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The Ones
Who Walk Away From Omelas by
Ursula K. Le Guin (from The Wind's Twelve Quarters; Reprinted
from http://www.geocities.com/lneefe/omelas.htm) With a clamor of bells that set the swallows
soaring, the Festival of Summer came to the city Omelas, bright-towered by
the sea. The rigging of the boats in harbor sparkled with flags. In the
streets between houses with red roofs and painted walls, between old moss-grown
gardens and under avenues of trees, past great parks and public buildings,
processions moved. Some were decorous: old people in long stiff robes of
mauve and grey, grave master workmen, quiet, merry women carrying their
babies and chatting as they walked. In other streets the music beat faster, a
shimmering of gong and tambourine, and the people went dancing, the
procession was a dance. Children dodged in and out, their high calls rising
like the swallows’ crossing flights over the music and the singing. All the
processions wound towards the north side of the city, where on the great
water-meadow called the Green Fields boys and girls, naked in the bright air,
with mud-stained feet and ankles and long, lithe arms, exercised their
restive horses before the race. The horses wore no gear at all but a halter
without bit. Their manes were braided with streamers of silver, gold, and
green. They flared their nostrils and pranced and boasted to one another; they
were vastly excited, the horse being the only animal who has adopted our
ceremonies as his own. Far off to the north and west the mountains stood up
half encircling Omelas on her bay. The air of morning was so clear that the
snow still crowning the
They were not simple folk, you see, though they
were happy. But we do not say the words of cheer much any more. All smiles
have become archaic. Given a description such as this one tends to make
certain assumptions. Given a description such as this one tends to look next
for the King, mounted on a splendid stallion and surrounded by his noble
knights, or perhaps in a golden litter borne by great-muscled slaves. But there
was no king. They did not use swords, or keep slaves. They were not barbarians.
I do not know the rules and laws of their society, but I suspect that they
were singularly few. As they did without monarchy and slavery, so they also
got on without the stock exchange, the advertisement, the secret police, and
the bomb. Yet I repeat that these were not simple folk, not dulcet shepherds,
noble savages, bland utopians. They were not less complex than us. The
trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates,
of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting.
This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil
and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can’t lick ‘em, join ‘em. If it
hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace
violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can
no longer describe a happy man, nor make any celebration of joy. How can I
tell you about the people of Omelas? They were not naive and happy
children—though their children were, in fact, happy. They were mature,
intelligent, passionate adults whose lives were not wretched. O miracle! but
I wish I could describe it better. I wish I could convince you. Omelas sounds
in my words like a city in a fairy tale, long ago and far away, once upon a
time. Perhaps it would be best if you imagined it as your own fancy bids,
assuming it will rise to the occasion, for certainly I cannot suit you all.
For instance, how about technology? I think that there would be no cars or
helicopters in and above the streets; this follows from the fact that the
people of Omelas are happy people. Happiness is based on a just
discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor
destructive, and what is destructive. In the middle category, however—that of
the unnecessary but undestructive, that of comfort, luxury, exuberance,
etc.—they could perfectly well have central heating, subway trains, washing
machines, and all kinds of marvelous devices not yet invented here, floating
light-sources, fuelless power, a cure for the common cold. Or they could have none of that; it doesn’t matter.
As you like it. I incline to think that people from towns up and down the
coast have been coming in to Omelas during the last days before the Festival
on very fast little trains and double-decked trams, and that the train
station of Omelas is actually the handsomest building in town, though plainer
than the magnificent Farmers’ Market. But even granted trains, I fear that
Omelas so far strikes some of you as goody-goody. Smiles, bells, parades,
horses, bleh. If so, please add an orgy. If an orgy would help, don’t
hesitate. Let us not, however, have temples from which issue beautiful nude
priests and priestesses already half in ecstasy and ready to copulate with
any man or woman, lover or stranger, who desires union with the deep godhead
of the blood, although that was my first idea. But really it would be better
not to have any temples in Omelas—at least, not manned temples. Religion yes,
clergy no. Surely the beautiful nudes can just wander about, offering
themselves like divine souffles to the hunger of the needy and the rapture of
the flesh. Let them join the processions. Let tambourines be struck above the
copulations, and the glory of desire be proclaimed upon the gongs, and (a not
unimportant point) let the offspring of these delightful rituals be beloved
and looked after by all. One thing I know there is none of in Omelas is
guilt. But what else should there be? I thought at first there were not drugs,
but that is puritanical. For those who like it, the faint insistent sweetness
of drooz may perfume the ways of the city, drooz which first
brings a great lightness and brilliance to the mind and limbs, and then after
some hours a dreamy languor, and wonderful visions at last of the very arcana
and inmost secrets of the Universe, as well as exciting the pleasure of sex
beyond belief; and it is not habit-forming. For more modest tastes I think
there ought to be beer. What else, what else belongs in the joyous city? The
sense of victory, surely, the celebration of courage. But as we did without
clergy, let us do without soldiers. The joy built upon successful slaughter
is not the right kind of joy; it will not do; it is fearful and it is
trivial. A boundless and generous contentment, a magnanimous triumph felt not
against some outer enemy but in communion with the finest and fairest in the
souls of all men everywhere and the splendor of the world’s summer: this is
what swells the hearts of the people of Omelas, and the victory they
celebrate is that of life. I really don’t think many of them need to take drooz.
Most of the procession have reached the Green
Fields by now. A marvelous smell of cooking goes forth from the red and blue
tents of the provisioners. The faces of small children are amiably sticky; in
the benign grey beard of a man a couple of crumbs of rich pastry are
entangled. The youths and girls have mounted their horses and are beginning
to group around the starting line of the course. An old women, small, fat,
and laughing, is passing out flowers from a basket, and tall young men where
her flowers in their shining hair. A child of nine or ten sits at the edge of
the crowd, alone, playing on a wooden flute. People pause to listen, and they
smile, but they do not speak to him, for he never ceases playing and never
sees them, his dark eyes wholly rapt in the sweet, thin magic of the tune. He finishes, and slowly lowers his hands holding
the wooden flute. As if that little private silence were the signal,
all at once a trumpet sounds from the pavilion near the starting line:
imperious, melancholy, piercing. The horses rear on their slender legs, and
some of them neigh in answer. Sober-faced, the young riders stroke the
horses’ necks and soothe them, whispering, “Quiet, quiet, there my beauty, my
hope....” They begin to form in rank along the starting line. The crowds
along the racecourse are like a field of grass and flowers in the wind. The
Festival of Summer has begun. Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the
city, the joy? No? Then let me describe one more thing. In a basement under one of the beautiful public
buildings of Omelas, or perhaps in the cellar of one of its spacious private
homes, there is a room. It has one locked door, and no window. A little light
seeps in dustily between cracks in the boards, secondhand from a cobwebbed
window somewhere across the cellar. In one corner of the little room a couple
of mops, with stiff, clotted, foul-smelling heads stand near a rusty bucket.
The floor is dirt, a little damp to the touch, as cellar dirt usually is. The
room is about three paces long and two wide: a mere broom closet or disused
tool room. In the room a child is sitting. It could be a boy or a girl. It
looks about six, but actually is nearly ten. It is feeble-minded. Perhaps it
was born defective, or perhaps it has become imbecile through fear,
malnutrition, and neglect. It picks its nose and occasionally fumbles vaguely
with its toes or genitals, as it sits hunched in the corner farthest from the
bucket and the two mops. It is afraid of the mops. It finds them horrible. It
shuts its eyes, but it knows the mops are still standing there; and the door
is locked; and nobody will come. The door is always locked; and nobody ever
comes, except that sometimes—the child has no understanding of time or
interval—sometimes the door rattles terribly and opens, and a person, or
several people, are there. One of them may come in and kick the child to make
it stand up. The others never come close, but peer in at it with frightened,
disgusted eyes. The food bowl and the water jug are hastily filled, the door
is locked, the eyes disappear. The people at the door never say anything, but
the child, who has not always lived in the tool room, and can remember
sunlight and its mother’s voice, sometimes speaks. “I will be good,” it says.
“Please let me out. I will be good!” They never answer. The child used to
scream for help at night, and cry a good deal, but now it only makes a kind
of whining, “eh-haa, eh-haa,” and it speaks less and less often. It is so
thin there are no calves to its legs; its belly protrudes; it lives on a
half-bowl of corn meal and grease a day. It is naked. Its buttocks and thighs
are a mass of festered sores, as it sits in its own excrement continually. They all know it is there, all the people of
Omelas. Some of them have come to see it, others are content merely to know
it is there. They all know that it has to be there. Some of them understand
why, and some do not, but they all understand that their happiness, the
beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of
their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even
the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend
wholly on this child’s abominable misery. This is usually explained to children when they are
between eight and twelve, whenever they seem capable of understanding; and
most of those who come to see the child are young people, though often enough
an adult comes, or comes back, to see the child. No matter how well the
matter has been explained to them, these young spectators are always shocked
and sickened at the sight. They feel disgust, which they had thought
themselves superior to. They feel anger, outrage, impotence, despite all the
explanations. They would like to do something for the child. But there is
nothing they can do. If the child were brought up into the sunlight out of
that vile place, if it were cleaned and fed and comforted, that would be a
good thing indeed; but if it were done, in that day and hour all the
prosperity and beauty and delight of Omelas would wither and be destroyed.
Those are the terms. To exchange all the goodness and grace of every life in
Omelas for that single, small improvement: to throw away the happiness of
thousands for the chance of the happiness of one: that would be to let guilt
within the walls indeed. The terms are strict and absolute; there may not
even be a kind word spoken to the child. Often the young people go home in tears, or in a
tearless rage, when they have seen the child and faced this terrible paradox.
They may brood over it for weeks or years. But as time goes on they begin to
realize that even if the child could be released, it would not get much good
of its freedom: a little vague pleasure of warmth and food, no doubt, but
little more. It is too degraded and imbecile to know any real joy. It has
been afraid too long ever to be free of fear. Its habits are too uncouth for
it to respond to humane treatment. Indeed, after so long it would probably be
wretched without walls about it to protect it, and darkness for its eyes, and
its own excrement to sit in. Their tears at the bitter injustice dry when
they begin to perceive the terrible justice of reality, and to accept it. Yet
it is their tears and anger, the trying of their generosity and the
acceptance of their helplessness, which are perhaps the true source of the
splendor of their lives. Theirs is no vapid, irresponsible happiness. They
know that they, like the child, are not free. They know compassion. It is the
existence of the child, and their knowledge of its existence, that makes
possible the nobility of their architecture, the poignancy of their music,
the profundity of their science. It is because of the child that they are so
gentle with children. They know that if the wretched one were not there
sniveling in the dark, the other one, the flute-player, could make no joyful
music as the young riders line up in their beauty for the race in the
sunlight of the first morning of summer. Now do you believe in them? Are they not more
credible? But there is one more thing to tell, and this is quite incredible. At times one of the adolescent girls or boys who go
to see the child does not go home to weep or rage, does not, in fact, go home
at all. Sometimes also a man or woman much older falls silent for a day or
two, and then leaves home. These people go out into the street, and walk down
the street alone. They keep walking, and walk straight out of the city of |
