Kacee’s Reviews > The Left Hand of Darkness > Status Update

The gave with both hands. No doling out, no counting up. And so Estraven received what they gave us, as a lord among lords or a beggar among beggars, a man among his own people.

Estraven, however, was on the track of his luck, following what appeared to be a hunch or intuition, but may have been applied experience and reasoning.

“It’s found on Earth, and on Hain-Davenant, and on Chiffewar. It is yin and yang. Light is the left hand of darkness…how did it go? Light, dark. Fear, courage. Cold, warmth. Female, male. It is yourself, Therem. Both and one. A shadow on snow.”

He smiled. “With luck we shall make it, and without luck we shall not.”

It was what he said from the start. With all my anxieties, my sense of taking a last desperate gamble, and so on, I had not been realistic enough to believe him. Even now I thought, Surely when we’ve worked this hard -

But the Ice did not know how hard we worked.

“Well in the Handdara…you know, there’s no theory, no dogma…maybe they are less aware of the gap between men and beasts, being more occupied with the likenesses, the links, the whole of which living things are part.” Tormer’s Lay had been all day in my mind, and I said the words:

Light is the left hand of darkness
and darkness the right hand of light.

How does one hate a country or love one? … 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 for one’s country; is it hate for one’s uncountry?

Once he told me that, being so slow-thinking, he had to guide his acts by a general intuition of which way his “luck” was running, and that this intuition rarely failed him.

I never had a gift but one, to know when the great wheel gives to a touch, to know and act… a great delight it was to feel that certainty again, to know that I could steer my fortune and the world’s chance like a bobsled down the steep dangerous hour.

It is terrible thing, this kindness that human beings do not lose. Terrible, because when we are finally naked in the dark and cold, it is all we have.