Make time for "No Time to Spare"

What to do with old blog entries? If you are Ursula K. Le Guin you organize them thematically and turn them into a book.

Of course you can always publish the book yourself and distribute it to friends and family. On the other hand, if you have published twenty-three works of fiction, eleven books of poetry, and two translations, and if you can write as well as Le Guin your publisher may add No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters to your list and someone like me will get around to reviewing it.

Because she was a terrific writer and an interesting thinker, these non-fiction little essays, three or four pages, at most are fascinating and thought-provoking. She wrote the first on October 2010, “inspired by José Saramago’s extraordinary blogs, which he posted when he was eight-five and eighty-six years old.” In 2010, Le Guin was eighty-one. Her most recent blog entry is dated January 2016; she died in January 2018.

Le Guin was born in Berkeley, CA, in 1929. Her father was anthropologist Alfred Louis Kroeber; her mother was author Theodora Kroeber. Le Guin earned a master's degree in French, and began doctoral studies but abandoned these after her marriage in 1953 to historian Charles Le Guin. She began writing full-time in the late 1950s, publishing her first book, Rocannon’s World in 1966. She achieved major critical and commercial success with A Wizard of Earthsea (1968) and The Left Hand of Darkness (1969). Harold Bloom has described as her masterpieces. For the latter volume, Le Guin won both the Hugo and Nebula awards for best novel, becoming the first woman to do so. (Thank you, Wikipedia.)

The essays in No Time to Spare are grouped into four sections: Going Over Eighty (reflections on old age), The Lit Biz (a working writer’s notes), Trying to Make Sense of It (aren’t we all); and Rewards (music, friendship, soft boiled eggs). Within these are seven blogs about her pet cat that I’m afraid I skipped. I particularly enjoyed four essays on old age and the eleven that talk about the lit biz. 

A questionnaire from Harvard for the sixtieth reunion of the 1951 graduating class (Le Guin attended Radcliffe) asked, “In your spare time, what do you do? (check all that apply).” The list began, “Golf . . .” Le Guin writes: “Seventh in the list of twenty-seven occupations, after ‘Racquet sports’ but before ‘Shopping,’ ‘TV,’ and ‘Bridge,’ come ‘Creative activities (paint, write, photograph, etc.)’”

What, she wondered, do they mean by “spare time”? After thinking about the difference between “free time” and “spare time” she concludes, “The opposite of spare time is, I guess, occupied time. In my case I don’t know what spare time is because all my time is occupied. It always has been and it is now. It’s occupied by living.”

Among the lit biz entries Le Guin discusses the difference between story (“Story goes”) and plot (“Plot elaborates the going”). “Plot hesitates, pauses, doubles back (Proust), forecasts, leaps, doubling or tripling simultaneous trajectories (Dickens), diagrams a geometry onto the story line (Hardy), makes the story Ariadne’s string leading through a labyrinth (mysteries), turns the story into a cobweb, a waltz, a vast symphonic structure in time (the novel in general) . . . .” Read this and truly embrace it and you’ll stop fretting over where your story is going. It will go where it needs to go.

She seems skeptical of religion. She notes Catholic bishops held a conference on exorcism in Baltimore in November 2010. “The church updated the rite [of exorcism] in 1999, advising that ‘all must be done to avoid the perception that exorcism is magic or superstition.’ This seems rather like issuing directions for driving  a car while cautioning that all must be done to avoid the perception that a moving vehicle is being guided.”

Le Guin’s thoughts are so interesting and she writes so well that it’s tempting to quote much more and flirt with the limits of fair usage. Rather let me just point to two other essays. She discusses the difference between belief and the acceptance of evidence. People who allow themselves to be vaccinated against Covid-19 don’t believe the vaccines work (although they may use that language). They have accepted as credible the statements of authoritative figures that the vaccines work (unless they have read and accepted the evidence themselves). You can, she says, accept Darwin’s theory of evolution and still believe in God, although perhaps not in a God that literally created the universe and everything in it in six days.

She also has a fascinating little essay on consequences of lying to children. These may be well-meaning, designed to save the child’s feelings. I recall at age thirteen seeing my grandmother laid out at her funeral and saying she looked as if she were sleeping. “Yes, dear, she’s just sleeping,” said the woman beside me. No. She was dead. I knew she was dead and there was no way to wake her, so who was the woman kidding? Do enough of that and a child can grow up with an unhealthy skepticism about every single thing he’s told.

There’s more, but let me give an unqualified recommendation (except for the cat essays which may delight cat lovers) to No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters.