But What Is Piety?

The marvelous chutzpah of Le Guin, to finish her career by writing a novel celebrating piety for an audience teeming with libertarian tech bros and lefty utopians! My delight in Lavinia grows and grows.

And having just got as far as Book VII in rereading the Aeneid, I'm staggered by a) how faithful she is to Virgil and b) how faithful she is to Ursula Le Guin. Her conversation with Virgil is a conversation between equals. 

The model of the book, maybe, is the intimate conversations in the sacred grove between Lavinia and the sending of Virgil: a girl speaking on equal terms with the incarnate Western Tradition. Just a conversation, between a girl and a dying poet. 

Le Guin is aware, no one better, that he is dying, and that we need to bring his lares and penates to a new shore.

"But what is piety?" asked Aeneas.
That brought a thoughtful silence.

Voices Behind

It's just going to be a longer journey than you thought, that's all. Soberly watch the omens, make all the due sacrifices, know that you're paying debts incurred by the jealous spouse of God. Make mistakes: of course. But when the messenger speaks clearly, do what he says.

What else is there to say?

Well, this, of course. If you're not founding Rome all you're doing is ricocheting around the Mediterranean causing trouble. Do you know what Rome will be? Of course not. Then how do you know what the hell you're founding? You don't. (Okay. Class dismissed. That didn't take long.)

What we keep coming back to is that if we are to be something more than we are, we don't know ahead of time what we are becoming. We aspire to be better, but one of the things we aspire to be better at is knowing what "better" is. If we already knew, we'd be done. 

There's this caul of falsehood over my face. The wrongness that comes between me and the world. The doctrine of original sin has been in great disfavor all my life: but it was a hell of a lot better than the doctrine of original worthlessness that has replaced it. If you're not uniquely worthwhile now, always already, you will never be worthwhile. You or anyone else. Asking the question creates the answer, and the answer will always be "no." 

Bah. Enough of this. This is all trampled ground in late summer: the dust rises from our feet. Stop being stupid. Use the brains God gave you, boy. 

The wind blowing snow off the mountain top; the little tarn, voices behind.

The Sightseeing Seniors of Cedarwood

A half moon low in the south: why so low? I don't think I've ever understood quite why the moon wanders so far from the ecliptic. Or does it? Maybe I'm just not minding the swings of the ecliptic. But sometimes the moon is high, way high, and sometimes low. As tonight. Mid-August, not particularly close to a solstice; it seems like the moon should be riding a middle way, not tangled in the trees of the flats south of Burnside. I'll have to look it up. But not now.

Now: that rounded chip caught in the trees, ivory-yellow. Diana. Σελήνη. Me he quedado mirando a la luna, a través de las finas acacias. And yet.

Feeling age pull at me, feeling the waste of my strength. I'm exercising a little again, going for little walks. Still feeling fragile, easily irritated, easily tired. What troubles me most, of course, is not having a lingering illness: it's discovering that the reason I haven't had a lingering illness before now is not that I'm a special person, who just doesn't put up with that sort of thing: it's that up till now I've had a nice run of dumb luck. in point of fact I'm just a regular person like other regular people. 

In Searoad an Important Man from Salem comes to a little Oregon beach town and takes a room at a hotel that has been mostly booked up by -- according to the side of their bus -- "The Sightseeing Seniors of Cedarwood: A Christian Community." He views them benevolently, but as the weekend progresses and people in town repeatedly assume he's one of them ("Your party is on the patio, sir") he gets less and less happy about them. Le Guin didn't go in for humor much, but it's deftly done.

Well. Let's call it a night, Dale. Here's hoping for another run of luck, eh?