So what if there's a child in the shed?

There are few things I love more than a good short story. In many ways, a short story is more difficult than a novel: it needs a tight plot, it doesn't get pages and pages to develop its characters. It doesn't have the luxury of being allowed to wind down on some sweet, light lullaby of phrasing; ideally it should deliver a punch on the last page powerful enough to deprive you of your wind. And Ursula Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" does exactly that.

Tiptoe away and read it before you keep going; I won't be the one to ruin the ending for you.

Back now? Well, I debated whether or not this was a wise post to write. In the first place, Ursula Le Guin is adamantly pro-choice, and I'd hate it if I were a published author and someone used one of my stories to support, say, abortion. But I still feel that when an author gets to the root of things in a story like this one, she can sometimes highlight the flaws even in her own thinking.

Borrowing an idea which dates back to the work of Dostoyevsky, Le Guin gives us, in gorgeous, glorious detail, a land without suffering. Its members are not naive; they are intelligent, impassioned. They are scholars and singers, artists and mothers. The more we delve into their society (with the author by our side, of course, like J.M. Barrie in Peter Pan), the more there doesn't seem to be a catch. Drugs are available, which bring "a great lightness and brilliance to the mind and limbs", but they are "not habit-forming", and very few feel the need to take them. Love is free, but also free of negative consequence;  "[o]ne thing I know there is none of in Omelas is guilt."

"A boundless and generous contentment," Le Guin writes, "a magnanimous triumph felt not against some outer enemy but in communion with the finest and fairest in the souls of all men everywhere and the splendor of the world's summer: this is what swells the hearts of the people of Omelas, and the victory they celebrate is that of life."

But wait, hang on a minute; in one tool shed, in one basement, there sits a child, seemingly suspended in agelessness (though hardly to its benefit), starving, awash in filth, utterly miserable, to whom no one is allowed to talk, though it occasionally cries for help (less and less often, as numbness enters its brain). It "has not always lived in the tool room, and can remember sunlight and its mother's voice".

"They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas. Some of them have come to see it, others are content merely to know it is there. They all know that it has to be there. Some of them understand why, and some do not, but they all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weather of their skies, depend wholly on this child's abominable misery … If the child were brought up into the sunlight out of that vile place, if it were cleaned and fed and comforted, that would be a good thing indeed; but if it were done, in that day and hour all the prosperity and beauty and delight of Omelas would wither and be destroyed. … The terms are strict and absolute; there may not even be a kind word spoken to the child."

This is explained to all of the children of Omelas at some point, usually before they enter their teens. They react in the way one might expect: with shock, anger, tears. "But as time goes on they begin to realize that even if the child could be released, it would not get much good of its freedom: a little vague pleasure of warmth and food, no doubt, but little more. It is too degraded and imbecile to know any real joy. It has been afraid too long ever to be free of fear. …Their tears at the bitter injustice dry when they begin to perceive the terrible justice of reality, and to accept it." They assimilate into society again; they vow to be better people, more compassionate. No one commits the treason of rescuing the child at the expense of thousands. "Now do you believe in them?" the author asks sadly. "Are they not more credible?"

My friends, we are living in a society today that is entirely dependent on the destruction of children; not in sheds, but in wombs. Because they were not easily seen, we were once told that they were not children at all. Like the young ones of Omelas we were blissful in our ignorance. But since sonogram images and scientific evidence don't match up with this idea, more and more abortionists, more and more who espouse the pro-choice cause, are admitting the truth. These are children, yes, but either they have to go or we do.

"Here's the complicated reality in which we live: All life is not equal," writes Salon author Mary Elizabeth Williams in the column "So what if abortion ends life?" "That's a difficult thing for liberals like me to talk about, lest we wind up looking like death-panel-loving, kill-your-grandma-and-your-precious-baby storm troopers. Yet a fetus can be a human life without having the same rights as the woman in whose body it resides. She’s the boss. Her life and what is right for her circumstances and her health should automatically trump the rights of the non-autonomous entity inside of her. Always."

If we overthrow abortion, Williams argues, there go our rights as women; the rights we've worked so hard for over the years. There goes Omelas, where actions carry no consequence. She takes it for granted that pro-lifers are "wingnuts", bullies, when they're the ones standing up for what she freely admits is the life of a child. It's not too surprising when you think about it; suppose some people invaded Omelas and announced their intention to storm the shed, to save the child. Would they not be labelled terrorists?

Let's put aside the question of whether this society of ours that allows the slaughter of its unborn is really the utopia we might have hoped, and ask ourselves: even if it were, even if our lives were utterly perfect and breathtakingly beautiful at the surface, would they be worth the price?

"We are not going back to the Dark Ages [when abortion was a crime]," Ursula Le Guin wrote in her 1982 essay The Princess. "…There are great powers, outside the government and in it, trying to legislate the return of darkness. We are not great powers. But we are the light. Nobody can put us out. May all of you shine very bright and steady, today and always.”

