Book: The Left Hand of Darkness
Quotes of Book: The Left Hand of Darkness
stepped out of the tent on to nothing. Sledge and tent were there, Estraven stood beside me, but neither he nor I cast any shadow. There was dull light all around, everywhere. When he walked on the crisp snow no shadow showed the footprint. We left no track. Sledge, tent, himself, myself: nothing else at all. No sun, no sky, no horizon, no world. A whitish-grey void, in which we appeared to hang. The illusion was so complete that I had trouble keeping my balance. My inner ears were used to confirmation from my eyes as to how I stood; they got none; I might as well be blind. It was all right while we loaded up, but hauling, with nothing ahead, nothing to look at, nothing for the eye to touch, as it were, it was at first disagreeable and then exhausting. book-quoteHate Orgoreyn? No, how should I? How does one hate a country, or love one? Tibe talks about it; I lack the trick of it. I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply? What is love of one's country; is it hate of one's uncountry? Then it's not a good thing. Is it simply self-love? That's a good thing, but one mustn't make a virtue of it, or a profession. . . . Insofar as I love life, I love the hills of the Domain of Estre, but that sort of love does not have a boundary-line of hate. And beyond that, I am ignorant, I hope. book-quote,,Cum poți să urăști o țară sau să iubești alta? Tibe vorbește despre asemenea lucruri, eu n-am abilitatea lui. Eu cunosc oameni, orașe, ferme, dealuri, râuri și stânci. Știu cum, toamna, razele amurgului scaldă un luminiș pe o colină. Dar ce rost are să înconjuri toate aceste lucruri cu o graniță, să le dai un nume și să te oprești cu iubirea acolo unde numele încetează? Dacă îți iubești țara înseamnă să urăști nețara? Atunci nu-i bine. E o simplă iubire de sine? Asta-i bine, dar nu trebuie să faci din ea o virtute sau o profesiune... Așa cum iubesc viața, iubesc și dealurile Domeniului Estre, însă genul acesta de iubire nu are o frontieră a urii. Iar dincolo de așa ceva sunt ignorant, sper...
Ignorant, în sensul Handdara: a ignora abstractul, a fi strâns legat de concret. Atitudinea respectivă avea în ea ceva feminin: refuzarea abstractului, a idealului, o supunere față de realitate, care nu mă încântă. {Estraven, cap. 15, ,,Spre Gheață"} book-quoteIt is a durable, ubiquitous, specious metaphor, that one about veneer {or paint, or pliofilm, or whatever} hiding the nobler reality beneath. It can conceal a dozen fallacies at once. One of the most dangerous is the implication that civilization, being artificial, is unnatural: that it is the opposite of primitiveness. . . . Of course there is no veneer, the process is one of growth, and primitiveness and civilization are degrees of the same thing. If civilization has an opposite, it is war. Of those two things, you have either one, or the other. Not both. It book-quoteThough I had been nearly two years on Winter I was still far from being able to see the people of the planet through their own eyes. I tried to, but my efforts took the form of self-consciously seeing a Gethenian first as a man, then as a woman, forcing him into those categories so irrelevant to his nature and so essential to my own. Thus as I sipped my smoking sour beer I thought that at table Estraven's performance had been womanly, all charm and tact and lack of substance, specious and adroit. Was it in fact perhaps this soft supple femininity that I disliked and distrusted in him? For it was impossible to think of him as a woman, that dark, ironic, powerful presence near me in the firelit darkness, and yet whenever I thought of him as a man I felt a sense of falseness, of imposture: in him, or in my own attitude towards him? His voice was soft and rather resonant but not deep, scarcely a man's voice, but scarcely a woman's voice either . . . but what was it saying? book-quote
