By Maria Popova (themarginalian.org)
“God is Change,” Octavia Butler wrote, wresting the poetic truth from the scientific fact that entropy is the ruling law of the universe.
We know that “to every thing there is a season,” that everything changes, everything passes, transitions from one state to another, from one stage to another — and yet, in our irrational longing for permanence, we try and try to hedge against change, denounce it as deterioration, dread it as a prelude to death.
Nowhere is this dread more acute than in the changes incurred by the body, that crucible of the soul. And no one has offered a greater salve for it than Ursula K. Le Guin (October 21, 1929–January 22, 2018) in one of the essays from her altogether indispensable 1989 collection Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places (public library), which also gave us her reflections on writing and where ideas come from.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Living through one of the profoundest changes a human body-soul can undergo — menopause, long cottoned in the euphemism “change of life” — she writes:
The woman who is willing to make that change must become pregnant with herself, at last. She must bear herself, her third self, her old age, with travail and alone. Not many will help her with that birth.
Although biologically particular to female bodies, Le Guin goes on to observe, menopause is a lens on the universal experience of change and our civilizational bias against old age. With her characteristic largehearted, vast-minded, mischievous wisdom, she writes:
What I would do is go down to the local Woolworth’s, or the local village marketplace, and pick an old woman, over sixty, from behind the costume jewelry counter or the betel-nut booth. Her hair would not be red or blonde or lustrous dark, her skin would not be dewy fresh, she would not have the secret of eternal youth. She might, however, show you a small snapshot of her grandson, who is working in Nairobi. She is a bit vague about where Nairobi is, but extremely proud of the grandson. She has worked hard at small, unimportant jobs all her life, jobs like cooking, cleaning, bringing up kids, selling little objects of adornment or pleasure to other people.
Art by Carson Ellis from What Is Love
With an eye to our troubled cultural model of aging — something Le Guin would address several years later in her exquisite meditation on the art of growing older — she adds:
But it won’t wash. She knows, though she won’t admit it, that Dr. Kissinger has not gone and will never go where she has gone, that the scientists and the shamans have not done what she has done. Into the space ship, Granny.
Complement with Simone de Beauvoir on how to grow old without letting life become a parody of itself, Bertrand Russell on the key to growing old contentedly, and Grace Paley’s almost unbearably wonderful instruction on the art of growing older, then revisit Le Guin on storytelling and the power of language, suffering and getting to the other side of pain, the magic of real human conversation, and the poetry of penguins.