When I read this quote, I see exactly what I see when I look at William's column: a defense of Omelas (which, after all, would seem to be a city of life and light) from the very woman who exposes it. I must beg of you; when you see that child huddled in that shed, do not try to justify it. Be like the people of the title, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

Or better yet, stay. Stay and fight. Storm the shed, save the child.

Current Reads: All You Need Is Blood

"Ringo, what are you up to?"
"Page 5."
- A Hard Day's Night

Inspired in part by the Simultaneous Reads blog over at Tumblr, I've decided to start posting a bit of what I'm reading. I believe that stacking up all the books a person is reading at the moment often tells a lot about his personal psychology.

...or at least, I used to believe that, until I realized I was reading three Beatle-themed books plus two tales of gore and childhood trauma.

Dear friends, I am not a gore person. Even watching that deliberately cheesy Shakespearean-themed thriller Theater of Blood (you know, with Vincent Price as an actor killing off his critics) set my teeth kinda on edge. It just sort of...fell out this way.

Technically I'm not even a nonfiction person, but random Beatles obsessions strike the best of us.

(And, fyi, I'd have three horror novels to balance out the Beatle books if Amazon hadn't suddenly raised the price on Blood Man.)

So, without further adieu!

John Lennon: A Biography by Jacqueline Edmonson 
Possibly the most bare-bones Lennon bio on the market, this book was an electronic resource from my college library, presumably for kids with papers due in the morning. It's written in the style of Wikipedia, with all its vast understatements and iffy grammar, and I've already picked up several mistakes (no, Paul and Pete didn't get deported from Hamburg for accidentally knocking over a candle in a venue; I seem to recall that they started a fire on purpose, cheeky young thugs that they were), but I'm actually enjoying it for its comprehensiveness and lack of pretension, the latter of which makes it far brisker reading than, say, Larry Kane's Ticket to Ride.
Also, the author dedicated it to three kids, presumably hers, which reassured me that the text was written by a human being and didn't spontaneously generate.

The Longest Cocktail Party by Richard Di Lello 
A fine example of what I'm pretty sure constitutes New Journalism, all about working at Apple Records toward the end of the 60's. Formatted in short dialogue-loaded chapters like sketches in The New Yorker, some black-and-white photo inserts. It's the kind of thing that could only have been published in the 70's. Like the liner notes in a 1960's vinyl, it's informative, conversational, amusing and often too clever by half.

Blackbird Fly by Lise McClendon 
Okay, calling it "Beatle-themed" just because of the title is a stretch worthy of Rose Mary Woods, but it's a low-key, observant and, so far, quite beautiful work. A woman's emotionally distant workaholic of a husband dies, and she finds out he's left her a house in France that she didn't know he even owned, so naturally she goes to check it out. If you're thinking of The Shack or something I must tell you that this won't be on the "inspirational" shelf anytime soon; while far from heartless, it's refreshingly unsentimental. It's one of those books that's content simply to live and breathe, and breathe it does.

Dark Places by Gillian Flynn
It's about time I cracked open a Gillian Flynn, and I must say I'm surprised. I was expecting a cerebral, poetic mystery in the vein of Tana French. It's more like a rusty razor in the vein of the reader. That's not to say it isn't witty and well-thought out, but good grief, the woman doesn't stray from messy murder and equally wince-worthy satire. So far we've got the surviving children of slaughtered families competing for donation money like a bunch of washed-up beauty pageant queens. No wonder Stephen King gave it a blurb. And speaking of Stephen...

The Shining by Stephen King 
Despite the fact that his paperbacks are a staple at my local grocery store, I've never gotten into Stephen King, because any mystery of his worth reading has been spoiled for me by movies I haven't even seen. I mean, how am I supposed to take the foreshadowing in the first three chapters seriously when I've got this mental image of Jack Nicholson smashing through a door with an axe? Nice going, Hollywood.

Review: Heretics by G.K. Chesterton

One of the rewarding things about reading Chesterton's work is watching him pick up the thread he began in one book and continue it in another--or in my case, since I read a few of the later ones first, winding the thread back and finding out what set it spinning in the first place. Orthodoxy has been my favorite for years upon years, and all this time I had no idea that he'd written it as a follow-up to Heretics, with a view towards expanding on a few ideas he had introduced therein--views which had not been  elaborated on to the satisfaction of his critics.

(In this sense, Heretics serves the same role in Chesterton's nonfiction that The Napoleon of Notting Hill serves in his fiction--the starting point of a hundred ideas. The creative seeds that flew from the finished Notting Hill not only took root in Chesterton's own later works Manalive and The Man Who Was Thursday, but in George Orwell's 1984 and, more recently, in Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere.)

An early work cannot be elaborate if it is to set off later works--it is the business of the later works, such as Orthodoxy, to be elaborate. But, above all, an early work must be bold, and this one fairly crackles on the page. It doesn't get much bolder than fixing a book with a title like Heretics and then christening each chapter after a well-known author of the day. A good start, I call it, and Chesterton likely thought so too. Small question why it set the critics gnawing on his heels.

