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A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be
An inward journey into writing and philosophical temporality via myth, cosmology and literary criticism from the late Ursula K. LeGuin.
In this refusal of futurity, Ursula K. Le Guin loosens the grip of Euclidean reason by taking a non-linear journey – full of side trips and reversals – through a counter-imaginary of place.
Drawing on Taoist thought, she shows a way out of the ‘hot’ yang motorcycle trip of colonial modernity and its doctrine of technological progress and future utopias. Instead, she advocates for what is ‘cold’, yielding, cyclical and resistant to abstraction. If we return, go round, go inward, go yinward, the Golden Age is right here, right now – invisible only to the forward-oriented mind.
A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be demonstrates that how we write is inseparable from how we imagine worlds. From alternative social imaginaries rehearsed within an anti-heroic literary style, utopia emerges as a practice of staying with and inhabiting the present.
In this refusal of futurity, Ursula K. Le Guin loosens the grip of Euclidean reason by taking a non-linear journey – full of side trips and reversals – through a counter-imaginary of place.
Drawing on Taoist thought, she shows a way out of the ‘hot’ yang motorcycle trip of colonial modernity and its doctrine of technological progress and future utopias. Instead, she advocates for what is ‘cold’, yielding, cyclical and resistant to abstraction. If we return, go round, go inward, go yinward, the Golden Age is right here, right now – invisible only to the forward-oriented mind.
A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be demonstrates that how we write is inseparable from how we imagine worlds. From alternative social imaginaries rehearsed within an anti-heroic literary style, utopia emerges as a practice of staying with and inhabiting the present.
20 pages, Unknown Binding
About the author
Ursula K. Le Guin
1,056 books32.6k followersUrsula K. Le Guin published twenty-two novels, eleven volumes of short stories, four collections of essays, twelve books for children, six volumes of poetry and four of translation, and has received many awards: Hugo, Nebula, National Book Award, PEN-Malamud, etc. Her recent publications include the novel Lavinia, an essay collection, Cheek by Jowl, and The Wild Girls. She lived in Portland, Oregon.
She was known for her treatment of gender (The Left Hand of Darkness, The Matter of Seggri), political systems (The Telling, The Dispossessed) and difference/otherness in any other form. Her interest in non-Western philosophies was reflected in works such as "Solitude" and The Telling but even more interesting are her imagined societies, often mixing traits extracted from her profound knowledge of anthropology acquired from growing up with her father, the famous anthropologist, Alfred Kroeber. The Hainish Cycle reflects the anthropologist's experience of immersing themselves in new strange cultures since most of their main characters and narrators (Le Guin favoured the first-person narration) are envoys from a humanitarian organization, the Ekumen, sent to investigate or ally themselves with the people of a different world and learn their ways.
She was known for her treatment of gender (The Left Hand of Darkness, The Matter of Seggri), political systems (The Telling, The Dispossessed) and difference/otherness in any other form. Her interest in non-Western philosophies was reflected in works such as "Solitude" and The Telling but even more interesting are her imagined societies, often mixing traits extracted from her profound knowledge of anthropology acquired from growing up with her father, the famous anthropologist, Alfred Kroeber. The Hainish Cycle reflects the anthropologist's experience of immersing themselves in new strange cultures since most of their main characters and narrators (Le Guin favoured the first-person narration) are envoys from a humanitarian organization, the Ekumen, sent to investigate or ally themselves with the people of a different world and learn their ways.
