things we live by. He missed the sledge.</bq> This section speaks to me so much, as I think to myself "who wouldn't feel this way about a piece of equipment that had served them well?" And then I think that most people have no attachment to things because they constantly look forward to new things that will replace them. Genry and Estraven emerge from the frozen wastes into Karhide but they are, of course, not greeted with open arms. They fled from a country in which Estraven could move freely but in which Genry was imprisoned, to a country in which Genry has power but from which Estraven has been exiled. In the end, Estraven sacrifices himself to save Genry's mission of integrating Gethen/Winter into the Ekumen. The ending matters far less than the journey of the book, which is very appropriate. Highly recommended; I would read it again. <hr> <ft>Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me of what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you.</ft> <h>Citations</h> <bq caption="Page xii">Ursula le Guin is a creator of vivid worlds. Earthsea is one of the most fully realized worlds in fantasy, to my mind, and the Hainish Cycle, to which The Left Hand of Darkness belongs, is one of the most evocative series in science fiction. What Earthsea and the Hainish Cycle have in common is maximal impact with minimal page count. Both feel vast, as if the novels are only glimpses of worlds, not full delineations of them; as if worlds continue to follow their histories even when no reader is watching.</bq> <bq caption="Page xii">Le Guin created her worlds with an anthropologist’s eye not only for language, but for rituals, myths, and influence of geography on culture. Gethen feels too replete with persuasive details to be made up. Cliche withers away. Le Guin does not resort to evil masterminds or dystopian states needing to be overthrown by a plucky band of misfits. A mentally unstable king and a quasi-totalitarian state threaten Genly Ai’s safety, but the true antagonists of The Left Hand of Darkness are very human bigotry, politicking and the harshness of the Gethenian climate. What action sequences there are occur offstage, or are handled with undramatic brevity. They serve as location shifters, not as adrenaline tweakers. Future tech plays a minimal role in Le Guin’s science fiction, and there is no exotic alien megafauna.</bq> <bq caption="Page xiii">He is an unarmed man in his late twenties from a distant planet, a self-exile out of his political and cultural depth, at the mercy of events he rarely, or barely, grasps. For most of the novel he fails to notice that he’d be dead without Estraven’s discreet interventions. What heroism he possesses is about surviving failure and failing better.</bq> <bq caption="Page xv">Le Guin’s writing—in The Left Hand of Darkness as powerfully as anywhere—also dares to posit how society could be better and fairer and wiser than the one we have. Le Guin’s fiction about others dreams seditious dreams for this one. It asserts that dysfunctions and injustices perpetrated by human beings can be amended and redeemed by those same human beings. It is a quiet, insistent call to arms by and for the better angels of our nature. Utopia may exist only in signposts to Utopia, but that’s enough; it’ll do; it’ll have to. Just as long as we have those signposts.</bq> <bq caption="Page xix">They may use all kinds of facts to support their tissue of lies. They may describe the Marshalsea Prison, which was a real place, or the battle of Borodino, which really was fought, or the process of cloning, which really takes place in laboratories, or the deterioration of a personality, which is described in real textbooks of psychology, and so on. This weight of verifiable place-event-phenomenon-behavior makes the reader forget that he is reading a pure invention, a history that never took place anywhere but in that unlocalizable region, the author’s mind. In fact, while we read a novel, we are insane—bonkers. We believe in the existence of people who aren’t there, we hear their voices, we watch the battle of Borodino with them, we may even become Napoleon. Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed. Is it any wonder that no truly respectable society has ever trusted its artists?</bq> <bq caption="Page xxii">I am not predicting, or prescribing. I am describing. I am describing certain aspects of psychological reality in the novelist’s way, which is by inventing elaborately circumstantial lies.</bq> <bq caption="Page xxii">Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist’s business is lying.</bq> <bq caption="Page xxii">In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it. Finally, when we’re done with it, we may find—if it’s a good novel—that we’re a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changed a little, as if by having met a new face, crossed a street we never crossed before. But it’s very hard to say just what we learned, how we were changed. The artist deals with what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.