"The Left Hand of Darkness"

[fiefoe]

It gets better once Estraven's voice gets into the narrative. The last third of the novel was a breathless read.

• wonder if Genly Ai sees that in Orgoreyn, despite the vast visible apparatus of government, nothing is done visibly, nothing is said aloud. The machine conceals the machinations.
• To oppose something is to maintain it... To oppose vulgarity is inevitably to be vulgar. You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road.
• To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.
• To become a high officer in the Sarf one must have, it seems, a certain complex form of stupidity. Gaum exemplifies it.
• By God, I have better things to do than play shifgrethor with scum. But that is a simplicity he is unequipped to see.
• suggesting that he try the public kemmerhouse next door.
• nothing is proved or disproved. An admirable outcome, were this world one Fastness of the Handdara, but alas we must walk forward troubling the new snow, proving and disproving, asking and answering.
• Men whose will was tempered to a sharper edge might have done much better:
• They were without shame and without desire, like the angels. But it is not human to be without shame and without desire.
• This was the first case I had seen of the social purpose running counter to the sexual drive. Being a suppression, not merely a repression, it produced not frustration, but something more ominous, perhaps, in the long run: passivity.
• Lacking sufficient cash to buy him with, I had to spend my reputation. Among the perfidious, the name of traitor is capital in itself.
• A great delight it was to feel that certainty again, to know that I could steer my fortune and the world’s chance like a bobsled down the steep, dangerous hour.
• began to ready my will and body to enter dothe, for my own strength would never suffice unaided by the strength out of the Dark.
• I am not used to doing so. I am not used to giving, or accepting, either advice or blame.” “I don’t mean to be unjust, Estraven—” “Yet you are. It is strange. I am the only man in all Gethen that has trusted you entirely, and I am the only man in Gethen that you have refused to trust.”
• He was never rash or hurried, but he was always ready. It was the secret, no doubt, of the extraordinary political career he threw away for my sake; it was also the explanation of his belief in me and devotion to my mission. When I came, he was ready. Nobody else on Winter was.
• “In danger, honor,” he said, evidently a proverb, for he added mildly, “We’ll be full of honor when we reach Karhide. . .
• He hesitated and smiled slightly. “The augmentation of the complexity and intensity of the field of intelligent life,” he said, quoting one of my Ekumenical quotations. “Ah, you were consciously extending the evolutionary tendency inherent in Being; one manifestation of which is exploration.”
• Is it simply self-love? That’s a good thing, but one mustn’t make a virtue of it, or a profession. . . . Insofar as I love life, I love the hills of the Domain of Estre, but that sort of love does not have a boundary-line of hate. And beyond that, I am ignorant, I hope.” Ignorant, in the Handdara sense: to ignore the abstraction, to hold fast to the thing.
• What is more arrogant than honesty?
• One palliative of winter on Winter is that the days stay light. The planet has a few degrees of tilt to the plane of the ecliptic, not enough to make an appreciable seasonal difference in low latitudes. Season is not a hemispheric effect but a global one, a result of the ellipsoid orbit.
• On the other hand, if he could lower all his standards of shifgrethor, as I realized he had done with me, perhaps I could dispense with the more competitive elements of my masculine self-respect, which he certainly understood as little as I understood shifgrethor. . .
• Farther off there were others: peaks, pinnacles, black cindercones on the glacier. Smoke panted from fiery mouths that opened out of the ice. Estraven stood there in harness beside me looking at that magnificent and unspeakable desolation. “I’m glad I have lived to see this,” he said. I felt as he did. It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.
• The Orgota evidently do not often come into their Fire-Hills. Indeed there is not much to come for, except grandeur.
• Cinders patter, falling with the snow. We creep infinitesimally northward through the dirty chaos of a world in the process of making itself.
• There is nothing, the Ice says, but Ice. But the young volcano there to northward has another word it thinks of saying.
• Light is the left hand of darkness and darkness the right hand of light. Two are one, life and death, lying together like lovers in kemmer, like hands joined together, like the end and the way.
• I am not trying to say that I was happy, during those weeks of hauling a sledge across an ice-sheet in the dead of winter... Happiness has to do with reason, and only reason earns it. What I was given was the thing you can’t earn, and can’t keep, and often don’t even recognize at the time; I mean joy.
• Estraven meanwhile engaged in his customary fierce and silent struggle with sleep, as if he wrestled with an angel.
• Even so my left eye froze shut one day, and I thought I had lost the use of it: even when Estraven thawed it open with breath and tongue, I could not see with it for some while, so probably more had been frozen than the lashes.
• when the air was forty or fifty degrees below freezing. When it went on lower than that, the whole breathing process was further complicated by the rapid freezing of one’s exhaled breath; if you didn’t look out your nostrils might freeze shut, and then to keep from suffocating you would gasp in a lungful of razors.
• I had imagined the Gobrin Ice Plateau to be all one sheet like a frozen pond, but there were hundreds of miles of it that were rather like an abruptly frozen, storm-raised sea.
• I hated him at such times, with a hatred that rose straight up out of the death that lay within my spirit. I hated the harsh, intricate, obstinate demands that he made on me in the name of life.
• As he did so he murmured a short and charming grace of invocation, the only ritual words I had ever learned of the Handdara: “Praise then darkness and Creation unfinished,”
• for infringing on the Law of Cultural Embargo. I was not paying my debt to him. Such debts remain owing. Estraven and I had simply arrived at the point where we shared whatever we had that was worth sharing.
• But it was from the difference between us, not from the affinities and likenesses, but from the difference, that that love came: and it was itself the bridge, the only bridge, across what divided us. For us to meet sexually would be for us to meet once more as aliens.
• We tried mindspeech again. I had never before sent repeatedly to a total non-receiver. The experience was disagreeable. I began to feel like an atheist praying.
• established between us was a bond, indeed, but an obscure and austere one, not so much admitting further light (as I had expected it to) as showing the extent of the darkness.
• Alone, the relationship I finally make, if I make one, is not impersonal and not only political: it is individual, it is personal, it is both more and less than political.
• In a certain sense the Ekumen is not a body politic, but a body mystic. It considers beginnings to be extremely important. Beginnings, and means. Its doctrine is just the reverse of the doctrine that the end justifies the means. It proceeds, therefore, by subtle ways, and slow ones, and queer, risky ones; rather as evolution does, which is in certain senses its model. . .
• “Fear’s very useful. Like darkness; like shadows.”
• He glanced back at the sledge, a bit of refuse in the vast torment of ice and reddish rock... His loyalty extended without disproportion to things, the patient, obstinate, reliable things that we use and get used to, the things we live by. He missed the sledge.
• across a houseless, speechless desolation: rock, ice, sky, and silence: nothing else, for eighty-one days, except each other.
• They gave with both hands. No doling out, no counting up.