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July 7, 2026Highlights:
In The Shape of Utopia, speaking of our modern distrust of utopia, Robert Elliott said, “If the word is to be redeemed, it will have to be by someone who has followed utopia into the abyss which yawns behind the Grand Inquisitor's vision, and who then has clambered out on the other side.” (2)
Utopia is uninhabitable. As soon as we reach it it ceases to be utopia. (3)
In “assuming the role of creator,” we seek what Lao Tse calls “the profit of what is not,” rather than participating in what is. (3)
The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past. (4)
[W]hen a big power wants to deprive a small one of its national identity, of its self-consciousness, it uses what he calls the “method of organized forgetting.” And when a future-oriented culture impinges upon a present-centered one, the method becomes a compulsion. Things are forgotten wholesale. (4)
Chapter One of the American history — South or North America, national or regional — is usually short. Unusually short. In it, the “tribes” that “occupied” the area are mentioned and perhaps anecdotally described. (5)
We were not told in school in Berkeley that the history of California had the final solution for its first chapter. We were told that the Indians “gave way” before the “march of progress.” (5)
The utopia of the Grand Inquisitor
is the product of “the euclidean mind” (a phrase Dostoyevsky often used), which is obsessed by the idea of regulating all life by reason and bringing happiness to man whatever the cost (7)
Totalitarianism is not only hell, but also the dream of paradise — the age- old dream of a world where everybody would live in harmony, united by a single common will and faith, without secrets from one another . . . If totalitarianism did not exploit these archetypes, which are deep inside us all and rooted deep in all religions, it could never attract so many people, especially during the early phases of its existence. (8)
The rationalist utopia is a power trip. It is a montheocracy, declared by executive decree, and maintained by willpower; as its premise is progress, not process, it has no habitable present, and speaks only in the future tense. (8-9)
Persevering in one’s existence is the particular quality of the organism; it is not a progress towards achievement, followed by stasis, which is the machine’s mode, but an interactive, rhythmic, and unstable process, which constitutes an end in itself. (12)
The world coveted knowledge, . . . there were axes and saws to shape things, ink and plumblines to trim them, mallets and gouges to poke holes in them, and the world, muddled and deranged, was in great confusion. (14)
But side trips and reversals are precisely what minds stuck in forward gear most need (17)
But if this enrichment of one type of civilization occurs only at the cost of the destruction of the planet, then it seems fairly clear to me that to count upon technological advance for anything but technological advance is a mistake. (18)
Perhaps the utopist should heed this unsettling news at last. Perhaps the utopist would do well to lose the plan, throw away the map, get off the motorcycle, put on a very strange-looking hat, bark sharply three times, and trot off looking thin, yellow, and dingy across the desert and up into the digger pines.
I don’t think we’re ever going to get to utopia again by going forward, but only roundabout or sideways; because we’re in a rational dilemma, an either/or situation as perceived by the binary computer mentality, and neither the either nor the or is a place where people can live. Increasingly often in these increasingly hard times I am asked by people I respect and admire, “Are you going to write books about the terrible injustice and misery of our world, or are you going to write escapist and consolatory fantasies?” I am urged by some to do one — by some to do the other. I am offered the Grand Inquisitor’s choice. Will you choose freedom without happiness, or happiness without freedom? The only answer one can make, I think is: No. (19)
In The Shape of Utopia, speaking of our modern distrust of utopia, Robert Elliott said, “If the word is to be redeemed, it will have to be by someone who has followed utopia into the abyss which yawns behind the Grand Inquisitor's vision, and who then has clambered out on the other side.” (2)
Utopia is uninhabitable. As soon as we reach it it ceases to be utopia. (3)
In “assuming the role of creator,” we seek what Lao Tse calls “the profit of what is not,” rather than participating in what is. (3)
The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past. (4)
[W]hen a big power wants to deprive a small one of its national identity, of its self-consciousness, it uses what he calls the “method of organized forgetting.” And when a future-oriented culture impinges upon a present-centered one, the method becomes a compulsion. Things are forgotten wholesale. (4)
Chapter One of the American history — South or North America, national or regional — is usually short. Unusually short. In it, the “tribes” that “occupied” the area are mentioned and perhaps anecdotally described. (5)
We were not told in school in Berkeley that the history of California had the final solution for its first chapter. We were told that the Indians “gave way” before the “march of progress.” (5)
The utopia of the Grand Inquisitor
is the product of “the euclidean mind” (a phrase Dostoyevsky often used), which is obsessed by the idea of regulating all life by reason and bringing happiness to man whatever the cost (7)
Totalitarianism is not only hell, but also the dream of paradise — the age- old dream of a world where everybody would live in harmony, united by a single common will and faith, without secrets from one another . . . If totalitarianism did not exploit these archetypes, which are deep inside us all and rooted deep in all religions, it could never attract so many people, especially during the early phases of its existence. (8)
The rationalist utopia is a power trip. It is a montheocracy, declared by executive decree, and maintained by willpower; as its premise is progress, not process, it has no habitable present, and speaks only in the future tense. (8-9)
Persevering in one’s existence is the particular quality of the organism; it is not a progress towards achievement, followed by stasis, which is the machine’s mode, but an interactive, rhythmic, and unstable process, which constitutes an end in itself. (12)
The world coveted knowledge, . . . there were axes and saws to shape things, ink and plumblines to trim them, mallets and gouges to poke holes in them, and the world, muddled and deranged, was in great confusion. (14)
But side trips and reversals are precisely what minds stuck in forward gear most need (17)
But if this enrichment of one type of civilization occurs only at the cost of the destruction of the planet, then it seems fairly clear to me that to count upon technological advance for anything but technological advance is a mistake. (18)
Perhaps the utopist should heed this unsettling news at last. Perhaps the utopist would do well to lose the plan, throw away the map, get off the motorcycle, put on a very strange-looking hat, bark sharply three times, and trot off looking thin, yellow, and dingy across the desert and up into the digger pines.
