Ursula K. Le Guin:
If you deny any affinity with another person or kind of person, if you declare it to be wholly different from yourself—as men have done to women, and class has done to class, and nation has done to nation—you may hate it, or deify it, but in either case you have denied its spiritual equality, and its human reality. You have made it into a thing, to which the only possible relationship is a power relationship. And thus you have fatally impoverished your own reality.
"American SF and The Other" in Science-Fiction Studies 7, 1975.
There were some interviews on Radio 4 ‘Women’s Hour’ this morning by women Sci Fi writers and all mentioned Le Guin who I greatly admire alongside many others
By sheer coincidence the newsletter this morning from the wonderful Maria Popova, her Marginalian, feature’s Le Guin on the transience of beauty
Beauty always has rules. It’s a game. I resent the beauty game when I see it controlled by people who grab fortunes from it and don’t care who they hurt. I hate it when I see it making people so self-dissatisfied that they starve and deform and poison themselves. Most of the time I just play the game myself in a very small way, buying a new lipstick, feeling happy about a pretty new silk shirt.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Le Guin, who writes about aging with more grace, humor, and dignity than any other writer I’ve read, turns to the particularly stifling ideal of eternal youth:
One rule of the game, in most times and places, is that it’s the young who are beautiful. The beauty ideal is always a youthful one. This is partly simple realism. The young are beautiful. The whole lot of ’em. The older I get, the more clearly I see that and enjoy it.
No comments:
Post a Comment