walls

My boss, a couple months ago, asked me somewhat randomly if I had ever read any Ursula K. LeGuin. Little did she know that Shevek was one of the greatest heroes I had as a teenager; that when Cindy and I made up (or started to make up) an entire language, I called myself Shevek-am, or Little Shevek; that I realized Dave and I would be lifelong friends the first night we met and somehow randomly bonded over The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas; that The Eye of the Heron made me cry; that Julie used to tease me about skimming through The Wind's Twelve Quarters at the drop of a hat; that Orsinian Tales has been on my favorite books list since the summer of '89 when I unearthed a worn-out, dogeared copy in the used bookstore in Pullman, WA; that I've been meaning to re-read The Farthest Shore (having read it at the tender age of 10) ever since first coming up against death, but have never quite gotten around to it.

Needless to say, while I acknowledged that indeed I have been known to read a bit of LeGuin, I thankfully managed to leave it at that.

There is a sign on 125th Street, just east of Amsterdam Avenue, that I walk by every so often on my way to the train. I smile every time I see this sign because it makes me think of The Dispossessed. I was walking along 125th Street with Nick not too long ago, after one of our weekly dinners, and I finally stopped and took a picture. And I laughed because of all the people I could be walking with, it was Nick, and he got it.

"There was a wall. It did not look important. It was built of uncut rocks roughly mortared. An adult could look right over it, and even a child could climb it. Where it crossed the roadway, instead of having a gate it degenerated into mere geometry, a line, an idea of a boundary. But the idea was real. It was important. For seven generations there had been nothing in the world more important than that wall.

Like all walls it was ambiguous, two-faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side of it you were on.

Looked at from one side, the wall enclosed a barren sixty-acre field called the port of Anarres. On the field there were a couple large gantry cranes, a rocket pad, three warehouses, a truck garage, and a dormitory. The dormitory looked durable, grimy, and mournful; it had no gardens, no children; plainly nobody lived there or was even meant to stay there long. It was in fact a quarantine. The wall shut in not only the landing field but also the ships that came down out of space, and the men that came on the ships, and the worlds they came from, and the rest of the universe. It enclosed the universe, leaving Anarres outside, free.

Looked at from the other side, the wall enclosed Anarres: the whole planet was inside it, a great prison camp, cut off from other worlds and other men, in quarantine."














If a thing can be neither inside nor outside the wall, where can it be?