Flying Home on a Dragon’s Wings

I had relapsed. Or well, “slipped up” as my counsellor wished to refer to it. That way I wouldn’t have to reset my mind and I could stay in the illusion of unbroken cycles. Ineffective. From day one, I felt like I was lying to myself. A slip-up is a misspelled name in an e-mail, forgetting to buy onions at the store, or missing the date to cancel a subscription. I had thrown away 8 months of hard work for a night of numbing negligence. The weeks after were wobbly. The string was cut, and I was floating away from the world. I needed something to ground me, to hold me and transport me back on track. As I packed for an upcoming family vacation, I looked at my bookshelf, trying to find the next victim on my “to-read-when-I-have-time-list”. Staring back at me was the thickest book I have, a blue hardcover, a golden dragon curling around a boy holding a staff: The Books of Earthsea, by Ursula K. Le Guin.

Admittedly, it’s shameful that it took me 6 months to read this after buying it. Ursula K. Le Guin wrote my—at the time—favorite book The Dispossessed, and yet I had never read another novel by her. The world of Earthsea changed that. I’ve now read about half of her work and own almost all of it. I found a love that borders on obsession with her writing, her stories and her wisdom. When I started A Wizard of Earthsea, I knew it from page one: This would save me. The Earthsea books contain something unnameable. A spark of endless creativity that captures you in the first breath uttered and only lets go in the last.

From its first line, we know what the story will be about: “The island of Gont, a single mountain that lifts its peak a mile above the storm-racked Northeast sea, is a land famous for its wizards.” Ged, a promising young wizard, leaves his home to train at the Roke School of Magic and goes on a journey to learn about the dangers of ambition, the responsibilities and consequences of power, and what it means to accept the darkness inside oneself. It has a mythologically familiar quality, but Le Guin finds her own way through that. Her writing is efficient, but so evocative. The combination of precision and imagination is one she has mastered. When you read these books, every page will give you at least one small pause. A strange gleam of light that fills you with wonder. They contain a quiet wisdom and potent magic unlike other fantasy books. In The Tombs of Atuan towards the end of the novel, the character Tenar experiences life outside her temple for the first time and realizes:

Freedom is a heavy load, a great and strange burden for the spirit to undertake. It is not easy. It is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one. The road goes upward towards the light; but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it.

I made a choice. I chose freedom. Freedom from the darkness that haunted me. Earthsea named my shadows. Shadows that have no power to take and nothing to give.

The best books provide comfort in strange times. They’re a window to different worlds through which we come to understand our own a little better. Ursula K Le Guin is a primal force in the fantasy and science-fiction genres. If you read in these styles, she’s unavoidable and when you meet her work, it will change you. Let it carry you on mighty wings to other winds and farther shores.