I picked up some nice stones on Millman Road on my walk, and arranged them on the big rocks beside my doorstep, where the blue spike flowers, whatever they are [adjuga, dummy!] make such a show and glow of purple-blue that welcomes me through the trees; the bees and bumblebees are always at them. I think, will the next person here like stones?
Tried to get to the Dark Tarn, after calling Charles about eight pm; missed it again—and again—and then finally almost fell into it. It is a fascinating place, with its black perfect mirror of the trees and sky, and no stir of its surface at all but the slight rings spreading out quick and silent from an insect touch. The night-heard frogs are down at Waterfall Pond. The ducks mostly hang out on those lower, sunny ponds. Black Pond is lonesome.
So far I have finished Lévi-Strauss, who had a considerable influence on my story; read parts of Clifford Geertz; read Leanne Hinton on Californian Indian languages; am avoiding Sanday, which might interfere with my story; started Garcilaso de la Vega last night. Geertz on common sense is good, and he has far more common sense than Lévi-Strauss—but L-S starts the mind—my mind, anyhow. He gets wheels turning I didn’t know were there. All his mythology however seems almost insane to me—the substitutions are like Freudian interpretations of “meaning,” a series of reflecting mirrors reflecting mirrors, with no standpoint outside from which to say Hold, enough!—Geertz is ineffably Ivyleague, a pity; it makes him smart-alecky sometimes, and though he is quite right to point out the curious reversal of fortune in so many academic careers, from the Big School as a graduate student to the Little School for the career, his assumption that Princeton is Paradise is appalling in an anthropologist. I was ashamed to read it. Those people really do believe in the hierarchy of intelligence and merit—I guess they have to? Of course better scholars are likely to come from the centers of scholarship than from the outskirts, it’s a matter of critical mass; but the preening, the snobbery, the prejudice, and the absolute indifference to the fact that, aside from specialised scholarship made available by wealth, there is no difference in the students at all: that’s unforgivable in an educated mind. It reveals a deep fault in the education. I suppose that’s really why I didn’t read the book methodically—I rather dislike Clifford Geertz. I don’t like being taught by a snob. Whereas Lévi-Strauss, for all his touching faith in a good boys’ lycée and the École Normale Supérieure, is not a snob, and I delight in learning from him. I can handle aristocrats, I just can’t take parvenus. Ha!
5:25 pm.
The curious comparison followed: Geertz is to Lévi-Strauss as a raccoon is to a unicorn.
Well!
Lunch was brought in the basket with the pretty cloth by the pretty Jennifer. Her smile is welcome after Laura’s overworked look, which makes me feel guilty—though Laura has a lovely smile which I caught a couple of times at dinner (from which she removes herself as much as Jennifer joins in). Jennifer is an “easy” person, Laura is not. The lunches are a bit odd. A marvelous green salad today, and a vegetable soup made from last night’s shepherd’s pie, with chicken; no bread. Never. Bread is not eaten, and drink is up to you. I have taken to taking an egg and English muffin for my breakfast, and thank goodness Judith told me to bring tea. There’s herbals but no tea at all, only vile “decaf.” The decaf coffee, on the other hand, is lovely, at night after dinner.
It went on being nice, and I scuttled off to the ponds and tried a sketch of the Far Blue Towers, which I assume are downtown Seattle, and another one of the reeds in Waterfall Pond.
I am nearing the end of my story, which may be accommodating itself to my time here—I suspect it of doing so. But it’s 41 pages now and should not go on forever, surely? It leaps about strangely, as it is. I think I know what it’s about and then I am not certain. I had some insights when I tried the little low place with its little low window, at the east end of the cabin, at the foot of the ladder to the loft, to the right of the door. The woman who showed her mother this cabin on Saturday said that’s where she mostly wrote in her cabin when she was here. It seems a bit dark to me, and odd, but it is a good space; from anywhere one gets beautiful views and angles on the rest of the cabin, and the view from there is particularly fine. It just would seem odd to me to stay in the dark, with the windowseat offering me all the glade, the trees, and sky. And the rabbits. Two last night, very methodical rabbits.
One more full day. The “test” aspect got passed in all senses by Saturday; in the writing aspect, by the second day. I feel some lingering reservation, which may well be nothing more than Charles’s negativity about my coming here, acting as a drag on me. I think that this is what I think: that this is a wonderful place for any woman who writes. So long as—So long as it doesn’t replace living in the world most people live in.—Puritan. Stupid Puritan.
What would men have written in the log-book of Cedar Cottage? I do wonder. The sweet gratitude and pleasure of the women who have stayed here flows like honey from the horn. Take my dear cabin, it is yours, they all say. I was happy, be happy, they say. I wrote, they say—Write!
DAY 7, 26 April.
Noon.
Woke and lay and storydreamed till 6:40; got up and wrote and wrote and came to an end—which may or may not be the end—of the story I began my first full day here, which I’m calling “A Man of the People.” Walked up to the Dark Tarn and round down to the herb garden, where I pencil-sketched Deer Lagoon. It’s grey and rather chilly.
Last night A., L., and J. read their work, and we sat around till past eight in the farm parlour. B. put on her Vampire Teeth. They were all going to go to the Dark Tarn to howl at the full moon when it came over the trees; but if they did I didn’t hear them. [Later: they all said they did.] I was luxuriating in the sleeping loft and had no wish to howl.
