# The Left Hand of Darkness ## Metadata - Author: [[Ursula K. le Guin]] - Full Title: The Left Hand of Darkness - Category: #source/books ## Highlights - One voice speaking truth is a greater force than fleets of armies - 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. - Gethenians could make their vehicles go faster, but they do not. If asked why not, they answer ‘Why?’ Like asking Terrans why all our vehicles must go so fast; we answer ‘Why not?’ No disputing tastes. Terrans tend to feel they’ve got to get ahead, make progress. - Note: Context: cars move at 25 mph - The people of Winter, who always live in the Year One, feel that progress is less important than presence - The person on my left – a stocky dark Karhider with sleek and heavy hair, wearing a heavy overtunic of green leather worked with gold, and a heavy white shirt, and heavy breeches, and a neck-chain of heavy silver links a hand broad – this person, sweating heavily, replies, ‘So it is.’ - Note: The author's regular, if not overuse of the word "heavy" here is, heavily interesting. - They are anything but a phlegmatic people, yet they are obdurate, they are pertinacious, they finish plastering joints - To oppose something is to maintain it - And I saw then again, and for good, what I had always been afraid to see, and had pretended not to see in him: that he was a woman as well as a man. Any need to explain the sources of that fear vanished with the fear; what I was left with was, at last, acceptance of him as he was. Until then I had rejected him, refused him his own reality. - To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness - A profound love between two people involves, after all, the power and chance of doing profound hurt. - Note: Love the interplay of duality here. Other refs to yin and yang. - Here, the government can check not only act but thought. Surely no men should have such power over others - In danger, honour - They gave with both hands - Note: Really like this writing - Fire and fear, good servants, bad lords.’ He makes fear serve him. I would have let fear lead me around by the long way. Courage and reason are with him. What good seeking the safe course, on a journey such as this? There are senseless courses, which I shall not take; but there is no safe one. - Though I had been nearly two years on Winter I was still far from being able to see the people of the planet through their own eyes. I tried to, but 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 - What is love of one’s country; is it hate of one’s uncountry? - Even in a bisexual society the politician is very often something less than an integral man. His inviting me to dinner showed that he thought I would accept his betrayal as easily as he committed it. Clearly face-saving was more important than honesty - Note: Really love this chain of writing... It has a bounce to it. - ‘With luck we shall make it, and without luck we shall not.’ - 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. - Light is the left hand of darknessand darkness the right hand of light.Two are one, life and death, lyingtogether like lovers in kemmer,like hands joined together,like the end and the way. - only fear rules men. Nothing else works. Nothing else lasts long enough - ‘Is he a threat to us, this Envoy?’ ‘I think not. He brings from his people offers of communication, trade, treaty, and alliance, nothing else. He came alone, without arms or defence, with nothing but a communicating device, and his ship, which he allowed us to examine completely. He is not to be feared, I think. Yet he brings the end of Kingdom and commensalities with him in his empty hands.’ - Note: An interesting musing: sometimes harm comes in an empty hand. - He had not meant to patronize. He had thought me sick, and sick men take orders. He was frank, and expected a reciprocal frankness that I might not be able to supply. He, after all, had no standards of manliness, of virility, to complicate his pride. - 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. - It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end. - The unexpected is what makes life possible - ‘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.’