Gerhard’s Reviews > The Dispossessed > Status Update

The great physicist was misled by a disaffected group, for a while. Intellectuals are always being led astray, because they think about irrelevant things like time and space and reality, things that have nothing to do with real life, so they are easily fooled by wicked deviationists.

Things change, change. You cannot have anything…. And least of all can you have the present—unless you accept with it the past and the future. Not only the past but also the future, not only the future but also the past! Because they are real: only their reality makes the present real. You will not achieve or even understand Urras unless you accept the reality, the enduring reality, of Anarres.

“But I’m luckier. A scientist can pretend that his work isn’t himself, it’s merely the impersonal Truth. An artist can’t hide behind the Truth. He can’t hide anywhere.”

...this instant the difference between this planet and that one, between Urras and Anarres, was no more significant to him than the difference between two grains of sand on the shore of the sea. There were no more abysses, no more walls.

I will not regret this separation. It has allowed me to see that I had begun to give less, as if I possessed you and you me and there was nothing more to be done. The real fact has nothing to do with ownership. What we do is assert the wholeness of Time.

And in the eyes you see the splendour, the splendour of the human spirit. Because our men and women are free, possessing nothing they are free. And you the possessors are possessed.

You fear we might bring back the revolution, the old one, the real one, the revolution for justice which you began and then stopped half-way. Here in A-Io they fear me less because they have forgotten the revolution. They don’t believe in it any more, they think if people can possess enough things they will be content to live in prison. But I will not believe that. I want the walls down.

“Hasn’t your man been in yet?” said Pae.
“My man?”
“The servant. He was supposed to bring you some things.”