We may be rapt within our own ignorance…

I’ve recently been doing a lot of thinking about the smattering of traveling I’ve done in the past year. Just a few days ago I started reading an Ursula Le Guin book, The Dispossessed, which, while also a rabidly feminist diatribe and an unabashed Marxist treatise, dwells often and well on cross-cultural learning.

In the excerpt below, the character Shevek talks with his hosts on the planet Urras. The twin planets Urras and Anarres have had no communication with each other for more than a century, since the Urrasti insurrectionists were exiled to Anarres. Shevek is the first visitor from Anarres since the exile.

Shevek felt extremely uncomfortable. He got up and went over to the windows. “Your world is very beautiful,” he said. “I wish I could see more. While I must stay inside, will you give me books?”

“Of course, sir! What sort?”

“History, pictures, stories, anything. Maybe they should be books for children. You see, I know very little. We learn about Urras, but mostly about Odo’s times. Before that was eight and one half thousand years! And then since the Settlement of Anarres is a century and a half; since the last ship brought the last settlers—ignorance. We ignore you; you ignore us. You are our history. We are perhaps your future. I want to learn, not to ignore. It is the reason I came. We must know each other. We are not primitive men. Our morality is no longer tribal, it cannot be. Such ignorance is a wrong, from which wrong will arise. So I come to learn.”

That says rather succinctly what I was trying to convey about feeling culturally challenged.

Somehow, I have nothing more to say on the matter right now.