The wave in the mind

I loved this book! I haven't read any novel by Ursula K. Le Guin, but after this beautiful collection of essays by the author, I am really looking forward to read her other works. She has a simple yet incredible style, something which penetrates the heart of its readers. In the first chapter itself entitled “Introducing Myself,” she is at her best, attacking the prevalent patriarchy of the current time with fierce wit. She writes,

I am a man. Now you may think I've made some kind of silly mistake about gender, or maybe that I'm trying to fool you, because my first name ends in a, and I own three bras, and I've been pregnant five times, and other things like that that you might have noticed, little details.......Women are a very recent invention. I predate the invention of women by decades. Well, if you insist on pedantic accuracy, women have been invented several times in widely varying localities, but the inventors just didn't know how to sell the product. Their distribution techniques were rudimentary and their market research was nil, and so of course the concept just didn't get off the ground. Even with a genius behind it an invention has to find its market, and it seemed like for a long time the idea of women just didn't make it to the bottom line.

Huge heavy things come and stand on granite and the granite just stays there and doesn't react and doesn't give way and doesn't adapt and doesn't oblige and when the huge heavy things walk away the granite is there just the same as it was before, just exactly the same, admirably. To change granite you have to blow it up.

But when people walk on me you can see exactly where they put their feet, and when huge heavy things come and stand on me I yield and react and respond and give way and adapt and accept. No explosives are called for. No admiration is called for. I have my own nature and am true to it just as much as granite or even diamond is, but it is not a hard nature, or upstanding, or gemlike. You can't chip it. It's deeply impressionable. It's squashy.

What an unexpected delight! I shouldn't have put it off – it had been on my to-read pile for a year, unread because I'm not a writer. It suffices, though, to be a reader, and this reader was captivated by Le Guin's writing, by her musings on rhythm and cadence, on communication, dancing, Twain, Tolkien, morality, justice, beauty. And imagination. Beautiful, moving, inspiring.