The Farthest Shore (28 page)

All rich, all excellent. I plundered freely. Smaug, the great Worms of the North, and aerial Chinese dragons are certainly ancestors of the Dragons of Pendor in the first book of Earthsea.

But, by going with Ged where he had to go, I still had much
to learn about the dragons of Earthsea, their history, their kinship with human beings. In
The Farthest Shore
, I began to see them clearly. Ged told me what to see, when he said to Arren, “And though I came to forget or regret all I have ever done, yet I would remember that once I saw the dragons aloft on the wind at sunset above the western isles; and I would be content.”

The dragons are, perhaps above all, beautiful.

As tigers are beautiful. Could anyone regret having seen a tiger? Unless, of course, they had a little while to regret it while the tiger ate them.

The dragons are beautiful, and also mortal, as tigers are. Long-lived, but not indestructible. Terrible, but not monstrous. Fierce, fiery, careless of human life, sometimes careless of their own lives. Destructive when angry, very much to be feared, and untamably wild. Mysterious, as all great wild creatures are mysterious.

But not incomprehensible. Speech is natural to them, inborn: they don’t have to learn it, as we do. Their language, the only one they will speak, is the tongue the wizards must learn, the tongue that works magic, the True Speech, the language of the Making.

When I wrote
The Farthest Shore
, I saw the dragons as wildness itself, and thus as utterly other than human. And yet, looking back, I see that I already felt their otherness as not absolute. They share a language with us, or some of us, as no animal does. And when Cob’s desire for immortality leads him to make a breach in the human world from which life and light drain out like water through
a breach in a dyke, the dragons are damaged by it just as human beings are, losing their reason, their power of speech, their magic.

I didn’t understand why that was so, when I wrote the book, but I knew it was so.

People like to believe that writers know exactly what they are doing and have their story under control, thought out, plotted from beginning to end. It makes sense of the whole strange enterprise of novel writing, makes it rational. Many academic critics believe this, so do many readers, so do some writers. But not all writers have this kind of control of their material, and I wouldn’t even want to have it.

There’s a difference between control and responsibility. Aesthetically and morally, I take full responsibility for what I write. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t feel free to let the material control itself to the extent I do. I’d have to manage it consciously and continuously, making everything happen as I planned it to happen. But I never wanted that kind of control. By “going where I have to go,” being willing to guess that there is such a place without knowing clearly how I am to get there, trusting to my story to take me there, I know I’ve gone farther than I could ever have gone if I’d fully known my goal and the way to it before I set out. I left room for luck and chance to come and aid me, room for my narrow plans and ideas to grow and include what I didn’t know when I set out.

What told me to do this—to leave room? I have no idea. Luck, chance. A kind of passive courage. A willingness to follow.

Follow what?

A dragon, maybe. A dragon flying on the wind.

I
T WOULD BE LOVELY IF
writing a story was like getting into a little boat that drifted off and took me to the promised land, or climbing on a dragon’s back and flying off to Selidor. But it’s only as a reader that I can do that. As a writer, to take full responsibility without claiming total control requires a lot of work, a lot of groping and testing, flexibility, caution, watchfulness. I have no chart to follow, so I have to be constantly alert. The boat needs steering. There have to be long conversations with the dragon I ride. But however watchful and aware I am, I know I can never be fully aware of the currents that carry the boat, of where the winds beneath the dragon’s wings are blowing.

A writer lives and works in the world she was born into, and no matter how firm her own purpose, or how seemingly far from the present day her subject, she and her work are subject to the changing winds and currents of that world.

I was a child during the Great Depression, and eleven years old when America entered the Second World War. I wrote this book soon after the Sixties—a time of high tides and high winds, of great hope and wild folly, when for a while it seemed a more generous vision might replace the sour dream of profiteering and consumerism that has been the bane of my country.

As I look back at the book now, I see how it reflects that time.
Along with the active movement to free America from racist injustice and from militarism, there was a real vision of getting free from compulsive materialism, the confusion of goods with good. Yet already we were watching much of that vision blur off into wishful thinking or become drug-dependent.

Being an irreligious puritan and a rational mystic, I think it’s irresponsible to let a belief think for you or a chemical dream for you.

So the book’s dark themes of loss and betrayal took shape. So Ged and Arren had to come to Hort Town, and drug addiction and slavery are seen for the first time in the Archipelago. Evil, in this book, has an immediate, ugly, human shape, because I saw evil not as some horde of foreign demons with bad teeth and superweapons but as an insidious and ever-present enemy in my own daily life in my own country: the ruinous irresponsibility of greed.

We are frequently told that greed for endless increase of material goods is natural and universal—as is greed for endless life. We are all supposed to agree that you can’t be too rich or live too long.

The desire to live is certainly natural and universal, since it’s the basic directive of living creatures: once born, our job and our desire is to try to stay alive.

But is that the same as a desire to stay alive forever, to be immortal? Or is it just that we can’t imagine not being, so we invent an endless existence called immortality?

Knowing that everything on earth has an end, we know the afterlife can’t be on earth, so it has to be somewhere else—a totally
other place where the living can’t come and where nothing can ever change. To me, the imagery of the various afterlives and underworlds, the heavens and hells, appears marvelous and powerful, but I can’t believe in any of them except as I “believe” in any imaginative creation as a hint, an indication, a sign of something more than can be said or shown. The idea of individual immortality, an endless ego-existence, is more dreadful to me than the idea of letting go the self in death to rejoin shared, eternal being. I see life as a shared gift, received from others and passed on to others, and living and dying as one process, in which lies both our suffering and our reward. Without mortality to purchase it, how can we have the consciousness of eternity? I think the price is worth paying.

So in this book Ged goes down into the dreary realm of the dead, knowing that he will not come back from it, and willing to pay that price.

But even wizards don’t know everything. He’s wrong. He does come back, saved by his young companion’s innocence and strength. Both of them are transformed by the terrible passage. The boy Arren returns as the man Lebannen, and Ged has lost, not his life, but his power to do magic. The Archmage is no mage now.

What may be implied about Ged’s future in that loss, that change, is just hinted at by the Doorkeeper when he says, “He has done with doing. He goes home.”

R
EAD THE
E
ARTHSEA
C
YCLE
:

A Wizard of Earthsea

The Tombs of Atuan

The Farthest Shore

Tehanu

Tales from Earthsea

The Other Wind

A
ND LOOK FOR ADDITIONAL NOVELS FROM

U
RSULA
K. L
E
G
UIN

This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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OOKS FOR
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Also available in an Atheneum Books for Young Readers hardcover edition

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This Atheneum Books for Young Readers hardcover edition September 2012

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ISBN 978-1-4424-5992-2 (hardcover)

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ISBN 978-1-4424-8083-4 (eBook)