At two this afternoon I had a shower in the lovely bath house, that work of art, and coming back spoke to Nancy, who was chopping wood. Linda came by soon after for a cup of tea and to talk—about writing something about Hedgebrook (i.e., this journal)—we were not very conclusive. At four Nancy and Trece Greene arrived, and Nancy took us on her Woods Walk, showing me a couple of amazing places in the Labyrinth that I never had discovered or suspected: some cedars snaking themselves strangely along from a central root-source and then rising up straight; and a lovely fir grove. Back by Otter Pond and the great old cedar on the east side of it, to Cedar House. Trece had tea and I had whiskey, till we walked down to farewell dinner. Lots of rice and laughing. A. gave us all frog stationery she has drawn and printed. So back through the still, mild, chill, grey evening to Cedar House, to pack, and sleep one more night.
I should think that any stay here would be important in one way or another to most women; and a long stay could be a crossroads to a young woman; an utter blessing to any woman in genuine need of solitude to write or to complete a spiritual passage. My week here (that seemed so long at the beginning, and now seems both very long and very short)—the importance of it to me lies, I think now, mostly in the great beauty and peacefulness of the house and the forest and the farm—a place apart, “enisled”—seclusion, freedom, luxury, rest, and the touching beauty of it above all.
If I had not found a story to write, I wonder how it would have been? I worked, I worked, the joy of my life. So all the beauty, the sunlight, the rabbits, the deer, the walks, the good fellowship of the younger women, the sweet deep silence of the nights, and the waking to see the treetops through the tulip window of the loft in the first light—all that was gravy.
But, if I had not been here, in all probability I would not have written this story. It took the whole week; and it was a response to considerable pressure: “I am here to write, I brought this empty notebook—I need a story!” So Cedar House, Hedgebrook, gave me the story.
And the gravy.
Trece is to come by to drive me home at eight tomorrow morning. Chau mi casita querida!
Acknowledgments
The publication information for the book reviews in this collection
is as follows:
Margaret Atwood, Moral Disorder. Published in the Guardian, September 2006.
Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood. Published in the Guardian, July 2009.
Margaret Atwood, Stone Mattress. Published in the Financial Times, September 2014.
J. G. Ballard, Kingdom Come. Published in the Guardian, July 2006.
Roberto Bolaño, Monsieur Pain. Published in the Guardian, January 2011.
T. C. Boyle, When the Killing’s Done. Published in the Guardian, April 2011.
Geraldine Brooks, People of the Book. Published in the Guardian, January 2008.
Italo Calvino, The Complete Cosmicomics. Published in the Guardian, June 2009.
Margaret Drabble, The Sea Lady. Published in the Guardian, July 2006.
Carol Emshwiller, Ledoyt. First published by the Women’s Review of Books in 1997; revised in 2002.
Alan Garner, Boneland. Published in the Guardian, August 2012.
Kent Haruf, Benediction. Published in the Literary Review, February 2014.
Kent Haruf, Our Souls at Night. Written in 2016, not previously published.
Tove Jansson, The True Deceiver. Published in the Guardian, December 2009.
Barbara Kingsolver, Flight Behavior. Published in the Literary Review, December 2012.
Chang-Rae Lee, On Such a Full Sea. Published in the Guardian, February 2014.
Doris Lessing, The Cleft. Published in the Guardian, March 2007.
Donna Leon, Suffer the Little Children. Published in the Guardian, April 2007.
Yann Martel, The High Mountains of Portugal. Written in 2016, not previously published.
Chine Miéville, Embassytown. Published in the Guardian, April 2011.
China Miéville, Three Moments of an Explosion. Published in the Guardian, July 2015.
David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks. Published in the Guardian, September 2014.
Jan Morris, Hav. Published in the Guardian, June 2006.
Julie Otsuka, The Buddha in the Attic. Published in the Guardian, December 2011.
Salman Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence. Published in the Guardian Unlimited, July 2014.
Salman Rushdie, Two Years, Eight Months, and Twenty-Eight Nights. Written in 2015, not previously published.
José Saramago, Raised from the Ground. Published in the Guardian, October 2012.
José Saramago, Skylight. Published in the Guardian, June 2014.
Sylvia Townsend Warner, Dorset Stories. Written in 2006. Not previously published.
Jo Walton, Among Others. Published in the Guardian, March 2013.
Jeanette Winterson, Stone Gods. Published in the Guardian, August 2007.
Stefan Zweig, The Post Office Girl. Published in the Literary Review, March 2009.
About the Author
Ursula Kroeber Le Guin was born in 1929 in Berkeley, and lives in Portland, Oregon. As of 2017, she will have published twenty-three novels, twelve collections of stories, five books of essays, thirteen books for children, nine volumes of poetry and four of translation. Among her numerous honors and awards are the Hugo, Nebula, National Book Award, PEN-Malamud, Library of Congress Living Legend, and National Book Foundation Medal. Recent publications include Steering the Craft, The Found and the Lost: The Collected Novellas, and Late in the Day: Poems 2010–2014. Her website is ursulakleguin.com.
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