Very Far Away from Anywhere Else

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  It had never occurred to me before that music and thinking are so much alike. In fact you could say music is another way of thinking, or maybe thinking is another kind of music.

  They talk about the patience scientists have to have, and how scientific work is 99 percent drudgery and repetition and neatness and making perfectly sure. And it is. I had a very good bio teacher last year, Miss Capswell and she and I did some lab work after school in spring term. We were working with bacteria. It was exactly the same thing Natalie was doing with the viola. Everything had to be right. You didn't know for sure what was going to happen when you finally did get it all right: you had to get it right to find out. Miss Capswell and I were trying to confirm an experiment reported in Science magazine last year. Natalie was trying to confirm what Bach had reported to some church congregation in Germany two hundred and fifty years ago. If she did it absolutely right, it might turn out to be true. To be the truth.

  That was maybe the most important thing that happened to me that day—understanding that.

  After about forty minutes of practicing, she started on a sticky fast part and fought with it for a while and got mad at it and went YAARKHH! on the strings and quit. She sat down on the rug too, and we talked. I told her what I had been thinking about music and thinking, and she liked it; but she asked didn't a scientist have to keep feeling out of his thinking, whereas in music they were the same thing. That didn't seem exactly right to me, but we couldn't figure out just what did happen in science. I told her about working with Miss Capswell and how neat it had been, because this was the first person I had ever met who just took it for granted you were interested in ideas. Working with her in the lab had been just about the first time in my life I didn't feel like an outsider, or self-conscious, or fake; and it was really because of that that I'd realized that no matter how I tried, I was never going to be an extravert, or popular, or one of the group, so I might as well quit trying. But Miss Capswell got transferred to another school over the summer, and when I came back in the fall, school was even worse than it had been before, in a way, because I wasn't even tormenting myself with trying to be part of it anymore, so there wasn't anything left at all. I didn't tell Natalie all that, that evening, of course. But we did talk some about school, about conformity and why it is hard to be different. She said it seemed like the only choices offered were to want to be what other people were, or to be what other people wanted you to be. Either to conform, or to obey. And that got me onto the car, and college, and my parents. She listened, and she understood perfectly about the car, but not so well about college. She said, "Well, OK, but you wouldn't actually give up going to the place where you belong, and go to a school you don't want? I mean, why?"

  "Because they expect me to."

  "But they expect wrong, don't they?"

  "I don't know. There's money, too."

  "There's loans and scholarships."

  "There's a lot of competition."

  "You're telling me!" she said, fairly sarcastically. "So you have to compete. All you can do is try, isn't it?"

  She was hard to answer. But not the way my parents were. They were hard to answer because you could never get to the real point with them, and she was hard to answer because shed got there first. But at least she didn't leave me fighting a piece of phantom pot roast. Her mother brought us up some other kind of weird tea, and we talked some more, just sort of nothing, friendly talk; and at ten-thirty I left, figuring she might want to practice some more, because she'd said she tried to practice three hours a day. I drove around a few blocks and got home and went to bed. I was really tired. Like I'd walked a hundred miles. But the fog was gone. I went to bed and straight to sleep.

  ALL THAT WAS on November 25th, like I said. Between then and New Year's I got to know Natalie Field a good deal better. We got along well. Whenever we got together we started talking, and we talked like crazy for as long as we had. We didn't often have very long, because she was really busy. She gave lessons after school five days a week, and on Saturdays she worked from nine to two at a music school, teaching something called Orff Method to little kids. Nights she practiced, and Sundays she played in a chamber group, and practiced, and went to church. Mr. Field was a very religious man. No, I withdraw that. Mr. Field was a very churchgoing man. I don't know if he was a religious man or not. Natalie was a religious person, and she probably got it from him, but she didn't like church at all. She went, though. She had thought a lot about it and decided it was more important to her father than it was to her, so she'd give in on that point, as long as she lived at home. She thought things like that out. Sometimes going to church made her resentful, but she didn't get all bogged down and tied up in her resentment, the way I did over the car. She just swore some about the dumb minister and went on with what she had to do next. She had her priorities straight.

  She was almost eighteen, older than me. That can make a big difference at our age, especially since girls are supposed to mature faster psychologically than boys, but it didn't matter to us. We just got along well. She was the first person I ever met I could really talk to, and talk with. The more we talked, the more there was to talk about. We both had last period free, and we could hang around and talk then till she had to go to her lessons; and sometimes in the evening I went over, and then there was Christmas vacation.

  I think it wasn't till vacation that I found out she wasn't studying to be a professional violist. She played viola and violin and piano, but what she wanted to be was a composer. She worked on the instruments so she could earn money teaching, and get into music schools, and later on teach or play in an orchestra for a living, but that was all just means to an end. It took me quite a while to find that out, because she was shy of talking about it. I'm not sure she'd ever told anybody about it except maybe her mother. She was so self-confident and realistic about her playing, I didn't realize at first that that covered up a whole area where she wasn't self-confident, and was ambitious and idealistic and ignorant and unsure, so that it was hard for her to talk about. But it was the real center of her whole life.

