22
" But reading is active, an act of attention, of absorbed alertness -- not all that different from hunting, in fact, or from gathering. In its silence, a book is a challenge: it can't lull you with surging music or deafen you with screeching laugh tracks or fire gunshots in your living room; you have to listen to it in your head. A book won't move your eyes for you the way images on a screen do. It won't move your mind unless you give it your mind, or your heart unless you put your heart in it. It won't do the work for you. To read a story well is to follow it, to act it, to feel it, to become it -- everything short of writing it, in fact. Reading is not "interactive" with a set of rules or options, as games are: reading is actual collaborating with the writer's mind. No wonder not everybody is up to it. "
― Ursula K. Le Guin , Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000–2016, with A Journal of a Writer's Week
23
" All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them. We need to be taught these skills; we need guides to show is how. Without them, our lives get made up for us by other people.
Human beings have always joined in groups to imagine how best to live and help one another carry out the plan. The essential function of human community is to arrive at some agreement on what we need, what life ought to be, what we want our children to learn, and then to collaborate in learning and teaching so that we and they can go on the way we think is the right way.
Small communities with strong traditions are often clear about the way they want to go, and good at teaching it. But tradition may crystallize imagination to the point of fossilizing it as dogma and forbidding new ideas. Larger communities, such as cities, open up room for people to imagine alternatives, learn from people of different traditions, and invent their own ways to live.
As alternatives proliferate, however, those who take the responsibility of teaching find little social and moral consensus on way they should be teaching -- what we need, what life ought to be. In our time of huge populations exposed continuously to reproduced voices, images, and words used for commercial and political profit, there are too many people who want to and can invent us, own us, shape and control us through seductive and powerful media. It's a lot to ask of a child to find a way through all that alone.
Nobody can do anything very much, really, alone.
What a child needs, what we all need, is to find some other people who have imagined life along lines that make sense to us and allow some freedom, and listen to them. Not hear passively, but listen. "
― Ursula K. Le Guin , Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000–2016, with A Journal of a Writer's Week
27
" Fantasy, or Phantasy,” Auntie replies, clearing her throat, “is from the Greek phantasia, lit. ‘a making visible.’” And she shows me how “fantasy” in the late Middle Ages meant “the mental apprehension of an object of perception,” the mind’s act of linking itself to the external world, but later came to mean just the reverse: an hallucination, a false perception, or the habit of deluding oneself. And she tells me that the word fantasy also came to mean the imagination itself, “the process, "
― Ursula K. Le Guin , Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000–2016, with A Journal of a Writer's Week
28
" Listening is an act of community, which takes space, time and silence.
Reading is a means of listening.
Reading is not as passive as hearing or viewing. It’s an act: you do it. You read at your pace, your own speed, not the ceaseless, incoherent, gabbling, shout rush of the media. You take in what you can and want to take in, not what they shove at you fast and hard and loud in order to overwhelm and control you. Reading a story, you may be told something, but you’re not being sold anything. And though you’re usually alone when you read, you are in communion with another mind. You aren’t being brainwashed or co-opted or used; you’ve joined in an act of the imagination. […]
Books may not be “books”, of course, they may not be ink on wood pulp but a flicker of electronics in the palm of a hand. Incoherent and commercialized and worm-eaten with porn and hype and blather as it is, electronic publication offers those who read a strong new means of active community. The technology is not what matters. Words are what matter. The sharing of words. The activation of imagination through the reading of words. "
― Ursula K. Le Guin , Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000–2016, with A Journal of a Writer's Week
34
" The book itself is a curious artifact, not showy in its technology but complex and extremely efficient: a really neat little device, compact, often very pleasant to look at and handle, that can last decades, even centuries. It doesn’t have to be plugged in, activated, or performed by a machine; all it needs is light, a human eye, and a human mind. It is not one of a kind, and it is not ephemeral. It lasts. It is reliable. If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell it to you again when you’re fifty, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you’re reading a whole new book. This is crucial, the fact that a book is a thing, physically there, durable, indefinitely reusable, an object of value. "
― Ursula K. Le Guin , Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000–2016, with A Journal of a Writer's Week
35
" Before long, if you didn’t poison your teenage brain with absinthe or withdraw to a cork-lined room, you were expected at least to indulge in alienation, alcoholism, bullfights, or suicide. German and Austrian artists started with an unfair advantage, in that their whole society was fairly toxic. Mahler, Richard Strauss, Thomas Mann, even Rilke: men of immense talent immersed in a cultural neuroticism, a wooing of perversity, disease, and death. "
― Ursula K. Le Guin , Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000–2016, with A Journal of a Writer's Week
40
" All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them. We need to be taught these skills; we need guides to show us how. Without them, our lives get made up for us by other people.
Human beings have always joined in groups to imagine how best to live and help one another carry out the plan. The essential function of human community is to arrive at some agreement on what we need, what life ought to be, what we want our children to learn, and then to collaborate in learning and teaching so that we and they can go on the way we think is the right way.
Small communities with strong traditions are often clear about the way they want to go, and good at teaching it. But tradition may crystallize imagination to the point of fossilizing it as dogma and forbidding new ideas. Larger communities, such as cities, open up room for people to imagine alternatives, learn from people of different traditions, and invent their own ways to live.
As alternatives proliferate, however, those who take the responsibility of teaching find little social and moral consensus on what they should be teaching -- what we need, what life ought to be. In our time of huge populations exposed continuously to reproduced voices, images, and words used for commercial and political profit, there are too many people who want to and can invent us, own us, shape and control us through seductive and powerful media. It's a lot to ask of a child to find a way through all that alone.
Nobody can do anything very much, really, alone.
What a child needs, what we all need, is to find some other people who have imagined life along lines that make sense to us and allow some freedom, and listen to them. Not hear passively, but listen. "
― Ursula K. Le Guin , Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000–2016, with A Journal of a Writer's Week
