The One Who Walks Away

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object:The One Who Walks Away
class:short story
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author class:Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
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THE ONES WHO WALK AWAY FROM OMELAS
by Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
(Variations on a theme by William James)
Reproduced from Ursula K. Le Guin's The Wind's Twelve Quarters collection of short stories.
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, li the 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 long. 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
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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 imdestructive, 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 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
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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 bands 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 soo the 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, secondh and 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
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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,
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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.
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 naively
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 helas.
"Where do you get your ideas from, Ms Le Guin?" From forgetting Dostoyevsky and reading
road signs backwards, naturally. Where else?

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1:The only loser who walks away from a wise man is the one who walks away. ~ Frederick Lenz,

2:There is only one way to fight, and that's dirty. Clean gentlemanly fighting will get you nowhere but dead, and fast. Take every cheap shot, every low blow, absolutely kick people when they're down, and maybe you'll be the one who walks away. ~ Jeaniene Frost,

3:If he thinks I’m going to sit around crying over him, he’s got another thing coming. I can live without him, I can do without him just fine—but I don’t like to lose. It’s not like me. None of this is like me. I don’t get rejected. I’m the one who walks away. ~ Paula Hawkins,

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