![]() ![]() But Le Guin finds a way to turn this very impossibility to her advantage. Like Heaven or Hell, we can only describe James’s utopia (or dystopia) in the broadest of strokes. Turning this philosophical thought experiment into a narrative is, in a sense, impossible. Fourier’s and Bellamy’s and Morris’s Utopias should all be outdone and millions kept permanently happy on the one simple condition that a certain lost soul on the far-off edge of things should lead a life of lonely torture, what except a specifical and independent sort of emotion can it be which would make us immediately feel, even though an impulse arose within us to clutch at the happiness so offered, how hideous a thing would be its enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain?” “If the hypothesis were offered us of a world in which Messrs. This seems to refer to the following (rather tortuous) sentence from James’s 1891 paper, “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life”: This razor-sharp Borgesian fable comes with a curious subtitle: “variations on a theme by William James”. Le Guin’s collection The Wind’s Twelve Quarters as well as The Unreal and the Real. Anthologized in The Penguin Book of the Modern Short Story, The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas appears in Ursula K.
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