The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin
3/31/2024
This book made me crave freedom. And then it made me crave freedom from craving freedom.
The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin is the tumultuous story of a quiet, introspective physicist named Shevek. Throughout the book, Shevek is working on his Theory of Time, but also on his Theory of Life—who we are and why, what is freedom and what are the walls we close ourselves in—either on the inside or the outside. He wants to know how to be free and also how can we be free together, through poverty and richness, through hunger and excess.
Shevek is torn between two worlds—two different planets that each is the other’s Moon and also each other’s Hell. His home planet is a barren, anarchist dream, the other a cornucopian degeneration. From his at times detached and at times intensely involved stance, Shevek sees the best and worst of each society, only coming together as a person after he has experienced both.
Ursula K. Le Guin, the heart-warming genius that she is, has filled the book with everyday people and with glimpses of their distilled, lives’ wisdom. The whole book is a complex, coherent system: the structure of the book weaves inside it the theme of the narration–Shevek’s obsession with time is mirrored in the lay-out of the chapters and the progression of the story.
Ursula K. Le Guin’s prose is simple, insightful and always surprising in the way she turns familiar images, people, and systems of thought around. Here is how she describes space flight through the eyes of Shevek, who is leaving his world for the first time–and is the first of his kind to do so.
“All at once a line broke across it, abstract, geometric, the perfect section of a circle. Beyond that arc was blackness. This blackness reversed the entire picture, made it negative. The real, the stone part of it was no longer concave and full of light but convex, reflecting, rejecting light.”
Accompany this beautiful book with a simple meal of roasted potatoes, porridge, or cornbread (just one, one is enough), in order to realize how the simplest tastes are infinitely rich and can sometimes be all you need. And remember, “You can not make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution.” Go be the Revolution, then.
Further reading:
This beautiful article (on a brilliant website) on Ursula K. Le Guin and her life-long relationship with Taoism–the strange, poignant and powerful anarchistic philosophy of the East. https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/10/21/lao-tzu-tao-te-ching-ursula-k-le-guin/