You, darkness, that I come from I love you more than all the fires that fence in the world, for the fire makes a circle of light for everyone and then no one outside learns of you.
But the darkness pulls in everything- shapes and fires, animals and myself, how easily it gathers them! - powers and people-
and it is possible a great presence is moving near me.
The poet Rilke looked at a statue of Apollo about fifty years ago, and Apollo spoke to him. “You must change your life,” he said. When the genuine myth rises into consciousness, that is always its message. You must change your life. The way of art, after all, is neither to cut adrift from the emotions, the senses, the body, etc., and sail off into the void of pure meaning, nor to blind the mind’s eye and wallow in irrational, amoral meaninglessness—but to keep open the tenuous, difficult, essential connections between the two extremes. To connect. To connect the idea with value, sensation with intuition, cortex with cerebellum. The true myth is precisely one of these connections.
==========
The Language of the Night: Essays on Writing, Science Fiction, and Fantasy (Ursula K. Le Guin)
ALT
ALT
ALT
