#orsinia

[deadhorsepress]

There Is No Biological Imperative

Finches, Plinko, and Le Guin

The problem with “believing science,” as it goes, is that science does not function the way religion does; science itself is not something to be believed or disbelieved. Science is a process. It is a system of arriving at conclusions through evidence. Thus, when the headlines proclaim, “Science Says [X]!” or “According to Science, [Y],” it’s weird, because science “says” nothing. Science happens.

[probablyasocialecologist]

Show me a seed," Stefan Fabbre said stopping and pointing at Kasimir, "yes, I can tell you what it is, it's an apple seed. But can I tell you that an apple tree will grow from it? No! Because there's no freedom, we think there's a law. But there is no law. There's growth and death, delight and terror, an abyss, the rest we invent.

Ursula K. Le Guin, A Week in the Country

[goobergunch]

Cover by Pauline Ellison, 1977.

[the-hearth-and-the-wild]

They passed on the road, she at sixteen and he at fifty-six, and she left him a blue cornflower twined in his horse's mane. It was queer, he thought, how you met and passed souls thus, and a few of them left sweetness with you. You passed one another and parted, it might as well be forever, and yet there remained the touch of sweetness, and of pain.

Ursula K. Le Guin, Malafrena

[probablyasocialecologist]

Within a few steps all dust and bright light were gone. Leaves overhead and underfoot; an air like green water through which birds swam and the dark trunks rose lifting their burdens, their crowns, towards the other element, the sky. Stanislas went first to the Oak and stretched his arms out, straining to reach a quarter of the way around the trunk. His chest and cheek were pressed against the harsh, scored bark; the smell of it and its shelf-fungi and moss was in his nostrils and the darkness of it in his eyes. It was a bigger thing than he could ever hold. It was very old, and alive, and did not know he was there.

Ursula K. Le Guin, Imaginary Countries

[mtprgm]

“I was a fool before I -before that. Now I’m wise, now I know what a fool I was, right? But what use is wisdom, what good is it, when the price of it is hope?”

Ursula K. Le Guin. Malafrena

[nearit]

"The future be damned, since all possible futures ever envisaged are - rusty sinks, two-week vacations and bombs or collective fraternity or harps and houris - endlessly, sordidly dreary, all delight being in the present and its past, all truth too, and all fidelity in the word, the flesh, the present moment: for the future, however you look at it, contains only one sure thing and that is death. But the moment is unpredictable. There is simply no telling what will happen."

Ursula K. Le Guin - 'A Week in the Country'

[calmgrove]

Live free, or die

Live free, or die

Engraving of ‘Liberty Leading the People’, by Eugène Delacroix (1830) Malafrena, by Ursula K Le Guin. Panther Books, 1981 (1979) He would look unseeing out over Malafrena, with a heaviness in him. It was as if a spell was laid upon him here, which he could not break, though he might escape from it; a charm that grew strongest in certain hours, certain conversations. The spell that binds young…

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