Ursula Le Guin and What A Novel Gives You

Every novel gives you a chance to do certain things you could not do without it; this is true for the writer as for the reader. Gratitude seems the only fit response. Some things I am grateful to this book for:

The chance to invent the patterning frame (I wish I had one).

The chance to use my own "translations" (collation-ripoff) of the Tao Te Ching. 

 The chance to imagine my own country, America, without cities, almost without towns, as sparsely populated by our own species as it was five hundred years ago; the vastness of this land, the empty beauty of it; here and there (random, the pattern broken) a little settlement of human beings; a buried supermarket or a ruined freeway made mysterious and pathetic as all things are by age. The sense of time, but more than that the sense of space, extent, the wideness of the continent. The wideness, the wilderness. Prairie, forest; undergrowth, bushes, grass, weeds; the wilderness. We talk patronizingly now of "saving the wilderness" for "recreational purposes," but the wilderness has no purpose and can neither be destroyed nor saved. Where we tame the prairie, the used-car lots and the slums arise, terrible, crowded, empty. The wilderness is disorder. The wilderness is the earth itself, and the dust between the stars, from which  new earths are made.

The chance to play with forests. The forest of the mind. Forests one within another.

The chance to speak of civilization not as a negative force -- restraint, constraint, repression, authority-- but as an opportunity lost, an ideal of truth. The City as goal and dream. The interdependence of order and honesty. No word or monument or way of being is more or less "real" than any other, and all is "natural"; what varies is vividness and accuracy of perception, clarity and honesty of speech. The measure of a civilization may be the individual's ability to speak the truth.

Thus, the chance to remark that programmed pigs may talk ethics but not truth.

The chance to take another journey. Most of my stories are excuses for a journey. (We shall henceforth respectfully refer to this as the Quest Theme.) I never did care much about plots, all I want is to go from A to B -- or, more often, from A to A -- by the most difficult and circuitous route. 

The chance to give the country between Wichita and Pueblo a ruler worthy of it.

The chance to build a city across the Black Canyon of the Gunnison. 

The chance to argue inconclusively with the slogan "reverence for life," which by leaving out too much lets the lie get in and eat the apple rotten. 

The chance to give Rolery and Jakob Agat a descendant.

The chance to begin and end a book with darkness, like a dream.

-Ursula K. Le Guin, Introduction to City of Illusions 

The Language of the Night, p. 146-148