  "There aren't any women composers," she said once. It was Christmas vacation, and we'd been able to see each other several times. We were walking up in the park that day. Its the best thing in our city, a huge park, a forest, with long hiking trails. We were walking the fat off Mrs. Fields dog, a poop a keep named Orville. It was raining.

  I know it is supposed to be Peke-A-Poo, but that dog was a poop a keep.

  "No women composers? There's got to be some," I said. She said there were, but they didn't amount to very much, or if they did you couldn't find out, because if they wrote operas they didn't get staged, and if they wrote symphonies they didn't get performed. "But if they were good, really good," she said, "they would get played, I think. There just haven't been any absolutely first-class ones."

  "Why not?" It seemed peculiar when you thought about it. Popular music has a lot of women composers now, and most kinds of singing have always been half women; anyhow music doesn't seem male, it seems human.

  "I don't know why not. Maybe I'll find out why not," she said rather grimly. "But I think it's prejudice and stuff. Like the self-whatsit-thingo you told me."

  "Self-fulfilling prophecy?"

  "Yeah. Everybody says you can't, and so you believe it. It was that way in literature, till enough women stopped listening and just wrote enough great novels that the men really looked like idiots if they went on saying women couldn't write novels. The trouble is, women have to be absolutely first class to get where third-class men get. It's weird. I guess it's the same thing as your levelers."

  Talking with her, I had worked out this theory, see, about what it was that made me feel so much an outsider. Why it is that people make heroes out of people who are good at sports or politics, but have this scorn and resentment against people who are good at thinking. Unless the ideas they think turn directly into money or power, in which case they're heroes again. Anti-intellectualism seemed to be
part of it, but not all of it; it was this sort of pulling things all down to the level where everybody is the same, like ants, that I called "leveling," although these days it gets called by some fancy names like anti-elitism, and some really out of place names like democracy, names you shouldn't even say unless you're willing to think about them.

  "Male chauvinist levelers?" I said.

  "Yeah, right on," she said. Orville came back down the trail, running like a fourteen-inch-high pregnant cow, and got mud all over my jeans, and then got mud all over her jeans.

  "What kind of music do you want to write?" I asked her.

  She tried to tell me, but I can't tell you because frankly I understood less than half of it. I mean if you don't know pretty clearly what a tonal row is, you are not going to understand somebody explaining what's wrong with the theories about tonal rows. And I didn't want to interrupt her and make her explain, because it wasn't easy for her to talk about it at all, but she wanted to, very badly. She talked about order and humanity in music, and machine music, and random music, and I sort of understood that, but I didn't know enough about modern music to be sure I understood. But some of it I could make sense of, because it was very close basically to some things I'd been reading by some modern psychologists about identifying with machinery—people thinking of the world, and themselves, as machines. Schizophrenics now often do that literally. They have to be plugged into a power source in order to function, and they receive instructions from a Great Computer. Reading about them I had thought about some of the rock groups with their electronic instruments and mikes and consoles and the stage full of wires, and the auditorium full of people who plug in emotionally with them, all depending on one wire from the power plant. Who says schizophrenics are crazy?

  It was something along that line Natalie was after—getting music away from its dependence on machinery, but by machinery she also meant the big symphony orchestra and the big opera production. But she didn't mean going back to "simplicity," the folk singer with a dulcimer and a fake Kentucky accent. She said complexity was essential to high art, but the complexity ought to be in the music, not in the means of production. I said that sounded like Einstein doing it all with a pencil and some paper and his head, instead of a fifty-million-dollar accelerator; accelerators were very neat, but basically Einstein was even neater, and a lot cheaper. She really liked that. We turned back, and the sun came out and made all the wet forest look like crystal, and we went to her place, and she played me one of her compositions on the piano.

  She explained that it wasn't for piano but for a string trio, and she sang the violin part in places. It didn't really seem very complex, or anyhow not difficult; there was a beautiful short tune in it that kept coming back, or pieces of it would come back, when things got rough. She was very tense, nervous, playing it; she was high. At the end she slammed the cover over the keys and said, "The end's all wrong." And then she had to go across town to give a lesson.

  Natalie Field is very hard to describe. I guess anybody is. But typing up what I said about her into the tape recorder, I'm afraid it makes her sound pompous. I guess when we talked we were both pompous, part of the time. Because we were talking about things that were very important to us, for the first time—saying stuff we'd never had anybody to say to. So it all sort of poured out unfiltered. And she was definitely a strong-minded person, self-reliant and very decisive. But then, because she'd worked so hard—and she really had, ever since she was six when she had taught herself the piano so that her parents had been sort of forced to start getting her lessons—because she'd worked so long and hard at one thing, music, she was pretty young and green about some other things. For instance she hardly ever went to movies. I took her to a Woody Allen, the one where he throws the cello out the window, and I thought she was going to get sick she laughed so much. And the way she laughed at me when I clowned; she wanted to laugh, she needed to. All I had to do was go into the ape act, and she was helpless. Her father was this grim, fundamentalist type, her mother was always calm and serene, her older sisters had both married and moved away, she worked and taught and practiced and composed and dreamed music. There wasn't anything funny, anything ridiculous in her life, till I showed up. What I realize now is that she needed me just as badly as I needed her.

