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Left And Right

Darkness And Light

Male and Female

This book is about dualities, and about how dualities are not about opposites, or antonyms. Dualities are symbiotic. The presence of one creates the other.

. The fictional setting of Karhide embraces this duality, and we are, through the person of Genry Ai, thrown into the story to ponder the meaning of this duality. Here is Genry, musing about Otherhord fastness:

It was an introverted life, self-sufficient, stagnant, steeped in that singular ignorance prized by the Handdarata and obedient to their rule of inactivity or noninterference. That rule (expressed in the word nusuth, which I have to translate as “no matter”) is the heart of the cult, and I don’t pretend to understand it. But I began to understand Karhide better, after a halfmonth in Otherhord. Under that nation’s politics and parades and passions runs an old darkness, passive, anarchic, silent, the fecund darkness of the Handdara.

The last line gives me goosebumps. I can’t put my finger on what that is – is it the lyricism, of bringing together the active picture of “politics, passions and parades”, with the “darkness, passive, anarchic, silent”, and summing up this in the “fecund darkness”. If I was to ever write a line like this, I would be mighty pleased with myself.

This line kind of captures what LeGuin’s writings are about. The fantasy of The Wizard of Earthsea and the Science fiction of The Left Hand of Darkness are merely settings where she can introspect on the many things that make us human.

Here’s another gem:

I pondered that a good while, as we walked side by side through the rain, under the dark branches of the Forest of Otherhord. Within the white hood Faxe’s face was tired and quiet, its light quenched. Yet he still awed me a little. When he looked at me with his clear, kind, candid eyes, he looked at me out of a tradition thirteen thousand years old: a way of thought and way of life so old, so well established, so integral and coherent as to give a human being the unselfconsciousness, the authority, the completeness of a wild animal, a great strange creature who looks straight at you out of his eternal present…