The Left Hand Of Darkness (Hainish Cycle #4) - Ursula K. Le Guin Page 0,89
did not know was in him. After a while he too came to speak of isolation, of loneliness.
‘Your race is appallingly alone in its world. No other mammalian species. No other ambisexual species. No animal intelligent enough even to domesticate as pets. It must colour your thinking, this uniqueness. I don’t mean scientific thinking only, though you are extraordinary hypothesizers – it’s extraordinary that you arrived at any concept of evolution, faced with that unbridgeable gap between yourselves and the lower animals. But philosophically, emotionally: to be so solitary, in so hostile a world: it must affect your entire outlook.’
‘The Yomeshta would say that man’s singularity is his divinity.’
‘Lords of the Earth, yes. Other cults on other worlds have come to the same conclusion. They tend to be the cults of dynamic, aggressive, ecology-breaking cultures. Orgoreyn is in the pattern, in its way; at least they seem bent on pushing things around. What do the Handdarata say?’
‘Well, in the Handdara … you know, there’s no theory, no dogma … Maybe they are less aware of the gap between men and beasts, being more occupied with the likenesses, the links, the whole of which living things are a part.’ Tormer’s Lay had been all day in my mind, and I said the words,
Light is the left hand of darkness
and darkness the right hand of light.
Two are one, life and death, 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.
Ai brooded, and after some time he said, ‘You’re isolated, and undivided. Perhaps you are obsessed with wholeness as we are with dualism.’
‘We are dualists too. Duality is an essential, isn’t it? So long as there is myself and the other.’
‘I and Thou,’ he said. ‘Yes, it does, after all, go even wider than sex …’
‘Tell me, how does the other sex of your race differ from yours?’
He looked startled and in fact my question rather startled me; kemmer brings out these spontaneities in one. We were both self-conscious. ‘I never thought of that,’ he said. ‘You’ve never seen a woman.’ He used his Terran-language word, which I knew.
‘I saw your picture of them. The women looked like pregnant Gethenians, but with larger breasts. Do they differ much from your sex in mind behaviour? Are they like a different species?’
‘No. Yes. No, of course not, not really. But the difference is very important. I suppose the most important thing, the heaviest single factor in one’s life, is whether one’s born male or female. In most societies it determines one’s expectations, activities, outlook, ethics, manners – almost everything. Vocabulary. Semiotic usages. Clothing. Even food. Women … women tend to eat less … It’s extremely hard to separate the innate differences from the learned ones. Even where women participate equally with men in the society, they still after all do all the childbearing, and so most of the child-rearing …’
‘Equality is not the general rule, then? Are they mentally inferior?’
‘I don’t know. They don’t often seem to turn up mathematicians, or composers of music, or inventors, or abstract thinkers. But it isn’t that they’re stupid. Physically, they’re less muscular, but a little more durable than men. Psychologically—’
After he had stared a long time at the glowing stove, he shook his head. ‘Harth,’ he said, ‘I can’t tell you what women are like. I never thought about it much in the abstract, you know, and – God! – by now I’ve practically forgotten. I’ve been here two years … You don’t know. In a sense, women are more alien to me than you are. With you I share one sex, anyhow …’ He looked away and laughed, rueful and uneasy. My own feelings were complex, and we let the matter drop.
Yrny Thanern. Eighteen miles today, east-northeast by compass, on skis. We got clear of the pressure-ridges and crevasses in the first hour of pulling. Both got in harness, I ahead at first with the probe, but no more need for testing: the firn is a couple of feet thick over solid ice, and on the firn lie several inches of sound new snow from the last fall, with a good surface. Neither we nor the sledge broke through at all, and the sledge pulled so light that it was hard to believe we are still hauling about a hundred pounds apiece.