</bq> <bq caption="Page 24">For two days he walked northward on the Ice. He had no food with him, nor shelter but his coat. On the Ice nothing grows and no beasts run. It was the month of Susmy and the first great snows were falling those days and nights. He went alone through the storm. On the second day he knew he was growing weaker. On the second night he must lie down and sleep awhile. On the third morning waking he saw that his hands were frostbitten, and found that his feet were too, though he could not unfasten his boots to look at them, having no use left of his hands. He began to crawl forward on knees and elbows. He had no reason to do so, as it did not matter whether he died in one place on the Ice or another, but he felt that he should go northward.</bq> <bq caption="Page 37">We are all men, you know, sir. All of us. All the worlds of men were settled, eons ago, from one world, Hain. We vary, but we’re all sons of the same Hearth. . .</bq> <bq caption="Page 44">The king had given me the freedom of the country; I would avail myself of it. As they say in Ekumenical School, when action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep. I was not sleepy, yet. I would go east to the Fastnesses, and gather information from the Foretellers, perhaps.</bq> <bq caption="Page 47">It was not the answer Herbor had hoped, but it was the answer he got, and having a patient heart he went home to Charuthe with it, through the snows of Grende. He came into the Domain and into the strong-place and climbed the tower, and there found his kemmering Berosty sitting as ever blank and bleak by an ash-smothered fire, his arms lying on a table of red stone, his head sunk between his shoulders.</bq> <bq caption="Page 49">My landlady, a voluble man, arranged my journey into the East. “If a person wants to visit Fastnesses he’s got to cross the Kargav. Over the mountains, into Old Karhide, to Rer, the old King’s City. Now I’ll tell you, a hearthfellow of mine runs a landboat caravan over the Eskar Pass and yesterday he was telling me over a cup of orsh that they’re going to make their first trip this summer on Getheny Osme, it having been such a warm spring and the road already clear up to Engohar and the plows will have the pass clear in another couple of days. Now you won’t catch me crossing the Kargav, Erhenrang for me and a roof over my head. But I’m a Yomeshta, praise to the nine hundred Throne-Upholders and blest be the Milk of Meshe, and one can be a Yomeshta anywhere. We’re a lot of newcomers, see, for my Lord Meshe was born 2,202 years ago, but the Old Way of the Handdara goes back ten thousand years before that. You have to go back to the Old Land if you’re after the Old Way.</bq> <bq caption="Page 51">I sold another ruby to the scar-faced jeweler in Eng Street, and with no baggage but my money, my ansible, a few instruments and a change of clothes, set off as a passenger on a trade-caravan on the first day of the first month of summer. The landboats left at daybreak from the windswept loading-yards of the New Port. They drove under the Arch and turned east, twenty bulky, quiet-running, barge-like trucks on caterpillar treads, going single file down the deep streets of Erhenrang through the shadows of morning. They carried boxes of lenses, reels of soundtapes, spools of copper and platinum wire, bolts of plant-fiber cloth raised and woven in the West Fall, chests of dried fish-flakes from the Gulf, crates of ballbearings and other small machine parts, and ten truckloads of Orgota kardik-grain: all bound for the Pering Stormborder, the northeast corner of the land.</bq> <bq caption="Page 52">Traffic is controlled, each vehicle or caravan being required to keep in constant radio touch with checkpoints along the way. It all moves along, however crowded, quite steadily at the rate of 25 miles per hour (Terran). Gethenians could make their vehicles go faster, but they do not. If asked why not, they answer “Why?” Like asking Terrans why all our vehicles must go so fast; we answer “Why not?” No disputing tastes.</bq> <bq caption="Page 53">At Third Hour we stopped for dinner at a large inn, a grand place with vast roaring fireplaces and vast beam-roofed rooms full of tables loaded with good food; but we did not stay the night. Ours was a sleeper-caravan, hurrying (in its Karhidish fashion) to be the first of the season into the Pering Storm country, to skim the cream of the market for its merchant-entrepreneurs. The truck-batteries were recharged, a new shift of drivers took over, and we went on.</bq> <bq caption="Page 54">We stood about stamping in the snow, gobbling up food and drink, backs to the bitter wind that was filled with a glittering dust of dry snow. Then back into the landboats, and on, and up. At noon in the passes of Wehoth, at about 14,000 feet, it was 82°F in the sun and 13° in the shade. The electric engines were so quiet that one could hear avalanches grumble down immense blue slopes on the far side of chasms twenty miles across.</bq> <bq caption="Page 58">Legends of prediction are common throughout the whole Household of Man. God speaks, spirits speak, computers speak. Oracular ambiguity or statistical probability provides loopholes, and discrepancies are expunged by Faith.