While it's pleasant to start the book familiar with the names Chesterton mentions--Rudyard Kipling, George Bernard Shaw, Joseph McCabe and H.G. Wells among them--it is far from necessary. The chapters provide us with all the information we need on these writers and philosophers, including full quotations. Even better, Chesterton does not merely argue with them or critique them, but uses them as a starting point for his own rocketing, riotous thoughts, eventually exposing them, one after the other, to his topsy-turvy point of view, tipping them on their heads, shaking them, and seizing hold of the worthwhile things that fall out of their minds and trouser-pockets. It's a conceit Chesterton himself might have cherished; that of a robber who steals a man's coins, bites them to see which are counterfeit, and returns the rest to their owner--render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, after all. 

One heretic, however, is noticeably missing from Chesterton's lineup, in much the same way Spider-Man is noticeably missing from The Avengers. I can't help but squint my eyes and look around for George Orwell. Now, I doubt that this was even Orwell's hour; my best guess is that he came a generation later, considering that Chesterton's fiction influenced his own writing. But right from the introduction, entitled "On the Importance of Orthodoxy", I could just feel him hovering on the outskirts of Heretics like the anarchist Lucian Gregory around the Council of Days in The Man Who Was Thursday, absent chapter after chapter yet waiting for his turn to speak. Gregory's nemesis, incidentally, is the hero of Thursday and goes by the strange name of Syme, and Orwell appropriated the name for a rather greasy side character in 1984, whether in rebuke of Chesterton or in tribute it is difficult to say. Orwell's Syme understands the schemes of the Party better than any other character, and yet the very Syme (as Chesterton's Syme might have said "in his most exquisite Cockney") is firmly enthusiastic about their application. "Orthodoxy," states Orwell's character with relish, "means not thinking--not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness." Without saying a word--without even appearing--Orwell says, Chesterton, I beg the question. 

And Chesterton answers it. He makes reply to that which has not been spoken. "But if there be such a thing as mental growth," he writes,

it must mean the growth into more and more definite convictions, into more and more dogmas. The human brain is a machine for coming to conclusions; if it cannot come to conclusions it is rusty. … Man can be defined as an animal that makes dogmas. As he piles doctrine on doctrine and conclusion on conclusion in the formation of some tremendous scheme of philosophy and religion, he is, in the only legitimate sense of which the expression is capable of, becoming more and more human. When he drops one doctrine after another in a refined skepticism, when he declines to tie himself to a system, when he says that he has outgrown definitions, when he says that he disbelieves in finality, when, in his own imagination, he sits as God, holding no form of creed but contemplating all, then he is by that very process sinking slowly backwards into the vagueness of the vagrant animals and the unconsciousness of the grass. Trees have no dogmas. Turnips are singularly broad-minded.

There you have it--Orwell turned on his head. Orthodoxy is consciousness. If you're still not convinced--as neither were Chesterton's critics--you can, and should, read Orthodoxy, for it was written with you in mind. But if you merely wish for more feats in the same vein, if you wish to see Chesterton shake famous men and still more famous ideals by the ankles, I can suggest no better stop than Heretics.  Button your pockets.

Spoken in jest

I would like to announce that I finally gained an essential older sister skill: the ability to pretend not to know the punchlines of jokes that I actually learned years ago. I used to just whip out the punchline, thereby disappointing the six-year-old out of five minutes of joke-telling, but I'm older and wiser now.

Rebecca: How do you put an elephant in the refrigerator?

Me: (knowing perfectly well how you put an elephant in the refrigerator) I don't know, how?

Rebecca: (laughing so hard she doubles up like a jackknife) You open the refrigerator, you put the elephant in and you close the refrigerator!

This joke, by the way, has several sequels that rely on it. For example, How do you put a giraffe in the refrigerator? Here, the jokist is relying on the listener to say you open the refrigerator, put the giraffe in and close the refrigerator, so that's exactly what I said. Not so, impractical one. You open the refrigerator, take the elephant out, and only then will you have room for the giraffe.

There's another one, and another one after that. I don't care to transcribe them all, but suffice it to say that by the time she was done with those and had started out on another set, I felt as if I'd gone to a ghost-story session to humor the hosts and then realized that they were actually a Nordic tribe reciting the Prose Edda.

But actually, seeing her laugh made me laugh. And seeing me laugh made her laugh still more.

I think the secret to a good sisterly relationship in a large family is to encounter each other constantly, almost as if by accident, always parting on mutual good terms. I'm hoping that she hunted up Cecilia and is now learning more of my oldest jokes to bring to me.

I like to think that there's something deeply and elusively good about us human beings, that one of our natural instincts is to want to make other people laugh. Why is that? It's one of those touches of the divine in us, I guess.

Now, do you know any of these jokes? They're good ones. Go tell them to your sisters.

[By the way, the word jokist isn't in the dictionary, but I got it out of Krazy Kat, and if it was good enough for George Herriman it's good enough for me.]