"The Left Hand of Darkness"

[fiefoe]

After Ursula K. Le Guin's stunning foreword, the first half of the novel was not that impressive, as the idea of societies of hermaphroditic neuters isn't that mind-bending any more. Little did I knew how it would build up.

• Almost anything carried to its logical extreme becomes depressing, if not carcinogenic.
• The purpose of a thought-experiment (... is) to describe reality, the present world. Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.
• so burdened and so privileged. The scientist is another who prepares, who makes ready, working day and night, sleeping and awake, for inspiration.
• Apollo, the god of light, of reason, of proportion, harmony, number—Apollo blinds those who press too close in worship.
• The only truth I can understand or express is, logically defined, a lie. Psychologically defined, a symbol. Aesthetically defined, a metaphor.
• I am describing certain aspects of psychological reality in the novelist’s way, which is by inventing elaborately circumstantial lies.
• The artist deals with what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.
• Truth is a matter of the imagination. The soundest fact may fail or prevail in the style of its telling: like that singular organic jewel of our seas, which grows brighter as one woman wears it and, worn by another, dulls and goes to dust. Facts are no more solid, coherent, round, and real than pearls are. But both are sensitive.

The long beginning:

• gangplank the light breaks through a last time, and his white figure and the great arch stand out a moment vivid and splendid against the storm-darkened south. The clouds close.
• He smiled again, and every tooth seemed to have a meaning, double, multiple, thirty-two different meanings.
• my efforts took the form of self-consciously seeing a Gethenian first as a man, then as a woman, forcing him into those categories so irrelevant to his nature and so essential to my own.
• gradually elevated me from my first year’s status as a highly imaginative monster to my present recognition as the mysterious Envoy,
• Even in a bisexual society the politician is very often something less than an integral man.
• He had the effrontery of the powerful.
• they do not install them in their houses. Perhaps if they did they would lose their physiological weatherproofing, like Arctic birds kept in warm tents, who being released get frostbitten feet.
• he had had long practice in the evasions and challenges and rhetorical subtleties used in conversation by those whose main aim in life was the achievement and maintenance of the shifgrethor relationship on a high level.
• That I was not dueling with Argaven, but trying to communicate with him, was itself an incommunicable fact.
• I fear liars, and I fear tricksters, and worst I fear the bitter truth. And so I rule my country well.
• As they say in Ekumenical School, when action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.
• He was, as I said, voluble, and having discovered that I had no shifgrethor took every chance to give me advice,
• Cultural shock was nothing much compared to the biological shock I suffered as a human male among human beings who were, five-sixths of the time, hermaphroditic neuters.
• but they did not go to war. They lacked, it seemed, the capacity to mobilize. They behaved like animals, in that respect; or like women. They did not behave like men, or ants.
• feel they’ve got to get ahead, make progress. The people of Winter, who always live in the Year One, feel that progress is less important than presence.
• I thought, shivering, that there are things that outweigh comfort, unless one is an old woman or a cat.
• The Thaw is the bad time on that plain of many rivers. The tunnels then are storm-sewers, and the spaces between buildings become canals or lakes, on which the people of Rer boat to their business, fending off small ice-floes with the oars.
• Now whitish strips of light stretched like slanting phantasmal sails, long triangles and oblongs, from wall to floor, over the faces of the nine; dull scraps and shreds of light from the moon rising over the forest, outside.
• “You don’t see yet, Genry, why we perfected and practice Foretelling?” “No—” “To exhibit the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question.”
• “The unknown,” said Faxe’s soft voice in the forest, “the unforetold, the unproven, that is what life is based on. Ignorance is the ground of thought. Unproof is the ground of action.
• The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.”
• “The admirable is inexplicable.”
• Names won’t do, they must have labels, and say the kind before they can see the thing.
• Room is made for sex, plenty of room; but a room, as it were, apart. The society of Gethen, in its daily functioning and in its continuity, is without sex.
• Consider: A child has no psycho-sexual relationship to his mother and father. There is no myth of Oedipus on Winter.
• In fact the whole tendency to dualism that pervades human thinking may be found to be lessened, or changed, on Winter.
• A man wants his virility regarded, a woman wants her femininity appreciated, however indirect and subtle the indications of regard and appreciation. On Winter they will not exist. One is respected and judged only as a human being. It is an appalling experience.
• But I really don’t see how anyone could put much stock in victory or glory after he had spent a winter on Winter, and seen the face of the Ice.
• Only in that unpossessiveness does it perhaps differ from what we call the “maternal” instinct.
• I decided that he was deliberately avoiding talk of shifgrethor because he wished to rouse emotions of a more elemental, uncontrollable kind. He wanted to stir up something that the whole shifgrethor-pattern was a refinement upon, a sublimation of. He wanted his hearers to be frightened and angry. His themes were not pride and love at all, though he used the words perpetually; as he used them they meant self-praise and hate.
• One of the most dangerous is the implication that civilization, being artificial, is unnatural: that it is the opposite of primitiveness. . .
• If civilization has an opposite, it is war.
• The clothes showed me what it was that this impressive, massive city lacked: elegance. Elegance is a small price to pay for enlightenment,
• The old Law of Cultural Embargo stood against the importation of analyzable, imitable artifacts at this stage, and so I had nothing with me except the ship and ansible, my box of pictures,
• I received formal training in it on Hain, where they dignify it with the title of Farfetching. What one is after when farfetching might be described as the intuitive perception of a moral entirety;