</bq> <bq caption="Page 59">“I’m not sure. I’m exceedingly ignorant—” The young man laughed and bowed. “I am honored!” he said. “I’ve lived here three years, but haven’t yet acquired enough ignorance to be worth mentioning.” He was highly amused, but his manner was gentle, and I managed to recollect enough scraps of Handdara lore to realize that I had been boasting, very much as if I’d come up to him and said, “I’m exceedingly handsome . . .”</bq> <bq caption="Page 62">One night two Indwellers danced, men so old that their hair had whitened, and their limbs were skinny, and the downward folds at the outer eye-corners half hid their dark eyes. Their dancing was slow, precise, controlled; it fascinated eye and mind. They began dancing during Third Hour after dinner. Musicians joined in and dropped out at will, all but the drummer who never stopped his subtle changing beat. The two old dancers were still dancing at Sixth Hour, midnight, after five Terran hours. This was the first time I had seen the phenomenon of dothe—the voluntary, controlled use of what we call “hysterical strength”—and thereafter I was readier to believe tales concerning the Old Men of the Handdara.</bq> <bq caption="Page 65">Faxe sat cross-legged, not moving, but charged, full of a gathering force that made his light, soft voice crack like an electric bolt. “Ask,” he said. I stood within the circle and asked my question. “Will this world Gethen be a member of the Ekumen of Known Worlds, five years from now?” Silence. I stood there; I hung in the center of a spider-web woven of silence. “It is answerable,” the Weaver said quietly. There was a relaxation. The hooded stones seemed to soften into movement; the one who had looked so strangely at me began to whisper to his neighbor. I left the circle and joined the watchers by the hearth.</bq> <bq caption="Page 66">Beside the kemmerer sat the Pervert. “He came up from Spreve with the physician,” Goss told me. “Some Foretelling groups artificially arouse perversion in a normal person—injecting female or male hormones during the days before a session. It’s better to have a natural one. He’s willing to come; likes the notoriety.” Goss used the pronoun that designates a male animal, not the pronoun for a human being in the masculine role of kemmer. He looked a little embarrassed. Karhiders discuss sexual matters freely, and talk about kemmer with both reverence and gusto, but they are reticent about discussing perversion—at least, they were with me. Excessive prolongation of the kemmer period, with permanent hormonal imbalance towards the male or the female, causes what they call perversion; it is not rare; three or four percent of adults may be physiological perverts or abnormals—normals, by our standard. They are not excluded from society, but they are tolerated with some disdain, as homosexuals are in many bisexual societies. The Karhidish slang for them is halfdeads. They are sterile.</bq> <bq caption="Page 68">Faxe raised his hand. At once each face in the circle turned to him as if he had gathered up their gazes into a sheaf, a skein.</bq> <bq caption="Page 71">We have NAFAL ships and instantaneous transmission and mindspeech, but we haven’t yet tamed hunch to run in harness; for that trick we must go to Gethen.</bq> <bq caption="Page 74">“Well, we come here to the Fastnesses mostly to learn what questions not to ask.” “But you’re the Answerers!” “You don’t see yet, Genry, why we perfected and practice Foretelling?” “No—” “To exhibit the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question.”</bq> <bq caption="Page 93">Obsle sat sunk in his fat, watching me from his small eyes. “This will take a month’s believing,” he said. “And if it came from anyone’s mouth but yours, Estraven, I’d believe it to be pure hoax, a net for our pride woven out of starshine. But I know your stiff neck. Too stiff to stoop to an assumed disgrace in order to fool us. I can’t believe you’re speaking truth and yet I know a lie would choke you.</bq> <bq caption="Page 97">If the individual was in the female role and was impregnated, hormonal activity of course continues, and for the 8.4-month gestation period and the 6- to 8-month lactation period this individual remains female. The male sexual organs remain retracted (as they are in somer), the breasts enlarge somewhat, and the pelvic girdle widens. With the cessation of lactation the female reenters somer and becomes once more a perfect androgyne. No physiological habit is established, and the mother of several children may be the father of several more.</bq> <bq caption="Page 100">Anyone can turn his hand to anything. This sounds very simple, but its psychological effects are incalculable. The fact that everyone between seventeen and thirty-five or so is liable to be (as Nim put it) “tied down to childbearing,” implies that no one is quite so thoroughly “tied down” here as women, elsewhere, are likely to be—psychologically or physically. Burden and privilege are shared out pretty equally; everybody has the same risk to run or choice to make. Therefore nobody here is quite so free as a free male anywhere else.</bq> <bq caption="Page 100">There is no division of humanity into strong and weak halves, protective/protected, dominant/submissive, owner/chattel, active/passive. In fact the whole tendency to dualism that pervades human thinking may be found to be lessened, or changed, on Winter.