Ursula K. Le Guin - Words Are My Matter: Writings on Life and Books

First Mariner Books edition 2019

Copyright 2016 by Ursula K. Le Guin.

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All rights reserved.

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

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Originally published in trade cloth by Small Beer Press in 2016.
Published by arrangement with Small Beer Press.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Le Guin, Ursula K., 19292018, author.

Title: Words are my matter : writings on life and books / Ursula K. Le Guin.
Description: First Mariner Books edition. | Boston : Mariner Books, Houghton
Mifflin Harcourt, 2019.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019013133| ISBN 9780358212102 (trade paper) |
ISBN 9780358212119 (ebook)

Subjects: | BISAC: LITERARY COLLECTIONS / Essays.
Classification: LCC PS3562.E42 A6 2019 | DDC 8I8/.5409dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/20I90I3I33

Cover design by Martha Kennedy

Cover photograph Sally Munday/Arcangel

Author photograph Marion Wood Kolisch

v3.1019

The Mind Is Still

The mind is still. The gallant books of lies

are never quite enough.

Ideas are a whirl of mazy flies

over the pigs trough.

Words are my matter. I have chipped one stone

for thirty years and still it is not done,

that image of the thing I cannot see.

I cannot finish it and set it free,

transformed to energy.

I chip and stutter but I do not sing

the truth, like any bird.

Daily I come to Judgment stammering

the same half-word.

So whats the matter? I can understand

that stone is heavy in the hand.

Ideas flit like flies above the swill.

I crowd with other pigs to get my fill.

The mind is still.

(1977)

I seldom have as much pleasure in reading nonfiction as I do in a poem or a story. I can admire a well-made essay, but Id rather follow a narrative than a thought, and the more abstract the thought the less I comprehend it. Philosophy inhabits my mind only as parables, and logic never enters it at all. Yet my grasp of syntax, which seems to me the logic of a language, is excellent. So I imagine that this limitation in my thinking is related to my abysmal mathematical incompetence, my inability to play chess or even checkers, perhaps my incomprehension of key in music. There seems to be a firewall in my mind against ideas expressed in numbers and graphs rather than words, or in abstract words such as Sin or Creativity. I just dont understand. And incomprehension is boredom.

So the nonfiction I read is mostly narrativebiography, history, travel, and science in its descriptive aspect: geology, cosmology, natural history, anthropology, psychology, etc., the more specific the better. And not only narrativity but the quality of the writing is of the first importance to me. Rightly or not, I believe a dull, inept style signals poverty or incompleteness of thought. I see the accuracy, scope, and quality of Darwins intellect directly expressed in the clarity, strength, and vitality of his writingthe beauty of it.

This means Ive set myself an awfully high standard when it comes to writing nonfiction. And if it isnt narrative, its going to be hard work, and hard for me to judge as good or bad. Writing fiction or poetry is natural to me. I do it, want to do it, am fulfilled in doing it, the way a dancer dances or a tree grows. Story or poem is spun directly out of my entire self. And so I consider myself without question the primary judge of its accuracy, honesty, and quality. Writing talks or essays, however, is always more like doing schoolwork. Its going to be assessed for style and content, and rightly so. Nobody knows better than I do what my stories are about, but my essays may be judged by people who know a lot more than I do about what Im talking about.

Fortunately, studying French and other Romance literatures, I got good training in scholarship and in writing critical prose, which gave me some confidence. Unfortunately, I also showed a gift for the snow jobnot the kind that buries fake facts under a blizzard of statistics, but the stylistic snow job, expressing incomplete ideas with such graceful confidence that they are perfectly convincing until examined. After all, a fluent style isnt altogether dependent on the thoughts it expressesit can be used to skate over gaps in knowledge and conceal rickety joints between ideas. When Im writing nonfiction I have to be very aware of my tendency to let the words take their own course, leading me softly, happily, away from fact, away from rigorous connection of ideas, toward my native country, fiction and poetry, where truths are expressed and thoughts connected in an entirely different way.

As I got old and my total store of energy began to shrink, I began to travel about to give speeches less often and less far, and was less willing to take on a big talk or essay topic that would eat up weeks or months of research, planning, writing, and rewriting. So there are fewer talks and essays in this book than in my earlier nonfiction collections, and proportionately more book reviews.

A book review is usually pretty short, under a thousand words, and naturally limited in topic; it has certain requirements of description, but allows a lot of leeway as to pronouncing judgmenteven though it involves the writers conscience pretty directly. Its an interesting and demanding form. And one can say a good deal in a review that has to do with wider matters, literary and otherwise.

I like writing reviews except when I dislike the book Im reviewing. When it comes to reading reviews, of course the best is one that sends me right to the bookstore, but I also treasure a hatchet job well-written and well-deserved. The pleasure of reading a killer review of a bad book is guiltless. The pleasure of writing one, however, is darkened for me by all kinds of compunctions, fellow-feeling for the author, shame at enjoying inflicting shame.... All the same, so long as Ive tried to understand what the author tried to do, and have no illusions of my critical infallibility, condoning inferiority isnt an option open to me. For this reason the only real killer review in this book presented me with an intense problem. I had considerable respect for the author but thought the book almost incredibly bad. I had no idea how to review it. I appealed to my friend the novelist Molly Glosswhat to do? She suggested that I simply tell the plot. It was an excellent solution. Supply enough hemp, and the problem vanishes.

As for what writing an essay or talk demandsthe expense of time and energy on research, thinking out, rethinkingthis of course varies according to the subject. One of the longer pieces in this book, Living in a Work of Art, was not written as most of them were as a talk to a group or on commission by a periodical (though it ended up happily in Paradoxa). It was something I wanted to write, purely on the principle of E. M. Forsters lady who said, How do I know what I think till I see what I say? It didnt take very much research, and once it got going it was a pleasure to write. When I can use prose as I do in writing stories as a direct means or form of thinking, not as a way of saying something I know or believe, not as a vehicle for a message, but as an exploration, a voyage of discovery resulting in something I didnt know before I wrote it, then I feel that I am using it properly. So that one is probably my favorite of these pieces.

I am often asked to deliver a message, and quite capable of doing so. But I seldom find it easy or particularly pleasant. One of the shortest pieces in the book is my speech on receiving the National Book Foundation medal in 2014. I was informed in June that this honor had been awarded me, so long as Id come to New York to get it and make an acceptance speech lasting not more than seven minutes. I accepted, with much hesitation. From June until November, I worked on that little talk. I rethought and replanned it, anxiously, over and over. Even on a poem Ive never worked so long and so obsessively, or with so little assurance that what I was saying was right, was what I ought to say. I was daunted, too, by the ingratitude of insulting the people who printed my books and were giving me an award. Who was I to spit in the publishers punch bowl at the annual industry party?