  But I fouled it up. Because I got my priorities wrong.

  Before that, though, there was the day at the beach. The good one.

  It was the day before New Year's Eve. It had stopped raining, and gotten cold and clear and still. Heart of winter. When I woke up early, the sun was shining the way it does way up high in the mountains, flooding down light out of a dark blue sky. I knew Natalie had the whole day free, because some of her pupils weren't taking lessons during vacation. So I called her up, and we decided to go over to the coast, in the new car.

  It was OK with Mrs. Field. She seemed to think I was OK, as far as I could tell. Mr. Field, who I gathered was extremely Biblical about young men who cast their eyes upon his daughters, was working—he was a building contractor—and didn't get home till around six. We'd be back before then, and what he didn't know wouldn't damage him irreparably. It was fine with my parents. All they knew was I was driving over to the coast with a friend. Mother was delighted that I had a friend, any friend, and dad was delighted that I was doing something, anything, with the car. So everybody was happy, and we left at nine with a sack lunch that Natalie had fixed.

  It's about ninety miles over to the coast and ten miles south to Jade Beach, where I wanted to go. It's a cove between big headlands, not too windy, and not crowded even in summer. In winter it was completely deserted. Where there was some snow on the road in the Coast Range, I drove pretty slow, so we got there about noon. The sky was completely clear and very bright; the Pacific was dark blue with high white breakers coming in fast. It was cold, but down on the beach the only wind was the wind that came in with the breakers. The spray hit you like fine rock salt. After a while you could take off your coat, if you kept moving. We did. We horsed around in the shallow breakers for a long time, and kept getting a little bit farther out. The water was like ice, but after the first moments of agony, it felt good, in a numbing sort of way. I got wet from the neck down, Natalie got wet from the waist down. We came back up to a dry hollow by a big driftwood log, and built a fire to get dry and eat lunch by. We ate a lot of lunch. I unbelievable amount. When Natalie packed a sack lunch, she didn't cut corners. I don't know how many sandwiches there were to start with, but there were none to end with, and I ate three bananas, an orange, and two apples. I might not have eaten so many bananas except that they became the cause of much youthful mirth and innocent merriment. Honestly, I don't know why a basically sane person like Natalie was such a fall guy for the ape act. But true appreciation is the spur of genius, and the ape act definitely reached its highest moments that afternoon, with the assistance of the bananas.

  Then we did some cliff climbing and some rock throwing, and built a sand castle. Then we came back and built up the fire, because it was getting colder, and watched the tide get closer to our sand castle, and talked We didn't talk about problems, or parents, or automobiles, or ambitions. We talked about life. We decided that it was no good asking what is the meaning of life, because life isn't an answer, life is the question, and you, yourself, are the answer. And the sea was there, forty feet away and coming closer, and the sky over the sea, and the sun going down the sky. And it was cold, and it was the high point of my life.

  I'd had high points before. Once at night walking in the park in the rain in autumn. Once out in the desert, under the stars, when I turned into the earth turning on its axis. Sometimes thinking, just thinking things through. But always alone. By myself. This time I was not alone. I was on the high mountain with a friend. There is nothing, there is nothing that beats that. If it never happens again in my life, still I can say I was there once.

  While we were talking we were sifting through the sand around where we sat for bits of jade and a
gate. Natalie found a black rock, flat, perfectly oval, and sand-polished. I found a lens-shaped agate, white and yellow; you could see the sun through it. She gave me the black rock, and I gave her the agate.

  While we were driving home, she fell asleep. That was neat. That was like coming back down the high mountain quietly in the sunset, I drove well and carefully, quietly.

  It was way past seven when we got home. We'd let time go on the beach. She slipped out of the car, still looking sleepy and windburned, and said, "It was beautiful, Owen," and went into her house smiling.

  THE FIELDS WENT out of town over New Year's, and I didn't see Natalie till the day started again. I waited for the bus with her. While we were hanging around there, I said I hoped her getting home late hadn't made any trouble with her father. She said, "Oh, well." And we talked about Ornstein's book; she was interested in his explanations about the silent half of the brain, where the music is.

  But if I wanted to blame anybody but myself for what went wrong, I guess I would blame Natalies father.

  When she said "Oh, well," of course it meant that he had made some kind of stink, and she didn't want to talk about it, she preferred to ignore it or forget it. But what had he made a stink about, anyhow? She goes to the beach and eats lunch and finds an agate and comes home. This is wicked? This is sin? What did Mr. Field have on his mind, anyhow?