Nursing
In 2-3 pages final reflection essay and for this week, you’ll consider LeGuin, “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” attached and ways it has prepared you to live a life of leadership and influence in the world. We reflect to understand who we uniquely are (Composing A Life) and to grasp the critical questions of purpose and meaning, both individually and collectively (Searching For Truths). The results of our reflection form the basis for our life’s work, This is the ‘doing’ of life, Working for Community and Justice.
As we reflect this week, consider:
from the fourth-century monk and mystic John Cassian: “Nothing is ours except one thing, which is possessed by the heart, which clings to the soul, and which can never be taken away by anyone.”
What is your one thing?
Knowing that, how will you use it for others in your one, precious life?
Critical Thinking Questions (to guide your reading and reflection)
In The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, the only people presented as taking any kind of social action are the ones who simply walk away. Is there value in not participating in social injustice? What other types of social action could result in solving the problem of the childs suffering?
Tr7_ Ti-7 d-‘ ~~~ oe vv tn s ~~
Twelve Quarters~~
~~~~~~~
~~~~~~
Short Stories hy
URSULA K. ~E GUIN
~~~
~~
[f]
PERENNIAL LIBRARY
Harper & Row, Publishers, New York
Cambridge, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Washington
London, Mexico City, Sao Paulo, Singapore, Sydney
“Semleys Necklace” originally appeared under the title “The Dowry of the Angyar” in Amazing,
1964.
“April in Paris” originally appeared in Fantastic, 1962.
“The Masters” and “Darkness Box” originally appeared in Fantastic, 1963.
‘.’The Word of Unbinding” and “The Rule of Names” originally appeared in Fantastic, 1964.
“Winters King” originally appeared in Orbit 5, 1969.
“The Good Trip” originally appeared in Fantastic, 1970.
“Nine Lives” originally appeared in Playboy, 1969.
“Things” originally appeared under the title “The End” in Orbit 6, 1970.
“A Trip co the Head” originally appeared in Quark 1, 1970.
“Vaster Than Empires and More Slow” originally appeared in New Dimensions 1, 1971.
“The Stars Below” originally appeared in Orbit 12, 1973.
“The Field of Vision” originally appeared in Galaxy, 1973.
“Direction of the Road” originally appeared in Orbit 14, 1974.
“The Ones Who Walk Away from Ornelas” originally appeared in New Dimensions 3, 1973.
“The Day Before the Revolution” originally appeared in Galaxy, 1974.
Excerpt from A. E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad reprinted by permission of Cambridge
University Press.
A hardcover edition of chis book was originally published in 197 5 by Harper & Row, Publishers.
THE WIND’S TWELVE QUARTERS. Copyright 1975 by Ursula K. Le Guin. All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America. No part of chis book may be used or reproduced in any
manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied
in critical articles and reviews. For information address Harper & Row, Publisher~, Inc., 10 Ease
53rd Street, New York, N.Y. 10022. Published simultaneously in Canada by Fitzhenry &
Whiteside Limited, Toronto.
First PERENNIAL LIBRARY edition published 1987.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
LeGuin, Ursula K.
The wind’s twelve quarters.
“Perennial Library.”
Contents: Semley’s necklace.-April in Paris.-The rnasters.-Darkness box.
[etc.] I. Title.
PZ4. L518Wi [PS3562. E42] 813’. 5 ‘4 75-6372
ISBN 0-06-091434-3 (pbk.)
From far, from eve and morning
And yon twelve-winded sky,
The stuff of life to knit me
Blew hither; here am I.
Now-for a breath I tarry
Nor yet disperse apart-
Take my hand quick and tdl me,
What have you in your heart.
Speak now, and I will answer;
How shall I help you, say;
Ere to the wind’s twelve quarters
I take my endless vray.
A. E. Housman: A SiJropshire Lad
>ff
The Co11ege of St. Catherine
ST. l1ARY’S CAMPUS LIBRARY
2500 South Sixth Street
.Minneapolis, MN 55454
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THE ONES WHO WALK
AWAY FROM OMELAS
~~~
~ ~ (Variations on a theme by William James)
The central idea of this psychomyth, the scapegoat, turns up in
Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, and several people have asked
me, rather suspiciously, why I gave the c~edit to William James.
The fact is, I haven’t been able to re-read ‘JJostoyevskJ, much as I
loved him, since I was twenty-five, and I’d simply forgotten he used
the idea. But when I met it in /amels “The Moral Philosopher and
the Moral Life,” it was with a shock of recognition. Here is how
James puts it:
Or if the hypothesis were offered us of a world in which Messrs.
Fourier’s and Bellamy’s and Morris’s utopias should all be outdone,
and millions kept permanently happy on the one simple condition that
a certain lost soul on the far-off edge of things should lead a life of
lonely torment, what except a specifical and independent sort of emotion
can it be which tvould make us immediately feel, even though an
impulse arose within us to clutch at the happiness so offered, how
hideous a thing would be its enjrlyment when deliberately accepted as
the fruit of such a bargain?
The dilemma of the American conscience can hardly be better
stated. Dostoyevsky was a great artist, and a radical one, but his
early social radicalism reversed itself, leaving him a violent reaction-
ary. Whereas the American James, who seems so mild, so naively
gentlemanly-look hotv he says “us,” assuming all his readers are
276 The Wind1s Twelve Quarters
as decent as himself I-was, and remained, and remains, a genuinely
radical thinker. Directly after the “lost soul” passage he goes on,
All the higher, more penetrating ideals are revolutionary. They present
themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience than in
that of probable causes of future experience, factors to which the
environment and the lessons it has so far taught us must learn to bend.
The application of those two sentences to this story, and to science
fictfon, and to all thinking about the future, is quite direct. Ideals
as “the probable causes of future experience11-that is a subtle and
an exhilarating remark!
Of course I didn 1t read /ames and sit down and say, Now I’ll write
a story about that “lost soul.” It seldom works that simply. I sat
down and started a story, just because I felt like it, with nothing
but tl2e word “Ornelas” in mind. It came from a road sign: Salem
(Oregon) backwards. Don1t you read road signs backwards? POTS.
WOLS nerdlihc. Ocsicnarf Nas … Salem equals schelomo equals
salaam equals Peace. Melas. 0 melas. Ornelas. Homme Mias.
“Where do you get your ideas from, Ms Le Guin?” From forgetting
Dostoyevsky and reading road signs backwards, naturally. Where
else?
With a damor of bells that set the swallows soaring, the Festival of
Summer came to the city Ornelas, bright-towered by the sea. The
rigging of the boats in harbor sparkled with flags. In the streets
between houses with red roofs and painted walls; between old moss-
grown gardens and under avenues of trees, past great parks and
public buildings, processions moved. Some were decorous: old peo-
ple in long stiff robes of mauve and grey, grave master workmen,
The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas 277
quiet, merry women carrying their babies and chatting as they
walked. In other streets the music beat faster, a shimmering of gong
and tambourine, and the people went dancing, the procession was
a dance. Children dodged in and out, their high calls rising like
the swallows’ crossing flights over the music and the singing. All
the processions wound towards the north side of the city, where
on the great water-meadow called the Green Fields boys and girls,
naked in the bright air, with mud-stained feet and ankles and long,
lithe arms, exercised their restive horses before the race. The horses
wore no gear at all but a halter without bit. Their manes were
braided with streamers of silver, gold, and green. They flared their
nostrils and pranced and boasted to one anot4,9′; they were vastly
excited, the horse being the only animal who has adopted our
ceremonies as his own. Far off to the north and west the mountains
stood up half encircling Ornelas on her bay. The air of morning
was so clear that the snow still crowning the Eighteen Peaks
burned with white-gold .fire across the miles of sunlit air, under
the dark blue of the sky. There was just enough wind to make the
banners that marked the racecourse snap and flutter now and then.
In the silence of the broad green meadows one could hear the music
winding through the city streets, farther and nearer and ever
approaching, a cheerful faint sweetness of the air that from time
to time trembled and gathered together and broke out into the
great joyous clanging of the bells.
Joyous! How is one to tell about joy? How describe the citizens
of Ornelas?
They were not simple folk, you see, though they were happy.
But we do not say the words of cheer much any more. All smiles
have become archaic. Given a description such as this one tends
to make certain assumptions. Given a description such as this one
tends to look next for the King, mounted on a splendid stallion
and surrounded by his noble knights, or perhaps in a golden litter
w~
278 The Wind’s Ttvelve Quarte1s
borne by great-muscled slaves. But there was no king. 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 that they
were singularly few. As they did without monarchy and slavery,
so they also got on without the stock exchange, the advertisement,
the secret police, and the bomb. Yet I repeat that these were not
simple folk, not dulcet shepherds, noble savages, bland utopians.
They were not less complex than us. The trouble is that we have
a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of consider-
ing happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual,
only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to
admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you
can’t lick ’em, join ’em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair
is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of every-
thing else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe a
happy man, nor make any celebration of joy. How can I tell you
about the people of Ornelas? They were not naive and happy
children-though their children were, in fact, happy. They were
mature, intelligent, passionate adults whose lives were not wretched.
0 miracle! but I wish I could describe it better. I wish I could
convince you. Ornelas sounds in my words like a city in a fairy
tale, long ago and far away, once upon a time. Perhaps it would
be best if you imagined it as your own fancy bids, assuming it will
rise to the occasion, for certainly I cannot suit you all. For instance,
how about technology? I think that there would be no cars or
helicopters in and above the streets; this follows from the fact that
the people of Ornelas are happy people. Happiness is based on a just
discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor
destructive, and what is destructive. In the middle category, how-
ever-that of the unnecessary but undestructive, that of comfort,
luxury, exuberance, etc.-they could perfectly well have central
heating, . subway trains, washing machines, and all kinds of marve-
i
The Ones Who Walk Away from Ornelas 279
lous devices not yet invented here, floating light-sources, fuelless
power, a cure for the common cold. Or they could have none of
that: it doesn’t matter. As you like it. I incline to think that people
from towns up and down the coast have been coming in to Ornelas
during the last days before the Festival on very fast little trains and
double-decked trams, and that the train station of Omel~s is actually
the handsomest building in town, though plainer than the magnifi-
cent Farmers’ Market. But even granted trains, I fear that Ornelas so
far strikes some of you as goody-goody. Smiles, bells, parades, horses,
bleh. If so, please add an orgy. If an orgy would help, don’t hesitate.
Let us not, however, have temples from which ,jssue beautiful nude
priests and priestesses already half in ecstasy and ready to copulate
with any man or woman, lover or stranger, who desires union with
the deep godhead of the blood, although that was my first idea. But
really it would be better not to have any temples in Ornelas-at least,
not manned temples. Religion yes, clergy no. Surely the beautiful
nudes can just wander about, offering themselves like divine souffies
to the hunger of the needy and the rapture of the flesh. Let them
join the processions. Let tambourines be struck above the copulations,
and the glory of desire be proclaimed upon the gongs, and (a not
unimportant point) let the offspring of these delightful rituals be
beloved and looked after by all. One thing I know there is none
of in Ornelas is guilt. But what else should there be? I thought at
first there were no drugs, but that is puritanical. For those who like
it, the faint insistent sweetness of drooz may perfume the ways of the
city, drooz which first brings a great lightness and brilliance to the
mind and limbs, and then after some hours a dreamy languor, and
wonderful visions at last of the very arcana and inmost secrets of the
Universe, as well as exciting the pleasure of sex beyond all belief;
and it is not habit-forming. For more modest tastes I think there
ought to be beer. What else, what else belongs in the joyous city? The
sense of victory, surely, the celebration of courage. But as we did
280 The Wind’s Tevelve Qua1ters
without clergy, let us do without soldiers. The joy built upon success-
ful slaughter is not the right kind of joy; it will not do; it is fearful
and it is trivial. A boundless and generous contentment, a mag-
nanimous triumph felt not against some outer enemy but in com-
munion with the finest and fairest in the souls of all men everywhere
and the splendor of the world’s summer: this is what swells the
hearts of the people of Ornelas, and the victory they celebrate is that
of life. I really don’t think many of them need to take drooz.
Most of the processions have reached the Green Fields by now.
A marvelous smell of cooking goes forth from the red and blue
tents of the provisioners. The faces of small children are amiably
sticky; in the benign grey beard of a man a couple of crumbs of
rich pastry are entangled. The youths and girls have mounted their
horses and are beginning to group around the starting line of the
course. An old woman, small, fat, and laughing, is passing out
flowers from a basket, and tall young men wear her flowers in their
shining hair. A child of nine or ten sits at the edge of the crowd,
alone, playing on a wooden flute. People pause to listen, and they
smile, but they do not speak to him, for he never ceases playing and
never sees them, his dark eyes wholly rapt in the sweet, thin magic
of the tune.
He finishes, and slowly lowers his hands holding the wooden
flute.
As if that little private silence were the signal, all at once a trumpet
sounds from the pavilion near the starting line: imperious, melan-
choly, piercing. The horses rear on their slender legs, and some of
them neigh in answer. Sober-faced, the young riders stroke the
horses’ necks and soothe them, whispering, “Quiet, quiet, there my
beauty, my hope …. ” They begin to form in rank along the
starting line. The crowds along the racecourse are like a field of
grass and flowers in the wind. The Festival of Summer has begun.
Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the city, the joy? No?
Then let me describe one more thing.
The Ones Who Walk Away from Ornelas 281
In a basement under one of the beautiful public buildings of
Ornelas, or perhaps in the cellar of one of its spacious private homes,
there is a room. It has one locked door, and no window. A little light
seeps in dustily between cracks in the boards, secondhand from a
cobwebbed window somewhere across the cellar. In one corner of
the little room a couple of mops, with stiff, clotted, foul-smelling
heads, stand near a rusty bucket. The floor is dirt, a little damp to
the touch, as cellar dirt usually is. The room is about three paces long
and two wide: a mere broom closet or disused tool room. In the
room a child is sitting. It could be a boy or a girl. It looks about six,
~
but actually is nearly ten. It is feeble-minded.’1’Perhaps it was born
defective, or per~aps it has become imbecile through fear, malnutri-
tion, and neglect. It picks its nose and occasionally fumbles vaguely
with its toes or genitals, as it sits hunched in the corner farthest
from the bucket and the two mops. It is afraid of the mops. It finds
them horrible. It shuts its eyes, but it knows the mops are still stand-
ing there; and the door is locked; and nobody will come. The door
is always locked; and nobody ever comes, except that sometimes-
the child has no understanding of time or interval-sometimes the
door rattles terribly and opens, and a person, or several people, are
there. One of them may come in and kick the child to make it
stand up. The others never come close, but peer in at it with
frightened, disgusted eyes. The food bowl and the water jug are
hastily filled, the door is locked, the eyes disappear. The people at
the door never say anything, but the child, who has not always lived
in the tool room, and can remember sunlight and its mother’s voice,
sometimes speaks. “I will be good,” it says. “Please let me out. I will
be good!” They never answer. The child used to scream for help at
night, and cry a good deal, but now it only makes a kind of whining,
“eh-haa, eh-haa,” and it speaks less and less often. It is so thin there
are no calves to its legs; its belly protrudes; it lives on a half-bowl of
corn meal and grease a day. It is naked. Its buttocks and thighs are
a mass of festered sores, as it sits in its own excrement continually.
282 The Wind’s Ttvelve Quarters
They all know it is there, all the people of Ornelas. Some of them
have come to see it, others are content merely to know it is there.
They all know that it has to be there. Some of them understand
why, and some do not, but they all understand that their happiness,
the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the
health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of
their makers, even the abundance of their harvest . and the kindly
weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child’s abominable
misery.
This is usually explained to children when they are between eight
and twelve, whenever they seem capable of understanding; and
most of those who come to see the child are young people, though
often enough an adult comes, or comes back, to see the child. No
matter how well the matter has been explained to them, these young
spectators are always shocked and sickened at the sight. They feel
disgust, which they had thought themselves superior to. They feel
anger, outrage, impotence, despite all the explanations. They would
like to do something for the child. But there is nothing they can
do. If the child were brought up into the sunlight out of that vile
place, if it were cleaned and fed and comforted, that would be a
good thing, indeed; but if it were done, in that day and hour all
the prosperity and beauty and delight of Ornelas would wither and
be destroyed. Those are the terms. To exchange all the goodness and
grace of every life in Ornelas for that single, small improvement: to
throw away the happiness of thousands for the chance of the happi-
ness of one: that would be to let guilt within the walls indeed.
The terms are strict and absolute; there may not even be a kind
word spoken to the child.
Often the young people go home in tears, or in a tearless rage,
when they have seen the child and faced this terrible paradox. They
may brood over it for weeks or years. But as time goes on they begin
to realize that even if the child could be released, it would not get
The Ones Who Walk Away from Ornelas 283
much good of its freedom: a little vague pleasure of warmth and
food, no doubt, but little more. It is too degraded and imbecile to
know any real joy. It has been afraid too long ever to be free of fear.
Its habits are too uncouth for it to respond to humane treatment.
Indeed, after so long it would probably be wretched without walls
about it to protect it, and darkness for its eyes, and its own excre-
ment to sit in. Their tears at the bitter injustice dry when they begin
to perceive the terrible justice of reality, and to accept it. Yet it is
their tears and anger, the trying of their generosity and the acceptance
of their helplessness, which are perhaps the true source of the
. 