Scan barcode
A review by xmagicanderson
Ursula K. Le Guin: The Last Interview: And Other Conversations by Ursula K. Le Guin
4.0
An insightful book to read for fans of Le Guin. Notable conversations below:
They’ll say, I don’t read fiction because it isn’t real. This is incredibly naive. Fiction is something that only human beings do, and only in certain circumstances. We don’t know exactly for what purposes. But one of the things it does is lead you to recognize what you did not know before.
This is what a lot of mystical disciplines are after—simply seeing, really seeing, really being aware. Which means you’re recognizing the things around you more deeply, but they also seem new. So the seeing-as-new and recognition are really the same thing.
HUBER: Have you ever thought about writing a memoir?
LE GUIN: Memoir? No. I’m like my father: I’m not interested in talking about who I was. I’m much more interested in finding out who I am. [Laughs] Going ahead.
LE GUIN: You’re how old? FIfty-four, fifty-six? Believe me, you haven’t been there. You may think you’re getting old, but you have a ways to go.
STREITFELD: It’s a long slide downhill, it seems like.
LE GUIN: A long way to go doesn’t tell you up or down, does it? It’s just a long way to go. I’m neither an optimist nor a pessimist. I just tell it the way it is. [Laughs] Being an artist takes a certain amount of arrogance.
That, as of old, was the writer’s job, maybe his primary job. To show us the futures we didn’t want, and the futures we could have if we wanted. The key line in the speech, for me, was the one about, “We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable—but then, so did the divine right of kings.” We can change our lives.
I can’t make moral judgments about what was wrong and right a hundred or two hundred years ago. I don’t live in that world. We have so much trouble reading history without colonizing it...as if they had the ideas in their head to think the way we do. It’s so unfair. There’s a sort of absolutism today. You do one bad thing and you’re a bad person. That’s just childish. There’s a lot of childishness around.
They’ll say, I don’t read fiction because it isn’t real. This is incredibly naive. Fiction is something that only human beings do, and only in certain circumstances. We don’t know exactly for what purposes. But one of the things it does is lead you to recognize what you did not know before.
This is what a lot of mystical disciplines are after—simply seeing, really seeing, really being aware. Which means you’re recognizing the things around you more deeply, but they also seem new. So the seeing-as-new and recognition are really the same thing.
HUBER: Have you ever thought about writing a memoir?
LE GUIN: Memoir? No. I’m like my father: I’m not interested in talking about who I was. I’m much more interested in finding out who I am. [Laughs] Going ahead.
LE GUIN: You’re how old? FIfty-four, fifty-six? Believe me, you haven’t been there. You may think you’re getting old, but you have a ways to go.
STREITFELD: It’s a long slide downhill, it seems like.
LE GUIN: A long way to go doesn’t tell you up or down, does it? It’s just a long way to go. I’m neither an optimist nor a pessimist. I just tell it the way it is. [Laughs] Being an artist takes a certain amount of arrogance.
That, as of old, was the writer’s job, maybe his primary job. To show us the futures we didn’t want, and the futures we could have if we wanted. The key line in the speech, for me, was the one about, “We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable—but then, so did the divine right of kings.” We can change our lives.
I can’t make moral judgments about what was wrong and right a hundred or two hundred years ago. I don’t live in that world. We have so much trouble reading history without colonizing it...as if they had the ideas in their head to think the way we do. It’s so unfair. There’s a sort of absolutism today. You do one bad thing and you’re a bad person. That’s just childish. There’s a lot of childishness around.