</bq> <bq caption="Page 101">A man wants his virility regarded, a woman wants her femininity appreciated, however indirect and subtle the indications of regard and appreciation. On Winter they will not exist. One is respected and judged only as a human being. It is an appalling experience.</bq> <bq caption="Page 102">Another guess concerning the hypothetical experiment’s object: the elimination of war. Did the Ancient Hainish postulate that continuous sexual capacity and organized social aggression, neither of which are attributes of any mammal but man, are cause and effect? Or, like Tumass Song Angot, did they consider war to be a purely masculine displacement-activity, a vast Rape, and therefore in their experiment eliminate the masculinity that rapes and the femininity that is raped?</bq> <bq caption="Page 103">I really don’t see how anyone could put much stock in victory or glory after he had spent a winter on Winter, and seen the face of the Ice.</bq> <bq caption="Page 104">I would tell my hosts in those rural Hearths and villages who I was; most of them had heard a little about me over the radio and had a vague idea what I was. They were curious, some more, some less. Few were frightened of me personally, or showed the xenophobic revulsion. An enemy, in Karhide, is not a stranger, an invader. The stranger who comes unknown is a guest. Your enemy is your neighbor.</bq> <bq caption="Page 109">Now Karhide was to pull herself together and do the same; and the way to make her do it was not by sparking her pride, or building up her trade, or improving her roads, farms, colleges, and so on; none of that; that’s all civilization, veneer, and Tibe dismissed it with scorn. He was after something surer, the sure, quick, and lasting way to make people into a nation: war. His ideas concerning it could not have been too precise, but they were quite sound. The only other means of mobilizing people rapidly and entirely is with a new religion; none was handy; he would make do with war.</bq> <bq caption="Page 115">It was all golden, all benign, that week of walking; and at night before I slept I would step out of the dark farmhouse or firelit Hearth-Hall where I was lodged and walk a way into the dry stubble to look up at the stars, flaring like far cities in the windy autumn dark.</bq> <bq caption="Page 121">A brief official bulletin repeated every so often said simply that order was being and would be maintained along the Eastern Border. I liked that; it was reassuring and unprovocative, and had the quiet toughness that I had always admired in Gethenians: order will be maintained. . . . I was glad, now, to be out of Karhide, an incoherent land driven towards violence by a paranoid, pregnant king and an egomaniac Regent. I was glad to be driving sedately at twenty-five miles an hour through vast, straight-furrowed grainlands, under an even gray sky, towards a capital whose government believed in Order.</bq> <bq caption="Page 124">The system of extended-family clans, of Hearths and Domains, though still vaguely discernible in the Commensal structure, was “nationalized” several hundred years ago in Orgoreyn. No child over a year old lives with its parent or parents; all are brought up in the Commensal Hearths. There is no rank by descent. Private wills are not legal: a man dying leaves his fortune to the state. All start equal.</bq> <bq caption="Page 125">His obtuseness is ignorance. His arrogance is ignorance. He is ignorant of us: we of him. He is infinitely a stranger, and I a fool, to let my shadow cross the light of the hope he brings us. I keep my mortal vanity down. I keep out of his way: for clearly that is what he wants.</bq> <bq caption="Page 126">To be an atheist is to maintain God. His existence or his nonexistence, it amounts to much the same, on the plane of proof. Thus proof is a word not often used among the Handdarata, who have chosen not to treat God as a fact, subject either to proof or to belief: and they have broken the circle, and go free. To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.</bq> <bq caption="Page 141">One of the truckload died that night. He had been clubbed or kicked in the abdomen, and died hemorrhaging from anus and mouth. No one did anything for him; there was nothing to be done. A plastic jug of water had been shoved in amongst us some hours before, but it was long since dry. The man happened to be next to me on the right, and I took his head on my knees to give him relief in breathing: so he died. We were all naked, but thereafter I wore his blood for clothing, on my legs and thighs and hands: a dry, stiff, brown garment with no warmth in it.</bq> <bq caption="Page 143">There was kindness. I and certain others, an old man and one with a bad cough, were recognized as being least resistant to the cold, and each night we were at the center of the group, the entity of twenty-five, where it was warmest. We did not struggle for the warm place, we simply were in it each night. It is a terrible thing, this kindness that human beings do not lose. Terrible, because when we are finally naked in the dark and cold, it is all we have. We who are so rich, so full of strength, we end up with that small change. We have nothing else to give.