‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’ by Ursula Le Guin

With a clamor of bells that set the swallows soaring, the Festival of Summer came to the

city Omelas, bright-towered by the sea. The rigging of the boats in harbor sparkled with

flags. In the streets between houses with red roofs and painted walls, between old

moss-grown gardens and under avenues of trees, past great parks and public buildings,

processions moved. Some were decorous: old people in long stiff robes of mauve and

grey, grave master workmen, quiet, merry women carrying their babies and chatting as

they walked. In other streets the music beat faster, a shimmering of gong and

tambourine, and the people went dancing, the procession was a dance. Children

dodged in and out, their high calls rising like the swallows’ crossing flights over the

music and the singing. All the processions wound towards the north side of the city,

where on the great water-meadow called the Green Fields boys and girls, naked in the

bright air, with mud-stained feet and ankles and long, lithe arms, exercised their restive

horses before the race. The horses wore no gear at all but a halter without bit. Their

manes were braided with streamers of silver, gold, and green. They flared their nostrils

and pranced and boasted to one another; they were vastly excited, the horse being the

only animal who has adopted our ceremonies as his own. Far off to the north and west

the mountains stood up half encircling Omelas on her bay. The air of morning was so

clear that the snow still crowning the Eighteen Peaks burned with white-gold fire across

the miles of sunlit air, under the dark blue of the sky. There was just enough wind to

make the banners that marked the racecourse snap and flutter now and then. In the

silence of the broad green meadows one could hear the music winding through the city

streets, farther and nearer and ever approaching, a cheerful faint sweetness of the air

that from time to time trembled and gathered together and broke out into the great

joyous clanging of the bells.

Joyous! How is one to tell about joy? How describe the citizens of Omelas?

They were not simple folk, you see, though they were happy. But we do not say the

words of cheer much any more. All smiles have become archaic. Given a description

such as this one tends to make certain assumptions. Given a description such as this

one tends to look next for the King, mounted on a splendid stallion and surrounded by

his noble knights, or perhaps in a golden litter borne by great-muscled slaves. But there

was no king. They did not use swords, or keep slaves. They were not barbarians. I do

not know the rules and laws of their society, but I suspect that they were singularly few.

As they did without monarchy and slavery, so they also got on without the stock

exchange, the advertisement, the secret police, and the bomb. Yet I repeat that these

were not simple folk, not dulcet shepherds, noble savages, bland utopians. They were

not less complex than us. 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. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to

admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can’t lick ‘em, join ‘em.

If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is

to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe a

happy man, nor make any celebration of joy. How can I tell you about the people of

Omelas? They were not naive and happy children–though their children were, in fact,

happy. They were mature, intelligent, passionate adults whose lives were not wretched.

O miracle! but I wish I could describe it better. I wish I could convince you. Omelas

sounds in my words like a city in a fairy tale, long ago and far away, once upon a time.

Perhaps it would be best if you imagined it as your own fancy bids, assuming it will rise

to the occasion, for certainly I cannot suit you all. For instance, how about technology? I

think that there would be no cars or helicopters in and above the streets; this follows

from the fact that the people of Omelas are happy people. Happiness is based on a just

discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what

is destructive. In the middle category, however–that of the unnecessary but

undestructive, that of comfort, luxury, exuberance, etc.–they could perfectly well have

central heating, subway trains, washing machines, and all kinds of marvelous devices

not yet invented here, floating light-sources, fuelless power, a cure for the common cold.

Or they could have none of that; it doesn’t matter. As you like it. I incline to think that

people from towns up and down the coast have been coming in to Omelas during the

last days before the Festival on very fast little trains and double-decked trams, and that

the train station of Omelas is actually the handsomest building in town, though plainer

than the magnificent Farmers’ Market. But even granted trains, I fear that Omelas so far

strikes some of you as goody-goody. Smiles, bells, parades, horses, bleh. If so, please

add an orgy. If an orgy would help, don’t hesitate. Let us not, however, have temples

from which issue beautiful nude priests and priestesses already half in ecstasy and

ready to copulate with any man or woman, lover or stranger, who desires union with the

deep godhead of the blood, although that was my first idea. But really it would be better

not to have any temples in Omelas–at least, not manned temples. Religion yes, clergy

no. Surely the beautiful nudes can just wander about, offering themselves like divine

soufflés to the hunger of the needy and the rapture of the flesh. Let them join the

processions. Let tambourines be struck above the copulations, and the glory of desire

be proclaimed upon the gongs, and (a not unimportant point) let the offspring of these

delightful rituals be beloved and looked after by all. One thing I know there is none of in

Omelas is guilt. But what else should there be? I thought at first there were not drugs,

but that is puritanical. For those who like it, the faint insistent sweetness of

 

drooz

may

perfume the ways of the city,

 

drooz

which first brings a great lightness and brilliance to

the mind and limbs, and then after some hours a dreamy languor, and wonderful visions

at last of the very arcana and inmost secrets of the Universe, as well as exciting the

pleasure of sex beyond belief; and it is not habit-forming. For more modest tastes I think

there ought to be beer. What else, what else belongs in the joyous city? The sense of

victory, surely, the celebration of courage. But as we did without clergy, let us do without

soldiers. The joy built upon successful slaughter is not the right kind of joy; it will not do;

it is fearful and it is trivial. A boundless and generous contentment, a magnanimous

triumph felt not against some outer enemy but in communion with the finest and fairest

in the souls of all men everywhere and the splendor of the world’s summer: this is what

swells the hearts of the people of Omelas, and the victory they celebrate is that of life. I

really don’t think many of them need to take

 

drooz

.

~ by rossbarham on 18 July, 2008.