Le Guin 2: The Architecture of Happiness

The Weight of Happiness

As I organize my notes for this episode, I need you to see where I am. If you’ve got a podcast player that shows it, I’ve placed a chapter image of the studio where I work. It’s a pretty damn comfortable spot; I made it this way because I knew I would be spending a fair amount of time here. I’m sitting in a Secret Lab gaming chair–I guess it’s the kind of chair hardcore gamers would use, their pee bottles on the floor next to them. (Sorry for that, kind of ruins the idea of comfort. Ignore the pee bottles.) 

I had a local carpenter build me some solid solid shelf units on which to place my granite desktop, actually a repurposed dining room table, but something that absolutely will not move or bump or rattle during recordings. The room is painted in darker colors which I like, and the walls are covered with various objects, a mix of the practical and sentimental, things from my travels, from my school teaching, from my youth. There’s a corner down below where I haven’t dusted in several months; it’s hard to reach, my robo vacuum can’t get there, and I just haven’t taken the time to move things about to get to it. No matter; forget I said anything. Everything you can see looks pretty clean.

My keyboard is here for music and sounds, one I saved up for, one that can do probably 400 times as much as I’m currently doing with it, and my computer keyboard is one that gives me those satisfying mechanical “clacking” sounds I remember from my typewriter days. Kind of a potent sensory feedback for my accuracy. I recently switched my mic stand out for a really cool boom arm that drops the mic down to me from above. It’s cleaned up my sound some, too. The RAM on my computer can’t always keep up with the demands of the audio and video and music work, so on occasion, the computer “stutters,” pausing for a split second and I have to do a re-take of whatever I’m working on, but until I can afford an upgrade, I get over it. It’s a minor problem compared to what everything else is doing for me.

Right now, as I put these notes together, the morning sun is coming through the eastern window of the studio, I’ve got some Sandalwood incense burning (which I do sometimes when I want to be more focused in this space), and–playing quietly on my Mackie studio speakers—a specially-created playlist of ambient music to assist the incense in focus. A foot rest under the chair. An iced drink and dried fruit snack, both healthy and rejuvenating. The computer set to “Do Not Disturb.” I’m alone at home right now, but I’ve closed the studio door to mask the sound of the water dripping from the bathroom shower head that I can’t easily shut off. That’s a task for later, maybe. But now in the studio with the door closed, it’s not an issue.

It’s a beautifully quiet space here; I don’t take it for granted. I’ve worked a few years to put it together as I wanted it, this Waywords Studio space. I can read and write here. Think and nap on the couch behind me. Produce and deliver. My little haven. I don’t take this space for granted; I know I have it pretty good, especially compared to writers who are forced to scribble ideas on notepads during work breaks, readers who struggle through their books on subways with earbuds barely cancelling the collisions of noise, people whose busy lives offer neither the time nor space to think at length about much of anything. I like this space that I’ve built for myself, bought for myself. Putting together today’s notes to offer you in this podcast episode here makes me happy.

So why, as I describe it, am I shifting uncomfortably in my perfect chair?

 

Theme

This is Literary Nomads, where we wander through literature and language, near and far.

I’m Steve Chisnell, and I love and hate my garden.

The Fictions of Happiness

I think you get it. I’ve built a kind of utopic space–at least for me–to take on this hobby-slash-business-slash-preoccupation-slash-obsession of mine. Outside of finding more hours in my day to make it all happen, I couldn’t ask much more of the space I’m in. 

I mean, yes, I could wish for a maid and plumber to keep it all more quiet and clean, a full-time tech assistant to keep all my equipment on-point. I could relocate the entire space to a more remote location so that when the 13-year-old next door starts revving up his minibike at 3 in the afternoon I could be more safely 68 miles distant. 

After that? The other pieces I can . . . well, ignore. (I hope none of you are still imagining pee bottles anywhere. There are no pee bottles. Just forget I said anything. Reason them right out of your imagination. It’s like what Russian writer Leo Tolstoy said about white bears. His brother challenged him to stop thinking about a white bear and, of course, the more he tried not to think of one, the more frequently and intensely the pee bottle–er, the white bear–was in his head. Just keep saying to yourself, “There is no pee bottle in Waywords Studio.”)

And that is how our walled gardens look. Isn’t it? A few episodes ago–more specifically, in the episode “Marvell’s Garden and Ours”–we looked briefly at the wonderful poem by Andrew Marvell, “The Garden,” a place he said where he could commune with nature. Let’s remember these lines:

Society is all but rude,

To this delicious solitude.

 

What wondrous life is this I lead! 

Ripe apples drop about my head; 

The luscious clusters of the vine 

Upon my mouth do crush their wine; 

The nectarine and curious peach 

Into my hands themselves do reach; 

Stumbling on melons as I pass, 

Insnared with flowers, I fall on grass.

 

Meanwhile the mind, from pleasure less, 

Withdraws into its happiness: 

The mind, that ocean where each kind 

Does straight its own resemblance find; 

Yet it creates, transcending these, 

Far other worlds, and other seas; 

Annihilating all that’s made 

To a green thought in a green shade.

 

While we took some of this poem apart fairly critically, it would be hypocritical of me not to see our lessons from “The Garden” here in my own . . . um, circumstance.

The first thing we have to recognize is that this isolation for thinking, for creation, for art, for rest, is a construction. For Marvell, it was the estate of Lord Fairfax where he found a gig as a tutor and got the chance to live in a luxury others would never know. At the time I said that by mistaking this constructed space for “nature,” (which he does), he misapprehends what nature is. Similarly the tended lands of Mr. and Mrs. Andrews, they of the Thomas Gainsborough painting which started our journey: yes, we can love the space they are in, but we don’t dare pretend it is wholly “natural,” no matter how tidily they have hidden all of their hired hands who did all the work for them. I’ll get back to this problem with nature and the natural, I’m sure, but let’s stay with the construction idea.

The walls and space of Waywords Studio make me happy, and it’s a space where the very kinds of thinking and creation Marvell envisioned might well occur. Well, I don’t know about that “green thought in a green shade” business, but you get the idea. It’s constructed by me, purchased by me, as a kind of otium away from civil society. Truly, if I work or rest here for a few hours and then emerge and do some grocery shopping or even chat with neighbors, it’s a kind of arrested ‘waking up,’ an eyeball shock that I am somewhere else that isn’t that space, and I have demands upon me again.

And yes, I can hear a few say something like, “Well, yes, but you built that space after an entire career of not having it; you earned the money over decades and built a single studio for your new creations. You earned it and made it. Enjoy and stop worrying about it.” (I know you, dear listener, would not lightly make such a bold claim.) And they are exactly right. Since I had the money to build it, I have absolutely no reason to think any more about it. Because, you know, money buys me the freedom not to ask questions.

Now there’s a lot of other pieces to this narrative, I know. I had the privilege to grow up in a community where I was relatively safe, find decent schooling, go to universities to earn degrees, build a reliable and secure career that produced a relatively safe retirement space in another relatively safe community. And inside that scenario resides the walls of Waywords Studio. Inside the walled estate of the renowned but retired Lord Fairfax of England resides the composition of poetic work of Andrew Marvell. In the region of Dordogne, France, in some of the finest private vineyards are the walls of a tower where in a well-stocked library and reclusive study Michel de Montaigne wrote all of his famous Essays. And, some episodes ago, you may recall, we left none less than the famous Roman Seneca wandering along the quiet shorelines of Italy near Campania, contemplating his time away from the Roman Senate so that he could develop his thinking on the philosophy of Stoicism. 

Yes, and yes. Let’s not ask questions about the lives of any of these people. After all, they earned it. I guess. Marvell was wealthy enough to buy his way out of the country during a Civil War until Fairfax took him in. Seneca was born in a wealthy family (his father Seneca the Elder was of high class and a writer/rhetorician) and had several opportunities to study and grow through family influence into Roman politics. Montaigne’s tower was part of his family estate, its wealth produced through fishing generations earlier. I–well, though now on a teacher’s pension, I live in one of the wealthier counties in the United States. As a measure against the eight billion or so others around us, we’ve all four done fairly well. 

And everyone else who doesn’t have a nice studio, a nice vineyard, a nice walled garden, or remote Italian coastlines to quietly explore? They, as the argument “you earned it” implies, must not have earned it. Such reasoning is apparently also something I’ve earned. It is also something I’ve constructed.