</bq> <bq caption="Page 162">Night had fallen and the greater darkness, the payment for the voluntary summoning of the body’s full strength, was coming hard upon me; to darkness I must entrust myself, and him.</bq> <bq caption="Page 164">“Mr. Ai, any one of you prisoners, or all of you together, could have walked out of that place, any night. If you weren’t starved, exhausted, demoralized, and drugged; and if you had winter clothing; and if you had somewhere to go....</bq> <bq caption="Page 164">“Mr. Ai, any one of you prisoners, or all of you together, could have walked out of that place, any night. If you weren’t starved, exhausted, demoralized, and drugged; and if you had winter clothing; and if you had somewhere to go.... There’s the catch. Where would you go? To a town? No papers; you’re done for. Into the wilderness? No shelter; you’re done for. In summer, I expect they bring more guards into Pulefen Farm. In winter, they use winter itself to guard it.”</bq> <bq caption="Page 165">“Mr. Ai, we’ve seen the same events with different eyes; I wrongly thought they’d seem the same to us.</bq> <bq caption="Page 165">“But for what purpose—all this intriguing, this hiding and power-seeking and plotting—what was it all for, Estraven? What were you after?” “I was after what you’re after: the alliance of my world with your worlds. What did you think?” We were staring at each other across the glowing stove like a pair of wooden dolls. “You mean, even if it was Orgoreyn that made the alliance—?” “Even if it was Orgoreyn. Karhide would soon have followed. Do you think I would play shifgrethor when so much is at stake for all of us, all my fellow men? What does it matter which country wakens first, so long as we waken?”</bq> <bq caption="Page 169">I never knew a person who reacted so wholly and rapidly to a changed situation as Estraven. I was recovering, and willing to go; he was out of thangen; the instant that was all clear, he was off. He was never rash or hurried, but he was always ready.</bq> <bq caption="Page 171">Estraven sat a long time by the stove that night figuring out precisely what we had and how and when we must use it. We had no scales, and he had to estimate, using a pound box of gichy-michy as standard. He knew, as do many Gethenians, the caloric and nutritive value of each food; he knew his own requirements under various conditions, and how to estimate mine pretty closely. Such knowledge has high survival-value, on Winter.</bq> <bq caption="Page 176">How does one hate a country, or love one? Tibe talks about it; I lack the trick of it. I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply?</bq> <bq caption="Page 182">Estraven stood there in harness beside me looking at that magnificent and unspeakable desolation. “I’m glad I have lived to see this,” he said. I felt as he did. It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end. It had not rained, here on these north-facing slopes. Snow-fields stretched down from the pass into the valleys of moraine. We stowed the wheels, uncapped the sledge-runners, put on our skis, and took off—down, north, onward, into that silent vastness of fire and ice that said in enormous letters of black and white DEATH, DEATH, written right across a continent. The sledge pulled like a feather, and we laughed with joy.</bq> <bq caption="Page 185">Long since in Erhenrang he had explained to me how time is shortened inside the ships that go almost as fast as starlight between the stars, but I had not laid this fact down against the length of a man’s life, or the lives he leaves behind him on his own world. While he lived a few hours in one of those unimaginable ships going from one planet to another, everyone he had left behind him at home grew old and died, and their children grew old.... I said at last, “I thought myself an exile.”</bq> <bq caption="Page 190">“Fire and fear, good servants, bad lords.” He makes fear serve him. I would have let fear lead me around by the long way. Courage and reason are with him. What good seeking the safe course, on a journey such as this? There are senseless courses, which I shall not take; but there is no safe one.</bq> <bq caption="Page 191">The world around us, ice and rock, ash and snow, fire and dark, trembles and twitches and mutters. Looking out a minute ago I saw the glow of the volcano as a dull red bloom on the belly of vast clouds overhanging the darkness.</bq> <bq caption="Page 194">Tonight my extreme physical awareness of him was rather hard to ignore, and I was too tired to divert it into untrance or any other channel of the discipline. Finally he asked, had he offended me? I explained my silence, with some embarrassment. I was afraid he would laugh at me. After all he is no more an oddity, a sexual freak, than I am; up here on the Ice each of us is singular, isolate, I as cut off from those like me, from my society and its rules, as he from his. There is no world full of other Gethenians here to explain and support my existence. We are equals at last, equal, alien, alone. He did not laugh, of course. Rather he spoke with a gentleness that I did not know was in him. After a while he too came to speak of isolation, of loneliness.