THE ONES WHO WALK AWAY FROM OMELAS

(Variations on a theme by William James)

The central idea of this psychomyth, the scapegoat, turns up in Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, and several people have asked me, rather suspiciously, why I gave the credit to William James. The fact is, I haven’t been able to re-read Dostoyevsky, much as I loved him, since I was twenty-five, and I’d simply forgotten he used the idea. But when I met it in James’s “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life,” it was with a shock of recognition. Here is how James puts it:

Or if the hypothesis were offered us of a world in which Messrs. Fourier’s and Bellamy’s and Morris’s utopias should all be outdone, and millions kept permanently happy on the one simple condition that a certain lost soul on the far-off edge of things should lead a life of lonely torment, what except a specifical and independent sort of emotion can it be which would make us immediately feel, even though an impulse arose within us to clutch at the happiness so offered, how hideous a thing would be its enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain?

The dilemma of the American conscience can hardly be better stated. Dostoyevsky was a great artist, and a radical one, but his early social radicalism reversed itself, leaving him a violent reactionary. Whereas the American James, who seems so mild, so naïvely gentlemanly—look how he says “us,” assuming all his readers are as decent as himself!—was, and remained, and remains, a genuinely radical thinker. Directly after the “lost soul” passage he goes on.

All the higher, more penetrating ideals are revolutionary. They present themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience than in that of probable causes of future experience, factors to which the environment and the lessons it has so far taught us must learn to bend.

The application of those two sentences to this story, and to science fiction, and to all thinking about the future, is quite direct. Ideals as “the probable causes of future experience”—that is a subtle and an exhilarating remark!

Of course I didn’t read James and sit down and say, Now I’ll write a story about that “lost soul.” It seldom works that simply. I sat down and started a story, just because I felt like it, with nothing but the word “Omelas” in mind. It came from a road sign: Salem (Oregon) backwards. Don’t you read road signs backwards? POTS. WOLS nerdlihc. Ocsicnarf Nas . . . Salem equals schelomo equals salaam equals Peace. Melas. O melas. Omelas. Homme hélas. “Where do you get your ideas from, Ms Le Guin?” From forgetting Dostoyevsky and reading road signs backwards, naturally. Where else?

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 Eighteen Peaks burned with white-gold fire across the miles of sunlit air, under the dark blue of the sky. There was just enough wind to make the banners that marked the racecourse snap and flutter now and then. In the silence of the broad green meadows one could hear the music winding through the city streets, farther and nearer and ever approaching, a cheerful faint sweetness of the air that from time to time trembled and gathered together and broke out into the great joyous clanging of the bells.

Joyous! How is one to tell about joy? How describe the citizens of Omelas?

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 naïve 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 soufféls 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 no 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 all 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 processions 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 woman, small, fat, and laughing, is passing out flowers from a basket, and tall young men wear 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 snivelling 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 Omelas, through the beautiful gates. They keep walking across the farmlands of Omelas. Each one goes alone, youth or girl, man or woman. Night falls; the traveler must pass down village streets, between the houses with yellow-lit windows, and on out into the darkness of the fields. Each alone, they go west or north, towards the mountains. They go on. They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

AFTERWORD

Since “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” was published in 1973, no story I’ve written has been reprinted so often, or brought me so many letters. Readers ask me to tell them what the story means, or where the ones who walk away are going. Or they tell me what the ones who walk away should do instead of walking away. Some are indignant, angry, because the condition on which the happiness of everyone in Omelas depends is so cruel and so arbitrary. Why do the people of Omelas accept it? Why don’t they rescue the child in the closet?

The answer to that question is in the story: Because all the wellbeing of everyone else depends on the suffering of the child. The moment the child is rescued, everybody else will begin to suffer as hopelessly as the child does now. That’s how things are in the story. It’s the rule of this game. You can only play a game -- chess, soccer, parable -- if you follow the rules. Games and stories are imitations of life, ways of playing at life, sometimes ways of learning how to live. Some of the rules may appear both cruel and arbitrary. But if you want to play the game, or live the life, you have to follow them.

Most of the questions I get about “Omelas,” however, I can’t answer. They’re based on the assumption that the story itself is the answer to a question, and want me to explain it to them. But it isn’t an answer. It’s a question.

I didn’t think the question up. I invented this particular way of asking it, yes. But I’d found it asked by two writers I read earlier in my life. It sank deep into my mind, and came out again at last in the form of a story.

In Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan Karamazov tells his brother the story of a little girl, horribly abused by her own mother, locked in a filthy outhouse, weeping, beating her heart with “her tiny fist in the dark and the cold.” And Ivan says:

“Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last, but that it was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature – that baby beating its breast with its fist, for instance -- and to found that edifice on its unavenged tears, would you consent to be the architect on those conditions?”

“No, I wouldn’t consent,” said Alyosha softly.

“And can you admit the idea that the men for whom you are building it would agree to accept their happiness on the foundation of the unexpiated blood of a little victim? And accepting it, would remain happy?”

“No,” said Alyosha.

I first read The Brothers Karamazov when I was seventeen or eighteen. Ten or fifteen years later, reading the American philosopher William James’ talk, “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life,” I came on this passage:

If the hypothesis were offered us that millions [should be] kept happy on the one simple condition that a certain lost soul on the far-off edge of things should lead a life of lonely torment, what except a specifical and independent sort of emotion can it be which would make us immediately feel, even though an impulse arose within us to clutch at the happiness so offered, how hideous a thing would be its enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain.

Dostoyevsky’s novel was first published in 1880; James gave his talk in 1891. The novel wasn’t translated into English till 1912. It’s possible that James read it in German or French, or read some reference to this passage, but it seems likelier that he and Dostoyevsky were pondering the same timeless moral problems each in his own way. Both men were Christians. Both posit a plan for making all mankind happy on the “one simple condition” of the absolute misery of an unimportant person. Dostoyevsky frames the question in essentially religious terms, James philosophically.

Dostoyevsky’s Ivan asks Alyosha – and us -- “Would you consent to carry out the plan, would you accept the happiness, on that condition?” And Alyosha answers, “No.” James thinks that a specific moral emotion or response would immediately, inevitably lead us all to that same answer.

The intensity of the question is sharper in Dostoyevsky, but the answer is just as clear in James’ quiet language.

My story presents the same “plan” on the same condition, and involves the reader even more directly in considering the question, but asks the question without offering any answer to it. All we see is that, even when so much is to be gained for so many at such a comparatively tiny cost, some of the people of Omelas – but only some – refuse the bargain and turn their backs on the city of happiness.

In talking about the “meaning” of a story, we need to be careful not to diminish it, impoverish it. A story can say different things to different people. It may have no definitive reading.

And a reader may find a meaning in it that the writer never intended, never imagined, yet recognizes at once as valid.

I got just such a shock of revelation and recognition from a letter sent me a couple of years ago by a young reader, who wrote:

The city of happiness, well, we all live there and people go about their business with full knowledge of the child in the closet.

And then at times I refuse to believe we are in the city of happiness and that instead we are all ones who walked away. Until I read in the news that a man was waterboarded 103 times in one month. Then I think we are all in the closet. Too stupid to understand what life we could have outside the walls around us.

This isn’t “the correct interpretation.” It’s simply one way to read the story – a painful, profoundly responsible way. In this view, we’re not the utopian planners of Dostoyevsky’s tale, nor are we the free, judging minds of James’ proposition. Omelas already exists: no need to build it or choose it. We already live here – in the narrow, foul, dark prison we let our ignorance, fear, and hatred build for us and keep us in, here in the splendid, beautiful city of life. . . .

-- UKL, 2016                    

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

URSULA K. LE GUIN was born in 1929 in Berkeley, California, and lives in Portland, Oregon. She has published twenty-one novels, eleven volumes of short stories, four collections of essays, twelve books for children, six volumes of poetry and four of translation, and has received many honors and awards including the Hugo, Nebula, PEN-Malamud, and National Book Awards, as well as the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

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PRAISE FOR URSULA K. LE GUIN AND THE WIND’S TWELVE QUARTERS

“There is no writer with an imagination as forceful and delicate as Ursula Le Guin’s.”