What I’m talking about here is a constructed narrative, one that gives me every reason to enjoy the walled space I’m in while ignoring any obligation or responsibility to the world out there that 1) might well have contributed to its construction, and 2) now keeps them outside of it. Otium is a constructed privilege. 

Let’s spend a few moments on this, because it’s kind of central to our Le Guin theme, even though none of these specific words are used by her in the Omelas story. Otium is a constructed privilege. 

Brief review: otium is the Roman concept of leisure or solitude, the retreat from the world, in contrast to neg-otium (“not otium”) which is the engagement in the world, living our civic duty. Now the Romans were highly suspicious of otium, believing that duty came first and that excessive time off–even if it was for personal enrichment–was unhealthy to mind and spirit. The world requires of us our engagement if it is to be bettered. We have a responsibility to it, . . . to ask questions of it.

And there are all kinds of questions we might ask:

• Where, Mr. and Mrs. Andrews, are your workers and how are you treating them?
• Why, young Mr. Marvell, are you living quietly for years in a private garden when you have been offered the means to engage England’s politics and unrest?
• Why, Seneca, did you so long delay your career in Rome? If it was for poor health, we are grateful your uncle was a Prefect in Egypt where you could rest for over ten years.
• Why, people of Omelas, are you still celebrating every year and none are spending their days in open debate on the morality of suffering? 

Because they earned it? What price are the people of Omelas paying for their private utopia garden?

In this way, the otium of privilege has a darker price. It’s not that Omelas as a utopia exists as a space of happiness and joy. It’s that otium is a tended space of controlled beauty which depends upon ignoring the suffering of the world. It’s a pursuit of self-centered peace that surrenders compassion for others. 

 

The Psychology of Complicity

You may be thinking that I am being too harsh or too absolute, that there are nuances and complexities to both our world and Omelas that must be considered. And I would agree, and we will talk about these, as well. But this is how allegory and utopia narratives work: they boil down all of those complexities to their simple foundations. They pose the moral problem at its core: To whom do we have a moral responsibility? Or, more exactly, what moral responsibility do we have to those who suffer for our comfort? Put the way I have today so far, to those who suffer for our privilege?

In Omelas, we know that many struggle with the knowledge that the child exists and is suffering. Two important points: they know and the suffering continues. It isn’t over. Every moment they are sipping their cappuccinos that kid is in the cellar without so much as a bottle for his pee. And a third point, perhaps the critical one. Le Guin writes: 

…they all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child’s abominable misery. 

Ah, that word “depend” is really troublesome, and we will come back to it. But the third point we need to remember is that there is a direct relationship between that child suffering and their privilege, a literal dependency. It isn’t a “oh, by the way, you forgot to help one kid somewhere in the world who’s in trouble.” The joy that they celebrate is reliant upon this child’s miserable fate. That’s the price. (And because I cannot help but rub in that “they earned it” argument, remember that the people of Omelas are literally celebrating a victory over life itself.) They have purchased their joy and comfort with this child’s pain; I just bought some equipment with microprocessors that I hope were not manufactured from slave-mined minerals in the DR Congo. But, you know, I didn’t ask.)

This price, the knowledge of that connection, that dependency upon the suffering, requires a certain degree of inner numbing so our compassion does not get the better of us. But that’s not the worst of it, not really. It’s that the entire culture is here doing it, numbing themselves as part of the social complicity they–we–all have, a normalizing of denial, a normalizing of producing an image of happiness that we never purely feel, but do completely mask. 

Because there are probably two kinds of people in Omelas after those who cannot tolerate it walk away. Those who feel no moral connection at all to the child, a certain kind of sociopath; and those who do feel something even if numbed, but train themselves to smile through it, to celebrate. To . . . celebrate . . . it. 

The smiles must not falter. The pain or doubt must not be revealed. The questions must never be asked aloud. A kind of taboo. And it’s not, then, that the people of Omelas–us, of course, because this utopia fiction points directly at us—it’s not that the people of Omelas are trading their joy upon this one child suffering. They’re trading a performance of joy, a puppet show of happiness, upon it. This is social complicity. 

Now I don’t think even this is exactly what’s going on here, but we’re exploring the space, some. 

Psychologist Albert Bandura tells us our avoidance of moral or ethical challenges and methods to maintain our positive self-image rely upon a number of common behaviors of thinking, and these should not surprise us overmuch. For instance, we use sanitized language or euphemisms to obscure harm (terms like “casualties” or “collateral damage,” “acceptable losses” or “enhanced interrogation”). We dehumanize the victims, calling them savages, alien, infestation, or any kind of animal.  And we might dilute our personal responsibility, saying that “everyone is doing it” in order to transfer away our own accountabilityAccountability is a claim on our actions, but it is external... More.

Our Omelas citizens rationalize away the suffering child. They do not wish to hear more about it; they must avoid, I imagine, any but the most vague references to it, if they tolerate the utterance at all. This is called “the blissful ignorance effect.” I can, for instance, know that most microprocessors-–the kinds of things which power our cell phones and gaming-level computers—require coltan, a rare mineral where upwards of 50% is found in Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. This is often smuggled from mining operations there where slaves, including women and children, collect the coltan. But since I do not specifically ask if my cell phone has coltan from there instead of, say, the Australian mines, I can remain “blissfully ignorant,” aware of my complicity in a much vaguer sense. I can call it, hmm, “free trade.” I only really have a genuine moral quandary–I am forced to face my complicity–if I discovered that the source of the product in my hands absolutely was Congo and Rwandan smuggling. In Omelas, there is some kind of “dependency” upon the child, but, I might reason, I did not lock the child in with my hands and I am not explicitly ordering it kept there. More, I don’t even have to consider the child as specifically human, do I? Now, it’s more a suffering delusional animal than a fully conscious human; I even, in the story, call the child an “it.”  

You might remember that I touched upon the poem by Thomas Gray in the second episode of our Journey, “Vaster Than Empires.” Here are some of his key lines again, where he thinks about the young and naive students on the campus:

Yet ah! why should they know their fate?

Since sorrow never comes too late,

         And happiness too swiftly flies.

Thought would destroy their paradise.

No more; where ignorance is bliss,

       ‘Tis folly to be wise.

And the problem I mentioned, for Gray, is that the loss of this sort-of-utopia, its failure into a world of suffering and injustice, is the act of thinking about it. Our Edenic happiness and joy depends upon us refusing to face the world as it is.

Instead, we must cultivate something else, a garden of the mind. We must construct a blind spot to the flaws, a psychological wall, against it. “Oh, let’s not think about that; let’s just enjoy the day,” even while our pronouncement not to think about white bears still holds true.

It’s a precarious place of doublethink, isn’t it? But we all do it, and that makes it somehow okay. Somewhere close we know there is suffering, and perhaps–if we thought too long about it–we find that suffering comes about because of a place of power or privilege which we ourselves may enjoy. I upgrade my cell phone for a faster one, I don’t worry about the farming and human rights practices used by Starbucks coffee suppliers or Hershey chocolate suppliers, I throw out the plastic after a single use because recycling is too hard, I watch a cat video on YouTube rather than approach my legislators about any of it, I wonder briefly why I haven’t seen my neighbor in the apartment down the hall for four days. I post a pic of me and my friends at a McDonald’s. It’s all good.

Now, this isn’t the “Let’s-Make-Everyone-Feel-Like-Crap” episode of Literary Nomads, but it is the “What questions is Le Guin making us consider” episode. And as I warned at the start, there’s little that’s particularly comfortable about it. I’m not asking everyone listening to invade the city of Hershey, Pennsylvania, trash Chocolate World, and demand supply chain changes. And I’m not asking you to then turn your attention to worse offenders like Godiva, Magnum, and General Mills.  

But I am asking us to consider the psychological condition which at least partly explains what is going on here. How far removed must our direct privilege be to absolve us of compassion for those who do not share it with us? Why do we build walls–either physical ones or psychological ones, locked doors or carefully-selected diction–unless we believed something outside might get in?

What we call a weed in our garden is merely what we ourselves decided was undesirable, something we did not wish to see.

 

The “Conditions” of Omelas

It may seem that we have left Omelas far behind us already, but hardly so. Omelas is, in the ways we’ve been talking about, always with us. But let’s just cross a few t’s here, keep our em-dashes lined up, and make sure this is the mirror that Le Guin is showing us.  (“Magic mirror, on the wall, who’s the fairest one of all?”) As I suggested at the end of the last episode, it is up to us to face the mirror completely and honestly, to engage the dilemma Le Guin has composed. I demonstrated a few techniques that casual readers use to avoid that reflection, and so far today I’ve set us up with some more psychological ones, some which may explain the citizens themselves. 

