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

Light is the left hand of darkness,
and darkness the right hand of light.
Two are one, lying together
like lovers in kemmer.
Like hands joined together,
like the end and the way.
.
My voice shook as I said the lines, for I remembered as I said them that in the letter my brother wrote me before his death he had quoted the same words.
...
"I and thou," he said.
"Yes. It does, after all, go even wider than sex."

-- I don't mean to be unjust, Estraven.
-- Yet you are. It is strange. I am the only man in all Gethen that has trusted you entirely. And I am the only man in Gethen that you have refused to trust.

I stood benumbed. The man was like an electric shock. Nothing to hold onto, and you don't know what hit you. He had certainly spoiled the mood of peaceful self-congratulation in which I had eaten breakfast.

He was, he said, "cutting down beneath the veneer of civilization." It is a durable, ubiquitous, specious metaphor, that one about veneer..hiding the nobler reality beneath. It can conceal a dozen fallacies..One of the most dangerous is the implication that civilization, being artificial, is unnatural. ...Of course there is no veneer; the process is one of growth....

The only thing that makes life possible, Genly, is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: Not knowing what happens next.

When I was a teen/young adult I read everything I could find by UKLeG - except this - maybe her most famous? - which i owned but just could not get into. I'm finally trying again - and ... although maybe I understand the subtleties better, alas the first quarter of the book is, well, not very interesting. Blasphemy! I'm sorry, Ursula! But I shall persevere ...