Category Archives: Life as we know it

Ursula K. LeGuin and history

I went to the Salvation Army store the other day hoping to find a replacement for the jacket I left on the plane in Denver. No luck, but I did find a book that has proved to be worthwhile. (There was a jacket that might have served but it had Frontier Airlines stitched on the front. I don’t think so!)

I read Ursula K. LeGuin’s Earthsea trilogy years ago and liked it enough to keep it in my library. I’ve read it once or twice more since then. She wrote a fourth book in the same story line that I read but did not care for as much.

Regardless, when I saw her name on a book titled Tales from Earthsea, I picked it up immediately. For a dollar how can you go wrong?

The book has a foreword that explains LeGuin’s take on the ‘nonexistent history’ of the fictional Earthsea. There’s a paragraph that hit me between the eyes this morning when I read it. She writes:

Even if we are present at some historic event, do we comprehend it – can we even remember it – until we can tell it as a story? And for events in times or places outside our own experience, we have nothing to go on but the stories other people tell us. Past events exist , after all, only in memory, which is a form of imagination. The event is real now, but once it’s then, its continuing reality is entirely up to us, dependent on our energy and honesty. If we let it drop from memory, only imagination can restore the least glimmer of it. If we lie about the past, forcing it to tell a story we want it to tell, to mean what we want it to mean, it loses its reality, becomes a fake. To bring our past along with us through time in the hold-alls of myth and history is a heavy undertaking; but as Lao Tzu says, wise people march along with the baggage wagons.

The philosophy of Lao Tzu is similar to that of Chuang Tzu, who I referenced in an earlier post involving LeGuin’s work: http://thezachproject.us/index.php/2016/09/01/loss/

LeGuin has a larger, world history in mind but her words resonate with me for the events of last November. Humankind is just a tiny blip in the context of the universe, but for us it is all we have. We must hold our memories true and pass them on. There is nothing more.

the guy downstairs

Ah, apartment living! No lawn to mow, no leaks to fix. Just jerks downstairs that bash and crash in the kitchen then turn their TV up loud in the middle of the night.

Rather than get in an altercation that could result in ugliness, my usual M. O. is to turn over and remain calm so I can get back to sleep. Tonight was worse than usual so now I’m up with my blog after I wrote the landlady an email about it. Three hours from now I have to be leaving for work. I’m going to try again to get to sleep.

Hair

I got a haircut yesterday.

Why is this news? Because it’s only the second haircut I’ve gotten since Zach was killed. That’s seven months for those of you scoring at home. And in the 25 or 30 years previous to this one, every two months was the rule for haircuts. A flexible rule, to be sure, but the common assumption was that short hair was easier to care for and I just didn’t want to be bothered.

True enough but things are different now. Indeed, it was in talking to Sarah just last week that I finally was able to articulate why I wanted my hair longer now. Sarah seemed particularly scandalized when she first saw me with it long. It took me a while before I realized that she had never seen me with long hair. She’s 31 years old.

Anyway, it seemed weird to me that I would commemorate Zach by growing my hair long. Zach always had his hair neatly trimmed – what’s the deal?

I told Sarah that I wanted people to know that I was different now. And that made sense to me. So that’s what it is.

Are people looking at me and thinking about that? Maybe, but most likely not, although a few who read this might start to. Whatever. It’s just for me. Several people have commented that I look nicer with longer hair. OK, but that’s not why I started to let it go. It was to mark the discontinuity in my life.