</bq> <bq caption="Page 200">Edondurath built a house of the frozen bodies of his brothers, and waited there inside that house for that last one to come back. Each day one of the corpses would speak, saying, “Does he burn? Does he burn?” All the other corpses would say with frozen tongues, “No, no.” Then Edondurath entered kemmer as he slept, and moved and spoke aloud in dreams, and when he woke the corpses were all saying, “He burns! He burns!” And the last brother, the youngest one, heard them saying that, and came into the house of bodies and there coupled with Edondurath. Of these two were the nations of men born, out of the flesh of Edondurath, out of Edondurath’s womb. The name of the other, the younger brother, the father, his name is not known.</bq> What an incredible imagination Le Guid has. <bq caption="Page 202">They are in the middle of time. In the beginning there was the sun and the ice, and there was no shadow. In the end when we are done, the sun will devour itself and shadow will eat light, and there will be nothing left but the ice and the darkness.”</bq> <bq caption="Page 209">His face in the reddish light was as soft, as vulnerable, as remote as the face of a woman who looks at you out of her thoughts and does not speak.</bq> <bq caption="Page 211">Young children, and defectives, and members of unevolved or regressed societies, can’t mindspeak. The mind must exist on a certain plane of complexity first. You can’t build up amino acids out of hydrogen atoms; a good deal of complexifying has to take place first: the same situation. Abstract thought, varied social interaction, intricate cultural adjustments, esthetic and ethical perception, all of it has to reach a certain level before the connections can be made—before the potentiality can be touched at all.”</bq> <bq caption="Page 216">This blizzard lasted two days; there were five days lost, and there would be more. Nimmer and Anner are the months of the great storms. “We’re beginning to cut it rather fine, aren’t we?” I said one night as I measured out our gichy-michy ration and put it to soak in hot water. He looked at me. His firm, broad face showed weight-loss in deep shadows under the cheekbones, his eyes were sunken and his mouth sorely chapped and cracked. God knows what I looked like, when he looked like that. He smiled. “With luck we shall make it, and without luck we shall not.”</bq> <bq caption="Page 219">Overnight the weather thickened somewhat. All brightness was gone, leaving nothing. We stepped out of the tent onto nothing. Sledge and tent were there, Estraven stood beside me, but neither he nor I cast any shadow. There was dull light all around, everywhere. When we walked on the crisp snow no shadow showed the footprint. We left no track. Sledge, tent, himself, myself: nothing else at all. No sun, no sky, no horizon, no world. A whitish-gray void, in which we appeared to hang. The illusion was so complete that I had trouble keeping my balance. My inner ears were used to confirmation from my eyes as to how I stood; they got none; I might as well be blind. It was all right while we loaded up, but hauling, with nothing ahead, nothing to look at, nothing for the eye to touch, as it were, it was at first disagreeable and then exhausting.</bq> <bq caption="Page 220">[...] we saw them plainly before sunset: nunataks, great scored and ravaged pinnacles of rock jutting up out of the ice, no more of them showing than shows of an iceberg above the sea: cold drowned mountains, dead for eons.</bq> <bq caption="Page 223">In the white weather one could not see a crevasse until one could look down into it—a little late, for the edges overhung, and were not always solid. Every footfall was a surprise, a drop or a jolt. No shadows. An even, white, soundless sphere: we moved along inside a huge frosted-glass ball. There was nothing inside the ball, and nothing was outside it. But there were cracks in the glass. Probe and step, probe and step. Probe for the invisible cracks through which one might fall out of the white glass ball, and fall, and fall, and fall.... An unrelaxable tension little by little took hold of all my muscles. It became exceedingly difficult to take even one more step.</bq> <bq caption="Page 226">It was good to be released from forever pulling and pushing and hauling and prying that sledge, and I said so to Estraven as we went on. He glanced back at the sledge, a bit of refuse in the vast torment of ice and reddish rock. “It did well,” he said. His loyalty extended without disproportion to things, the patient, obstinate, reliable things that we use and get used to, the things we live by. He missed the sledge.</bq> As would I. <bq caption="Page 232">“Sometimes you must go against the wheel’s turn,” Estraven said. He was as steady as ever, but in his walk, his voice, his bearing, vigor had been replaced by patience, and certainty by stubborn resolve.</bq> <bq caption="Page 234">I remembered his voice last night, saying with all mildness, “I’d rather be in Karhide. . .” And I wondered, not for the first time, what patriotism is, what the love of country truly consists of, how that yearning loyalty that had shaken my friend’s voice arises, and how so real a love can become, too often, so foolish and vile a bigotry. Where does it go wrong?</bq>