Ursula Le Guin: No Time to Spare

[bibliogramma]

No Time to Spare: Thinking about What Matters is a collection of Ursula Le Guin’s writings taken largely from her personal blog. I’d read most of them before, having been a follower of that blog from fairly early on. And being of the opinion that anything Le Guin chooses to write about is worth reading, even if it is only what she imagines her cat might like her to write about. Maybe even particularly that.

There will be no more blog posts. But reading them in a concentrated dose, in this volume, is like looking into the wise and imaginative mind of one of the great thinkers and writers of our time, and seeing what she does when she’s at home. Of course there is always the necessary distance between writer and reader. Le Guin knew well she was writing for an audience, even in this blog. But I like to think she knew she was writing for an audience that loved her and wanted to know some of the things about her that she was willing to share.

As Karen Joy Fowler remarks in the Introduction:

“What you will find in these pages here is a more casual Le Guin, a Le Guin at home. Some of the issues that have obsessed her throughout her career—the fatal model of growth capitalism; sisterhood and the ways in which it differs from the male fraternal; the denigration and misunderstandings of genre, science, and belief—continue to appear, but they’ve been sanded back to their absolute essentials. It is particularly pleasurable here to watch the lively way her mind works, and how a posting whose trappings initially seem merely sportive becomes deeply consequential.”

Le Guin’s topics range from the love her cat has of hunting beetles to the magnificent subversiveness inherent in the truth that lies beneath all speculative fiction, that “it doesn’t have to be the way it is.” In some ways, she has personified in her blog one of my favourite aphorisms, the one attributed to the Roman playwright Terence (Publius Terentius Afer) which says “Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto.” All of that which is human, which can be apprehended by a human, is hers to explore and discuss.