Filmore Holmes referenced LeGuin's The Dispossessed in another thread. In the same thread, pE said he was planning on reading the short story "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" at the suggestion of one of his students. I'm hoping there's sufficient interest from others to generate a bit of discussion of her work.

I'm not as big a fan of The Dispossessed as I am the novel The Left Hand of Darkness. There is a lyricism of the writing in the latter I find more compelling. I also admire the ambitious take on issues of gender.

I'm especially interested in your thoughts on TOWWAFO, pE. The story had a tremendous impact on me when I first read it many, many years ago. Despite what I would consider a healthy interest in philosophy over the years, I find that my knowledge is more cursory than I would prefer, so I'm interested in your take on the story given the considerable expertise you bring to the table.

One final random thought on LeGuin. I don't know if anybody watched the SciFi Channel's recent adaptation of Earthsea. I've not read the Earthsea books, but watched a bit of the movies and found them pretty tedious. I was very interested to find that LeGuin had written a scathing essay on the adaptation.

Now Playing: The Chargers and Colts scoreless in the first quarter...Manning just threw an interception just outside the endzone to slow his quest to top Marino's record for single season touchdown passes...

Well, I jst finished reading TOWWAFO and was suitably impressed with its brevity and the potency of the message. Some of the lines are quite brilliant...

"They did not use swords or keep slaves. They were not barbarians. I do not know the rules and laws of their society but I suspect they were singualarly few." (I'm not sure this is correct, given the ending!)

"...they got on without the stock exchange, the advertisement, the secret police, and the bomb. Yet I repeat these were not simple folk, not dulcet shephereds, noble savages, bland utopians."

"Their tears at the bitter injustice dry when they perceive the terrible justice of reality, and they accept it."

"They know, like the child, they are not free. They know compassion."

Fascinating stuff. I've found more than a few philosophers who use this in their intro level courses on utilitarianism.

The version I found comes from LeGuin's The Wind's Twelve Quarters which features intros written by the author. In this one, she admits to being inspired by Dostoyevsky's Brothers Karamazov but taking her real inspiration from William James' reading of it in "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life," a wonderful James essay.

She also admits that Omelas was created by reading a sign backwards (Salem, Oregon)....funny.

"It is preferable to have an end to journey towards, but it is the journey that matters, in the end." - Ursula K. LeGuin.
I read that quote in a Western study of Zen. The woman pops up all over the place...