Guest blog: Ursula K. Le Guin (Excerpt)
Getting ready for the trip, I'm back to reading Barfield, hoping I'll be able to finish it before I meet up with the students in the airport, since they'll all be much fresher with it than I am. I've also been thinking a lot about subcreation from the perspective of Tolkien, since that's one of the topics I'm writing about soon for Journey to the Sea, and have been pondering my long WIP (the one I just started randomly and haven't yet gotten back to), in which some writers can exert their will over reality.
All of these thoughts were in my head when I picked up Lavinia, by Ursula K. Le Guin on my lunch break today, and the first few paragraphs hit home, so I wanted to share them here. I've long admired Le Guin's work (one of my favorite essays in college was a response, in Le Guin's style, to "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas"), though I've not read as much of it as, perhaps, I should have. At any rate, here is the opening; I hope you'll see why it intertwined so easily with my thoughts.
--
I know who I was, I can tell you who I may have been, but I am, now, only in this line of words I write. I'm not sure of the nature of my existence, and wonder to find myself writing. I speak Latin, of course, but did I ever learn to write it? That seems unlikely. No doubt someone with my name, Lavinia, did exist, but she may have been so different from my own idea of myself, or my poet's idea of me, that it only confuses me to think about her. As far as I know, it was my poet who gave me any reality at all. Before he wrote, I was the mistiest of figures, scarcely more than a name in a genealogy. It was he who brought me to life, to myself, and so made me able to remember my life and myself, which I do, vividly, with all kinds of emotions, emotions I feel as strongly as I write, perhaps because the events I remember only come to exist as I write them, or as he wrote them.
but he did not write them. He slighted my life, in his poem. He scanted me, because he only came to know who I was when he was dying. He's not to blame. It was too late for him to make amends, rethink, complete the half lines, perfect the poem he thought imperfect. He grieved for that, I know; he grieved for me. Perhaps where he is now, down there across the dark rivers, somebody will tell him that Lavinia grieves for him.
All of these thoughts were in my head when I picked up Lavinia, by Ursula K. Le Guin on my lunch break today, and the first few paragraphs hit home, so I wanted to share them here. I've long admired Le Guin's work (one of my favorite essays in college was a response, in Le Guin's style, to "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas"), though I've not read as much of it as, perhaps, I should have. At any rate, here is the opening; I hope you'll see why it intertwined so easily with my thoughts.
--
I know who I was, I can tell you who I may have been, but I am, now, only in this line of words I write. I'm not sure of the nature of my existence, and wonder to find myself writing. I speak Latin, of course, but did I ever learn to write it? That seems unlikely. No doubt someone with my name, Lavinia, did exist, but she may have been so different from my own idea of myself, or my poet's idea of me, that it only confuses me to think about her. As far as I know, it was my poet who gave me any reality at all. Before he wrote, I was the mistiest of figures, scarcely more than a name in a genealogy. It was he who brought me to life, to myself, and so made me able to remember my life and myself, which I do, vividly, with all kinds of emotions, emotions I feel as strongly as I write, perhaps because the events I remember only come to exist as I write them, or as he wrote them.
but he did not write them. He slighted my life, in his poem. He scanted me, because he only came to know who I was when he was dying. He's not to blame. It was too late for him to make amends, rethink, complete the half lines, perfect the poem he thought imperfect. He grieved for that, I know; he grieved for me. Perhaps where he is now, down there across the dark rivers, somebody will tell him that Lavinia grieves for him.