Here are the words which trap us:

They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas. Some of them have come to see it, others are content merely to know it is there. They all know that it has to be there. Some of them understand why, and some do not, but they all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child’s abominable misery. 

… No matter how well the matter has been explained to them, these young spectators are always shocked and sickened at the sight. They feel disgust, which they had thought themselves superior to. They feel anger, outrage, impotence, despite all the explanations. They would like to do something for the child. But there is nothing they can do. If the child were brought up into the sunlight out of that vile place, if it were cleaned and fed and comforted, that would be a good thing, indeed; but if it were done, in that day and hour all the prosperity and beauty and delight of Omelas would wither and be destroyed. Those are the terms. To exchange all the goodness and grace of every life in Omelas for that single, small improvement: to throw away the happiness of thousands for the chance of happiness of one: that would be to let guilt within the walls indeed. 

The terms are strict and absolute; . . .

It’s bewildering, really. The offense we’ve discussed, to be sure, but these other words, they don’t seem to register for us:  “Depend wholly on,” “nothing they can do,” “those are the terms,” “the terms are strict and absolute.” 

In one sense, we’ve already addressed this when I said that it is not up to us as readers here to escape the confrontation with suffering but to face it. As hard as it is, my first advice to readers of this story is to stop looking for any rational explanation for these conditions in the text of the story. Le Guin is offering nothing further than what I’ve read here. The “terms are strict and absolute.” There is no one to negotiate with, no city council to consult for policy change, literally, says the text, “nothing they can do.” 

This powerlessness does not contradict anything I said about the doublethink earlier, though. I mean, I did tell you not to storm the chocolate factories, mostly because it wouldn’t make much long-term difference, but because I wanted to underscore what the facing of this moral challenge does. When we meet an injustice, much as I described several in the last 30 minutes or so, we feel what Le Guin writes: “anger, outrage, impotence, despite all the explanations.” We’re right to feel this way. The naivete we knew as children in a happy town is ruined somewhere, Le Guin says, between the ages of eight and twelve when we can understand the world better. 

Le Guin sets us these unspeakable, unalterable conditions because these are the rules of the fantasy world she has created, the utopia. It’s a condition of the genre: the writer creates the rules for the world, and then the story and readers abide by the adventure of life inside of them. If we seek to escape these conditions, we are breaking the rules of the reading.

Some have suggested that these are terms set by a greater force: some unearthly Wizard, god, or other creator-force. If so, there is no mention of any of that, and Le Guin certainly gives us plenty of detail of the world to note it. There are temples, but these seem more for free worship rather than any dogma. She does suggest that harvest and weather are also dependencies, so this might imply a greater power, but this is the only place where this idea appears, not enough, I think, to be called a significance pattern, especially when there is another explanation for these terms. If such a cosmic force was out there, she would name it instead of four times avoiding doing so. 

And if it was this, then we are in a place closer to Dostoevsky’s story of The Suffering Child, the “Rebellion” chapter of The Brothers Karamazov. It becomes a different story, and we are more likely to start thinking of Eden directly, its walls guarded by heavy foliage and angels to keep the undesirable weed of Satan and temptation out, the inevitable thorn of a forbidden fruit that will spell doom hanging ever in their thoughts, but otherwise, you know, a perfect place to live without thinking overmuch and just living joy. Or now, with mankind on the other side of those walls, the price we must pay (a child suffering) in order to return, Ivan’s lament. But Omelas is here on the ground, not in the lofty creations of universe.

More plausibly, we might see the terms as creations of the people of Omelas themselves. They built the culture and its rules so long ago that it can no longer be questioned, almost holy–or at least psychologically inevitable–in their thinking about it. If they have come to believe that a scapegoat child will absolve them of their sins and permit joy, certainly releasing the child will end that condition. Over time, again psychologically, we might believe more than our own lives are dependent upon the child. We might come to explain–almost religiously–that all depends upon it, even the harvests, the tides, the wind, the sun. Some of the earliest of sacrifices to the gods were for good harvests, what life truly depends upon.

