In The Left Hand of Darkness, a Terran named Genly Ai travels as envoy to the planet Gethen, known as “Winter” for its ice age climate. There, he visits one of the Fastnesses, where a reclusive people practice foretelling. He asks a question, and is answered, and later talks with Faxe, the weaver of the foretellers, about the experience:
“You don’t see yet, Genry, why we perfected and practice Foretelling?”
“No—”
“To exhibit the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question.”
I pondered that a good while, as we walked side by side in the rain, under the dark branches of the Forest of Otherhord. Within the white hood, Faxe’s face was tired and quiet, its light quenched. Yet he still awed me a little. When he looked at me with his queer, kind, candid eyes, he looked at me out of a tradition thirteen thousand years old: a way of thought and a way of life so old, so well established, so integral and coherent as to give a human being the unself-consciousness, the authority, the completeness of a wild animal, a great strange creature who looks straight at you out of his eternal present....
“The unknown,” said Faxe’s soft voice in the forest, “the unforetold, the unproven, that is what life is based on. Ignorance is the ground of thought. If it were proven that there is no God, there would be no religion. No Handdara, no Yomesh, no hearthgods, nothing. But also if it were proven that there is a God, there would be no religion....Tell me, Genry, what is known? What is sure, predictable, inevitable—the one certain thing you know concerning your future, and mine?”
“That we shall die.”
“Yes. There’s really only one question that can be answered, Genry, and we already know the answer....The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.”
Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness, page 70
In despair at a critical review, Virginia Woolf turned to her husband and asked,
Well, then, what should she do about such abuse? Pay no attention, get on with her work. And if she couldn’t work, what then? If such attacks upset her so that she couldn’t write—what then, Mongoose, what then? Then she should read until she could write again; that’s what books were for.
Nunez, Mitz, page 46
(“Mongoose” was the pet name Virginia used for Leonard; he called her “Mandrill.” Mitz is fiction, but it draws from the Woolf’s diaries and other contemporary sources and is, for my purposes, true enough. All prose is fiction, as Le Guin teaches us.)
Virginia, of course, knew well the ways that reading could summon us to our own wills. Here a similar note is echoed in a passage in A Room of One’s Own:
Nature seems, very oddly, to have provided us with an inner light by which to judge of the novelist’s integrity or disintegrity. Or perhaps it is rather that Nature, in her most irrational mood, has traced in invisible ink on the walls of the mind a premonition which these great artists confirm; a sketch which only needs to be held to the fire of genius to become visible. When one so exposes it and sees it come to life one exclaims in rapture, But this is what I have always felt and known and desired!
Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, page 94
This is one of the great joys of reading, and of reading novels in particular: that something in the novel resonates so deeply that you feel it vibrate down to your marrow, feel that spark of truth race across your veins. And that spark is, very often, a light by which we can write, the energy we need to put our own pen to paper, to evoke the fire that makes those premonitions visible, however darkly and briefly and tenuously.
And yet: sometimes the words do not come. In The Left Hand of Darkness, Le Guin writes:
As they say in Ekumenical School, when action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.
Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness, page 42
Which is another way of saying, when you can’t write, read. When you can’t read, sleep.
