Coyly, against what she calls her own puritanical thoughts, she tells us that if we like we can imagine these people having sex and drugs. Then Le Guin tells us that she is struggling to describe happiness, and brings us through a number of attempts. But what does she actually show us? The first paragraphs of the story show people, in theory, but they are people statically going about their roles, sprinkled with authorially desperate adjectives that try to spice them up just like the scenery. "Yet I repeat that these were not simple folk, not dulcet shepherds, noble savages, bland utopians." Therefore, it stands as a particular sort of symbol, not only a personal one, but also for an American left that has largely been a failure at articulating the very same problems over the period since the mid-70s. On the other hand, it deals with the aesthetic and moral issues that I've been concerned with my whole life. On the one hand, it's an artistic and moral failure - one that I recognized, instinctively and angrily, the first time that I read it as a young teen. It's a difficult short story for me to look back at. Here's a link to the full text of it, for as long as that lasts. Encouraged by a comment of Adam Roberts' on my last post, I'm going to write more about the Ursula Le Guin short story The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.
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