Caution: No Semblance Of Order

Mars. 30s. Take a hard hat, mind your step. Consistency is the false god of ego.

[visenyaism]

Honestly fuck AI for making me have to go on and on defending the dignity of toil like I’m some kind of protestant

[pmamtraveller]

Party Pooper by Matty Newton

[pigeonpraxis]

While he got hungrier, while the train sat hour after hour on the siding between a scarred and dusty quarry and a shut-down mill, he had grim thoughts about the reality of hunger, and about the possible inadequacy of his society to come through a famine without losing the solidarity that was its strength. It was easy to share when there was enough, even barely enough, to go round. But when there was not enough? Then force entered in; might making right; power, and its tool, violence, and its most devoted ally, the averted eye.

-- The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin (p. 240)

[pigeonpraxis]

Living in a society where anyone could move whenever and wherever he wanted, an Anarresti tended to look for his friends where he was, not where he had been.

-- The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin (p. 235)

[pigeonpraxis]

Odo wrote: "A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart. The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skillful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well--this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection and of sociality as a whole."

-- The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin (p. 232)

[pigeonpraxis]

To survive, to make a go of life, an Anarresti knew he had to be ready to go where he was needed and do the work that needed doing. He grew up knowing labor distribution as a major factor of life, an immediate, permanent social necessity; whereas conjugality was a personal matter, a choice that could be made only within the larger choice. But when a direction is chosen freely and followed wholeheartedly, it may seem that all things further the going. So the possibility and actuality of separation often served to strengthen the loyalty of partners. To maintain genuine spontaneous fidelity in a society that had no legal or moral sanctions against infidelity, and to maintain it during voluntarily accepted separations that could come at any time and might last years, was something of a challenge. But the human being likes to be challenged, seeks freedom in adversity.

-- The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin (p. 231)

[pigeonpraxis]

An Odonian undertook monogamy just as he might undertake a joint enterprise in production, a ballet or a soap works. Partnership was a voluntarily constituted federation like any other. So long as it worked, it worked, and if it didn't work it stopped being. It was not an institution but a function. It had no sanction but that of private conscience.

-- The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin (p. 229)

[pigeonpraxis]

She had been increasingly quiet, passive, patient. He understood that passivity now: it was a preparation for her death. It was she who had withdrawn from him, and he had not tried to follow her. He had looked only at his own bitterness of heart, and never at her fear, or courage. He had let her alone because he wanted to be let alone, and so she had gone on, gone far, too far, would go on alone, forever.

-- The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin (p. 227)

[pigeonpraxis]

He had the flair for where to set to work, just as Shevek did, and Shevek respected it in him as in himself, for it is a singularly important attribute in a scientist.

-- The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin (p. 259)

[darkcomedies]

evoking bertholt brecht’s “the way people cast a play!” quote as a spell against prescriptive, stereotypical, fatalistic typecasting

[darkcomedies]

idk what to tell you except go look at the fishwives

[pigeonpraxis]

"You ask questions like a true profiteer," Shevek said, and not a soul there knew he had insulted Dearri with the most contemptuous word in his vocabulary.

-- The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin (p. 277)

[pigeonpraxis]

It was an unjust beauty. What had the Urrasti done to deserve it? Why was it given to them, so lavishly, so graciously, and so little, so very little, to his own people? I'm thinking like an Urrasti, he said to himself. Like a damned propertarian. As if deserving meant anything. As if one could earn beauty, or life! He tried to think of nothing at all, to let himself be borne forward to watch the sunlight in the gentle sky and the little sheep bouncing in the fields of spring.

-- The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin (p. 195)

[pigeonpraxis]

The little something not quite right kept looking wronger. A little flaw in the reasoning. A big flaw. A crack right through the foundations.

-- The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin (p. 193)

[pigeonpraxis]

"If you can see a thing whole," he said, "it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives... But close up, a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the patterns. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death."

-- The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin (p. 178)

[pigeonpraxis]

"But the meetings and the friends were peripheral to them. Neither social nor sociable participation was necessary to them; their partnership was enough, and they could not hide the fact."

-- The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin (p. 177)

[pigeonpraxis]

"Gradually the sunlight entered, shifted across the papers on the table, across his hands on the papers, and filled the room with radiance. And he worked. The false starts and futilities of the past years proved themselves to be groundwork, foundations laid in the dark but well laid."

-- The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin (p. 176)

[pigeonpraxis]

"Her concern with landscapes and living creatures was passionate. This concern, feebly called "love of nature," seemed to Shevek something much broader than love. There are souls, he thought, whose umbilicus has never been cut. They never got weaned from the universe. They do not understand death as an enemy;"

-- The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin (p. 174)