The novel’s protagonist - the idealistic prodigy physicist Shevek, visiting a beautiful earth-like world from a society inhabiting the world’s barren moon, where a colony had seceded long ago, disenchanted with the profiteering and “propertarian” values of an increasingly materialistic and selfish human society - channels Le Guin’s philosophical insight into the paradoxes of existence and the pitfalls of human society: Le Guin (Based on photograph by Benjamin Reed) Le Guin (October 21, 1929–January 22, 2018) explores throughout The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia ( public library) - the superb 1974 novel, part science fiction and part philosophy, that gave us Le Guin’s insight into time, loyalty, and the root of human responsibility. That indelible relationship between suffering and life is what Ursula K. Lewis wrote in contemplating how suffering confers agency upon life, “and you find that you have excluded life itself.” “Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free wills involve,” C.S.

How we orient ourselves to our suffering - or to the suffering, as Buddhist might correct the ego-illusion and reaffirm our shared reality - may be the single most significant predictor of our happiness, wellbeing, and capacity for joy. And yet we do suffer and the pain incurred, whatever the suffering is grounded in, is real. “We suffer more in imagination than in reality,” Seneca observed before offering his millennia-old, timeless antidote to anxiety. Simone Weil considered it the highest existential discipline to “make use of the sufferings that chance inflicts upon us.” George Bernard Shaw saw suffering as our supreme conduit to empathy.

Le guin the dispossessed