Whenever I am asked to compose a short list of the most important books I have read I always include The Dispossessed by Ursula LeGuin. I enjoy almost everything by this feminist atheist science-fiction writer but The Dispossessed moves me deeply in ways I do not fully understand.
Briefly – it is the story of an “ambiguous utopia”. An anarchist revolutionary society on Anarres which is a moon of the planet Urras. And of Shevek – a brilliant physicist who struggles to understand and be true to himself in this society.
Early in the novel there is a conversation that includes Shevek and several other youths. In the following short speech Shevek articulates an idea that becomes an important theme for the rest of the book.
[Reality] exists. it’s real. I can call it a misunderstanding, but I can’t pretend that it doesn’t exist, or will ever cease to exist. Suffering is the condition on which we live. And when it comes, you know it. You know it as the truth. Of course it’s right to cure diseases, to prevent hunger and injustice, as the social organism does. But no society can change the nature of existence. We can’t prevent suffering. This pain and that pain, yes, but not Pain. A society can only relieve social suffering, unnecessary suffering. The rest remains. The root, the reality. All of us here are going to know grief; if we live fifty years, we’ll have known pain for fifty years. And in the end we’ll die. That’s the condition we’re born on. I’m afraid of life! There are times I – I am very frightened. Any happiness seems trivial. And yet, I wonder if it isn’t all a misunderstanding – this grasping after happiness, this fear of pain… If instead of fearing it and running from it, one could… get through it, beyond it. There is something beyond it. It’s the self that suffers, and there’s a place where the self – ceases. I don’t know how to say it. But I believe that the reality – the truth that I recognize in suffering as I don’t in comfort and happiness – that the reality of pain is not pain. If you can get through it. If you can endure it all the way. (HarperPrism, 60-61)
When I read this I think of the Christ and the way of the Cross. Not to avoid pain. But to face it and journey through it.
