The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelasby Ursula K LeGuin –

from The Wind's Twelve Quarters

http://harelbarzilai.org/words/omelas.txt

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

ringing 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 gray, 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

throughout the city streets, farther and nearer and ever approaching, a

cheerful faint sweetness of the air 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.

There 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 ithurts,

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 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 to Omelas during the last days before

the Festival on very fast little trains and double-decked trams, and that the

trains 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 gory 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 arcane 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 hears of

the people of Omelas, and the victory they celebrate is that of life. I 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 gray 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, thing 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 a tit 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 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 real 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 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 see the child does not go home to

weep or rage, does not, in fact, go home at all. Sometimes also a man or a

woman much older falls silent for a day or two, 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.