So I’m more inclined to buy into the traditions argument than the secret Creation Wizard argument. But, either way, what of it? It is now an absolute condition in our understanding of how the world functions, its dependencies and costs, no less absolute than human selfishness, the next iPhone, war, or capitalism. Just, you know, things we have constructed.

For readers, we have partly constructed this hideous bargain ourselves. Le Guin has let us create it any way we please–I leave it to you, then, to spot the walls and blind spots, the hidden dependencies, which make your utopia possible. She has insisted only upon this one absolute condition, that no one can alter (but is the first thing we want to). The child must suffer and it falls apart without this.

 

And Its Virtues

Le Guin will go even further, of course. She will not let this go. She writes of the people who have seen the child:

Yet it is their tears and anger, the trying of their generosity and the acceptance of their helplessness, which are perhaps the true source of the splendor of their lives. Theirs is no vapid, irresponsible happiness. They know that they, like the child, are not free. They know compassion. It is the existence of the child, and their knowledge of its existence, that makes possible the nobility of their architecture, the poignancy of their music, the profundity of their science. 

This is a critical piece of the trap. All along, we’ve been talking about our ignorance of the injustice and how we keep the suffering at bay, away from us. Here, however, despite our denials of it, we actively partake in it. We . . . celebrate . . . it.   Because we are trapped with the sufferer, because we depend upon the sufferer, our ability to live with it catalyzes a kind of compassion and creativity and love. This might be a statement of the role of suffering in art, but it does beg a question: if no one ever suffers, what is compassion for? Suffering makes possible our more virtuous image-making of ourselves. It creates not just a building, but a beautiful building made with the noble motivation to beauty in relation to the knowledge of suffering. 

And oh, this seems a cynical and terrible take, perhaps, all the more. We spent this entire episode talking about the horror of the suffering and our complicity in it. About our walls of privilege and psychological fear that they will fall and interfere with our creative happiness and peace. We know these walls to be artificial and the garden within them equally so. They are built upon a number of clever rationalizations we make, and our otium, this utopic splendor we live, hides a terrible truth: that suffering in the world exists and that our gardens of privilege help create and prolong it. 

But now–now, rather than fall to despair, rather than rise to oppose, rather than simply rationalize away to performative bliss like some Like-hungry Instagrammer, Le Guin is suggesting that we use this suffering to provoke us to acts of nobility. Le Guin writes:

It is because of the child that they are so gentle with children. They know that if the wretched one were not there sniveling in the dark, the other one, the flute-player, could make no joyful music as the young riders line up in their beauty for the race in the sunlight of the first morning of summer. 

Ah, the wonder and complexity of the world! Who are we, after all, without the knowledge that some have less than ourselves? Without suffering, there is nothing for which we can have compassion; and without suffering, there is nothing from which we can know and understand love.

. . . We have, in a sense here, subverted the binary that is in front of us, this simple question of Should I Stay or Should I Go? which does not often apprehend what either choice really means. We have moved beyond the simple, binary choice. There is here a more complex reality: that a society’s highest chosen virtues are built upon a known, terrible evil. This is the ultimate “hideous bargain” that is neither apathetic nor simply rebellious. It becomes part of our unquestioned world vision, a fiction of happiness like no other. 

 

So What Is Left For Us?

This leaves us, here midway or so through our exploration of the story, in a pretty terrible place. Before, we may have believed that the abandonment of the suffering child is the great evil of the story, but I don’t think so. It’s not that the child exists; the story that Le Guin offers us isn’t really about the child—we all know, have always known—that suffering exists and–perhaps in denial or not, have rationalized away much of our accountabilityAccountability is a claim on our actions, but it is external... More for it and action about it. But no, what may seem most hideous to us in the story is what we do with that knowledge, not that we merely dilute it and rationalize our inaction, but that simultaneously we celebrate it, this victory over life, in Omelas as a summer festival which draws people from all the neighboring cities. 

If you’re a teacher of this story or a student working with it, it may be hard to deliver this particular edge, and–while hanging on to the idea that we cannot negotiate our way out of the story’s conditions–we will have to direct our attention to that prison the citizens of Omelas find themselves in: the intolerable and the celebratory are one, pain and virtue, suffering and beauty. Binary oppositions are never opposites, right? They are in relationship; and Le Guin has mapped a few for us.