—Grace Paley

“[Le Guin] wields her pen with a moral psychological sophistication rarely seen . . . she writes fables: splendidly intricate and hugely imaginative tales.”

—Newsweek

“Ursula K. Le Guin fashions ideas like a goldsmith: intricate, involved, and confident. Her prose sparkles like sunlight on water.”

—Chicago News

“An elegant writer, deft with the poetry of language.”

—Philadelphia Inquirer

“Ursula Le Guin’s prose breathes light and intelligence. She can lift fiction to the level of poetry and compress it to the density of allegory.”

—Jonathan Lethem

“[Le Guin’s] work transcends the usual limitations of the genre.”

—The New Yorker

“An important writer, period.”

—Washington Post

“She is a splendid short-story writer. . . . Fiction, like Borges’s, that finds its life in the interstices between the borders of speculative fiction and realism.”

—San Francisco Chronicle Book Review

“For sheer depth of imagination Ursula K. Le Guin has few rivals in American literature today. . . . Like Borges, she is an original, a consummately unique storyteller.”

—Judith Freeman

“Le Guin’s powerful work illustrates that fantasy need not be escapist, that gender studies need not be dry or strident, and that entertainment need not be mindless.”

—The Onion

“In recent years, no [writer] inside the field of science fiction or outside of it [has] done more to create a modern conscience.”

—New Republic

“Le Guin is as good as any contemporary at creating worlds, imaginary or our own.”

—Time

“I don’t know anyone else who can do what Le Guin does. Her work is simple and brilliantly clear, like a Buddha’s laugh: joyfully serious, delighted with the joke that is life. Le Guin writes about love, pure and simple—love and all the ways in which it refuses to be bound—and she does so beautifully.”

—Nicola Griffith

“Ms. Le Guin has to be accounted a science fiction writer because most of her short stories rocket about outer space, but her knack of translating recognizable states of mind into fantastic action brings her close to the old fairy tale field. She is the ideal science fiction writer for readers who ordinarily dislike science fiction.”

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“[Ursula K. Le Guin] examines the most public of politics and the most intimate of emotions, constantly challenging her readers to reconsider what it means to be human and humane.”

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“[E]verything Le Guin does is interesting, believable, and exquisitely detailed.”

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“Ursula Le Guin is more than a writer of adult fantasy and science fiction . . . she is a philosopher, an explorer in the landscapes of the mind.”

—Cincinnati Enquirer

“For a number of years the only science fiction I read was that of Ursula K. Le Guin. I don’t read science fiction anymore, though I wouldn’t think of missing a book of Le Guin’s. She has transcended the genre to become what it was clear she would become: our wise-woman, our seeress, a writer of infinite range and power. . . . This woman can do anything! Long may she continue to do it all.”

—Carolyn Kitzer

ALSO BY URSULA K. LE GUIN

NOVELS

Always Coming Home

The Beginning Place

City of Illusion

The Dispossessed

The Eye of the Heron

The Farthest Shore

The Lathe of Heaven

The Left Hand of Darkness

Malafrena

The Other Wind

Planet of Exile

Rocannon’s World

Tehanu

The Telling

The Tombs of Atuan

Very Far Away from Anywhere Else

A Wizard of Earthsea

The Word for World Is Forest

STORY COLLECTIONS

The Birthday of the World

Buffalo Gals

The Compass Rose

A Fisherman of the Inland Sea

Four Ways to Forgiveness

Orsinian Tales

Searoad

Tales from Earthsea

Unlocking the Air

The Wind’s Twelve Quarters

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COPYRIGHT

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

First published in New Dimensions 3, 1973.

Excerpted from The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, originally published in hardcover in 1975 by HarperCollins Publishers.

THE ONES WHO WALK AWAY FROM OMELAS. Copyright © 1975 by Ursula K. Le Guin. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

EPub Edition February 2017 ISBN 9780062470973

Print ISBN 978-0-06-091434-9

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