No Time to Spare

My blog often strikes me as an outlier, an exception in a world of sharply focused blogs with tons of avid followers and commenters.  Mine, on the other hand, is the opposite of focused.  It is a collection of odd thoughts that occur to me, thoughts on any subject, and has a total of nine formal followers -- most of whom I suspect have forgotten that they are followers.

And yet, I now find that I'm not alone.  I've been reading selections from Ursula K. Le Guin's blog, collected in a book entitled No Time to Spare (2018).  You may recall that I wrote praising Le Guin back in February.  She was a fantasy writer, a creator of fantasy worlds of great detail and ingenuity.  I discovered her only a year ago, and quickly read all six of her Earthsea novels, and then her darker and even more ingenious novel The Left Hand of Darkness.

Her stories are comparable in some ways to Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, but her hero is more prone to struggle against his own fears and weaknesses and against the implacable forces of nature and Fate, rather than to battle against "the bad guys."  

High minded stuff, exhilarating and beautifully written.  And so, I'm surprised to find that her blog is at least superficially very much like my own.  Better written and better thought out, of course, and with essays a bit longer than I can drive myself to write or expect my readers to tolerate, but essays that deal with the human problems that a human writer might be expected to encounter.  Like her heroes, most of her thoughts are grounded in quotidian realities even when touching the heights.

Le Guin died in October 2008 at the age of 88.  Her first blog essay -- at least as presented in this collection -- was written at the age of  80 -- "Going over Eighty."  She faces the problems of "old age" as any 80-year-old might.  In her next essay the following month, she denounces the frequent claim, "You're only as old as you think you are."

It can be very hard to believe that one is actually eighty years old, but as they say, you'd better believe it.  I've known clear-headed people in their nineties.  They didn't think they were young.  They knew, with a patient, canny clarity, how old they were.  If I'm ninety and believe I'm forty-five, I'm headed for a very bad time trying to get out of the bathtub.  Even if I'm seventy and think I'm forty, I'm fooling myself to the extent of almost certainly acting like an awful fool.

Note the laid-back colloquialism of her writing.  Le Guin understands that your writing style should -- or at least may -- vary according to why and to whom you're writing.  She writes her blog as a rambling journal, rambling as her thoughts ramble, not with the crisp, concise, carefully-edited clarity of her fantasy novels.

So she writes disarmingly about the pains and the questionable advantages of growing old.  She writes about cats -- she writes a lot about cats, and especially about her black cat "Gattopardo" (after the Prince in the Italian novel, The Leopard), which was inevitably abbreviated in steps to "Pard."  Pard is the ideal writer's pet -- sleeping contentedly atop the printer, while Le Guin types on her computer.  (My own black cats react with alarm whenever my printer bursts into action.)

She writes about what she calls the "Lit Biz."  Answering questions from readers, many of them from children, many of them from students of all ages: "Tell me what it Means."  "But that's not my job, honey.  That's your job."  She discusses her obsession -- which I share -- with the precise meaning and derivations of words.

Words are my matter -- my stuff.  Words are my skein of yarn, my lump of wet clay, my block of uncarved wood.  Words are my magic, antiproverbial cake.  I eat it, and I still have it.

The Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Mahabharbata.  Literary awards.  The Great American Novel, and who  needs it?  Male authors vs. female authors.  Odd topics like exorcism; military uniforms and how they have devolved from World War II nattiness to today's sloppy camouflage garb; the difference between "knowing" and "believing.".  A lament for the days when America was willing to suck it up and accept self-sacrifice for the common good (this was in 2012, eight years before Covid-19!).

And an entire wonderful section on beauty in many forms -- favorite concerts and opera; hiring an assistant who becomes a friend; the wonders (almost anthropomorphic, a la Hans Christian Andersen) of a "real" Christmas tree; a child's confusion in learning the idioms we take for granted, which segues into how the child understands what we tell her about Santa Claus, and the ethics of our so doing.  And my favorite -- how to eat a soft-boiled egg.

So you put your freshly boiled egg into the egg cup -- but which end up?  Eggs are not perfect ovoids, they have a smaller and and a bigger end. ... I am a Big-Ender.  My opinion, which I will defend to the death, is that if the big end is up it's easier to get the spoon into the opening created when you knock off the top of the egg with a single decisive whack of your knife blade.  Or possibly -- another weighty decision, another matter of opinion, with advocates and enemies, the Righteous and the Unrighteous -- you lift the top of the egg off carefully from the egg-encircling crack you have made by tapping the shell with the knife blade all the way around about a half-inch from the summit.  

Opinions differ.  But everyone surely agrees upon one contention: you need a special, tiny egg spoon, easy to find in Europe, nearly impossible here at home.

Trying to eat an egg from the shell with a normal spoon is like mending a wristwatch with a hammer.

I couldn't have said it better myself.   High praise indeed!

Easy reading, and enjoyable comments on the ups and downs -- mostly ups -- of a long life as a woman and as a renowned writer.  We lost a talented and imaginative writer when Ursula K. Le Guin passed away in 2018 in her adopted city, Portland, Oregon.  Few of us will ever write a novel, but she offers inspiration even to those of us who only stand and blog.