As I have, and as I mentioned earlier, it’s critical that the personal stakes of this story be transparent and shared by all, including the teacher. As I have with my description of Waywords Studio, I am quite aware of the complex role I inhabit here. I am accused. I am complicit. But I am also using the knowledge of that complicity to wrestle my way to a new understanding. The utopia is a tool for us, not against us. 

But it may be hard to get us there as a classroom or through discussion. I have and would direct student attention to that passage of compassion and beauty after outrage, have them wrestle with interpretation. They may come upon the relationship in new ways, but since the reader is accountable for this utopia, let this wrestling become the kind of accountabilityAccountability is a claim on our actions, but it is external... More a reader is ready to see or accept. The story is hard enough to deal with; let its other ambiguities remain uneasy, not fully answered. 

Speaking of which, here are a few more ways to approach these more challenging relationships.

• We’ll call this a Silent Moments Annotation. Mark the story up. Note all of the most quiet and boring sections. Then ask questions about them: Why these passages? Why did Le Guin need them? Knowing the end of the story as you do, how are these passages changed? Are they costs paid? Rationalizations?
• Hold a discussion on how the language we use is always a place of ethics. This is easy to do in an age where cautionary speech, trigger language, and diverse sensitivities are at the forefront. Investigate any of these phrases for their value and costs. Only afterwards apply it to Omelas for consideration.
• In the fifth paragraph, Le Guin spends some time with evil (and we still need to). Ask students where the evil is in this story and what exactly makes it evil. In this way we might better see the choices before us.

These are only a couple of quick ideas based upon what we’ve talked about today. There’s more ahead. We’ve talked a lot now about the psychology of those who have stayed in Omelas, but very little at all about those who leave. 

We’ll need to address that next time, but also the role our unusual narrator is playing in all of this, and then too some readings of this story from the margins of our society. 

Phew. Go contemplate your life and your binaries, I guess, and if you’re up to it,

Go read something.

 

Outro

Follow me and find me along with supplements, bonuses, resources, newsletters, and still more at Waywords Studio dot com.  That’s Waywords Studio (two s’s in the middle) dot com. Thanks for listening! 

Music for Literary Nomads is by Randon Myles

Chapter headings by Natalie Harrison and Sarah Skaleski

Literary Nomads is a production of Waywords Studio. Find me at Waywords Studio on most social media and at Waywords Studio .com.

 

Bibliography

Case, Spencer, “Ursula Le Guin’s ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’: Would You Walk Away?” 1000-Word Philosophy: An Introductory Anthology. 19 May 2022, https://1000wordphilosophy.com/2022/05/19/omelas/.

Davis, Matt. “Le Guin On Morality: ‘Turd In The Punchbowl…’” Portland Mercury, https://www.portlandmercury.com/books/2009/06/18/1438143/le-guin-on-morality-turd-in-the-punchbowl. Accessed 15 Aug. 2025.

Faragher, Julia. “Rethinking Utopia.” The Story and Its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction, edited by Ann Charters, Bedford/St Martins, 2003, p. 902.

Greene, Amelia Z. “‘Variations on a Theme by WIlliam James’: Varieties of Religious Experience in the Writing of Ursula K. Le Guin.” William James Studies, vol. 13, no. 2, 2017, pp. 217–39. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/26493680. 

Knapp, Shoshana. “The Morality of Creation: Dostoevsky and William James in Le Guin’s ‘Omelas.’” The Journal of Narrative Technique, vol. 15, no. 1, Winter 1985, pp. 75–81, https://www.jstor.org/stable/30225113.

Langbauer, Laurie. “Ethics and Theory: Suffering Children in Dickens, Dostoevsky, and Le Guin.” ELH, vol. 75, no. 1, Mar. 2008, pp. 89–108. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2008.0005.

Roemer, Kenneth M. “Utopian Literature, Empowering Students, and Gender Awareness.” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 23, no. 3, 1996, pp. 393–405. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4240547. Accessed 22 Aug. 2025.

Wyman, Sarah. “Reading Through Fictions in Ursula Le Guin’s ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.’” ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews, vol. 25, no. 4, Oct. 2012, pp. 228–32. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1080/0895769X.2012.720854.