Ones Who Walk Away From
Omelas
- Ursula Le Guin
The
trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates,
of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil
interesting.
The “happiness as something rather
stupid” kind of makes sense to me in a weird and distorted way. When I sat back from the reading and thought
of all the wonderful times I had on a particular day, and then thought of that
one bad moment that almost triumphed all of the many good moments within an
instant, I thought, why?
The more I think about it, the bad
moment lingering over my head like a diffused gloomy cloud that had snuck up on
me, made me question why we even allow such things to get to us in a way that
could potentially ruin the rest of the day.
This child, living in its own
excrement’s, having been fed minimal food, constantly crying out for someone to
save “it” represents all the evil in the world in one human being everyone can
come to look at. Come to pity. Come to be saddened for. And come to be appreciative for. Guin mentally answered a question I had
lingering in my mind through much of the reading: why doesn’t someone retaliate and help save
the child?
It’s simple, “it is because of the child that they are so
gentle to children” (Guin 82). It is like though experiences are able to
make a person either more bitter or more gentle, this child acts as a punching
bag to all people of Omela and is a living reminder of the greatness that they
have in their life simply by being exposed to the filth, wretchedness and
degrading treatment of this one little human being. When we feel pain, it is only then that we
are more likely to better judge something should a similar situation come back
around in our lives. Experiences shape us
to be the people we have become on this present day. Because Omela is a type of Utopia, pain,
guilt, and evil doesn’t exist. They’re
unable to register or associate any kind of pain to themselves except for the pain
they feel for the child. And it’s dehumanizing
to think such a thought. Why is
happiness stupid? Why do we let pain
overtake our days on those blue kinds of times?
What about pain is so much more emotional-worthy that we allow it to linger
longer in our hearts, on our minds, and in our thoughts than happiness? Why can’t happiness be as interesting as
evil? What kick are we getting out of
something tragic and terrible? I do not
know. Perhaps Guin has an idea. Maybe the ones who left Omela have an answer
to that question.
Very interesting. What's the connection between your sense that we need pain to feel happiness and the quote with which you begin, that we consider happiness stupid, trivial, uninteresting?
ReplyDeleteTying back with the quote I initially sited at the top of the page, I feel as though humans need a sort of excitement and adrenaline rush within our daily lives. When bad things happen, it puts the rest of the day into a different lens and perspective. All of a sudden that becomes the height of our day, the pain, the anger, the whatever. Whenever we get mad, later on when we've ruined the whole rest of the and then part of the next we wonder why we even held onto it for so long--- well that's because it's interesting. It's intriguing, it's fascinating, and it gets our emotions riled up into a continuous cycle of nervousness about what we're going to do about it, angst in how we're going to handle it, etc. With happiness, it is like being gentle and being kind is a kind of bore. Why? I don't know. It is so easy to be mean, but I feel as though it is harder to be nice, especially when others are mean back to you. Maybe it's just laziness. Maybe it's lack of effort or lack of will to put in the effort. It could be many things. But nothing gets us riled up like a good ole nasty fight.
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