“Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.”
— Ursula K. Le Guin
In The Lathe of Heaven, the weird, wise, and beautiful book by Ursula K. Le Guin, George Orr is a man whose dreams literally change the world. His curse is that he’s the only one who remembers the way things used to be before. Everyone around him continues as if all is well, while he is left a man apart, an alien in a world of his own making.
In time, there are those who come to understand his power, those who try to use it for their own ends, but it is a fool’s errand. The subconscious is a fey and fickle thing, beyond the bounds of reason. In one tragic scene, George’s psychiatrist attempts to get George to dream of a world of racial harmony, but when he wakes, he discovers a world of chilling, grey-skinned uniformity; a world where the only woman he has ever loved, a woman with biracial ancestry, has ceased to exist.
If you haven’t read this book yet, go read it. It was written in 1971, and it is undenidably a product of it’s time, imperfect, dated, incomplete. But there is a deep vein of wisdom that runs through its core, and there are so many lessons we might draw from it; so many ways to interpret the metaphor that is George Orr.
Here’s one way: the messy complexity and unpredictability of George’s subconscious mind mirrors the messy complexity and unpredictability of human society.
We too often believe that if only this one thing were different, everything would be okay. If only more of us voted. If only the president would stop tweeting. If only we had more regulations. If only more people thought like me. If only we could go back to the way things used to be.
On and on and on, all of us desperate for some panacea to make it all right, never taking into account the interconnected truth of our lives, the ownership each of us has to take right here and right now. George Orr is, perhaps, this naiveté personified. Just as he comes to terms with the perils and limits of his power, so must we.
“[They say] the end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.”
— from the ‘Lathe of Heaven’
The civil rights activists of the sixties dreamed too. They dreamed of a world where all people were given equal respect and equal measure under the rule of law, regardless of skin color. But they understood that dreams cannot be made real simply by pointing fingers and casting blame. There is no real change unless we get into the mess of life and figure out how to change it.
So they went out and lived for that dream. And they died for it too. The possibilities they gave us were formed not merely from hopes and dreams, but from bruises, broken bones, and bloody bullet wounds. They made us a new world with their very lives.
Our mistake as a society was thinking that their work was finished. That it could ever be finished. For decades now, we have nourished ourselves off the bread they made for us, without noticing how it grew stale, without noticing the mold that took root.
But there is a new generation of leaders calling to us, reminding us that we can change the world if only we’re willing to stop dreaming and start living. As we watch the worst of ourselves played out in places like Sanford and Ferguson and Charlottesville, we must square oursevles to the truth: the work is not done. It will never be done.
Because love doesn’t just sit there. It has to be made; remade all the time, made new.
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