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.