I don’t think we’re ever going to get to utopia again by going forward, but only roundabout or sideways; because we’re in a rational dilemma, an either/or situation as perceived by the binary computer mentality, and neither the either nor the or is a place where people can live. Increasingly often in these increasingly hard times I am asked by people I respect and admire, “Are you going to write books about the terrible injustice and misery of our world, or are you going to write escapist and consolatory fantasies?” I am urged by some to do one — by some to do the other. I am offered the Grand Inquisitor’s choice. Will you choose freedom without happiness, or happiness without freedom? The only answer one can make, I think is: No. (19)
February 9, 2025
An essay everyone must read and internalize . The centre of the world is a bluff on the Klamath River, a rock in Mecca, a hole in the ground in Greece, nowhere, its circumference everywhere!
November 30, 2020
This essay gets into your head and maybe even down into your blood. Maybe it's because I assigned it as a companion text to a book my class is reading, which means I spent more time and attention with/on it than something that just struck my fancy, but LeGuin's essay is something to really get lost in and maybe found by? In the essay LeGuin separates out "cold" societies from "hot" societies and even nods at "warm" societies like those mentioned in Robert Nichols book, Daily Lives in Nghsi Altai and Austin Tappan Wright's tome, Islandia. I'm not going to explain these distinctions because explanations are the low road to understanding (actually, they might just be trompe d'oeils). I will say that both of these books contain communities that illustrate kinder, gentler (and more naturally in-tune and intuitive) worlds than the "hot" capitalist society that we live in today (and we are really a mindless lot!) and maybe that's the draw; LeGuin's ability to critique while she imagines alternative ways of living keeps the reader engaged with her thinking. Her ability to use multiple lenses--like the trickster, or the Tao, or the I Ching, or history, anthropology and literary texts--to think deeply about how we got here (and where here actually is) and how we might imagine a different kind of future left me wanting more. Donna Haraway once said that the beauty of good writing (and here I mean writing that makes you think) is that it "fucks with your head." Well, if you are looking for something to upend your worldview, then look no further.
Usà puyew usu wapiw!
Usà puyew usu wapiw!
October 7, 2021
It is always this essay at the end of the day
June 6, 2020
. . . Ideally, at its loftiest and most pure, the utopia aspires to (if it has never reached) the condition of the idyll as Schiller describes it — that mode of poetry which would lead man, not back to Arcadia, but forward to Elysium, to a state of society in which man would be at peace with himself and the external world.
November 30, 2020
"In one way or another, from Plato on, utopia has been the big yang motorcycle trip. Bright, dry, clear, strong, firm, active, aggressive, lineal, progressive, creative, expanding, advancing and hot. What would a yin utopia be? It would be dark, wet, obscure, weak, yielding, passive, circular, cyclical, peaceful, retreating, contracting and cold"
March 3, 2024
organized forgetting = discovery
what is a yin utopia?
missing california
what is a yin utopia?
missing california
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews