2026-01-28 Journal Entry

Today is the day. Well it’s actually not any specific day, it is in fact a somewhat nondescript day of doing the normal things, the little maintenance priorities and writing (now!) and reading a lot. Should be a blast.

I finished Captive Paradise yesterday and it was still an interesting read. Not the most compellingly-written history I’ve ever read, but the subject matter was of enough interest to me that I felt good plowing through it. It struck me just how many somewhat coincedental things went into play in order to get Hawai’i annexed – the ebb and tide of US presidencies between Democrats and Republicans at various times, the fall of the Spanish empire opening up opportunities for the US in the Phillipines, the speed of communication greatly delaying news and amplifying misunderstandings. It seems as if in any other time it would not have happened, though perhaps I am on optimist.

What else what else what else. I feel this morning much less excited about writing than I did yesterday. That’s the reason to keep these writing sessions short. I can knock out the whole thing in perhaps less than an hour, and that makes it feel like in theory there’s more gas in the tank each time. I don’t really have to slog through the whole story if I don’t want to. But I still have work to do, “Judgement Day” is in a place where I see now that it needs to be totally re-written, though of course I don’t mind that at all. I think that’s the better way for me to work, to do the thing where you write the story and then perhaps just rewrite it from scratch instead of trying to mold the thing into something better. I think it was Kafka who did that? It’s like having the story idea and the plot somewhat in place, and then you can actually use that sense of tone and character to really nail the style. I don’t know, we’ll see.

I also read “Those Who Walk Away From Omelas” yesterday, which is a luminous short story. It is scarcely a story at all, actually, perhaps an idea more than anything else. But it’s still moving, which I believe tells you something important about the core of the truth of the thing, that it’s so white-hot that we don’t actually need to say everything about it but that by just gesturing towards it, by just nudging you lightly it sends you down a path. Obviously society is more complex than a single child in a broom closet, and our society is obviously not the purely happy one of Omelas, but to me it’s perhaps less about that and more about bravery. If we know so much of our society is founded upon this particular kind of ill-will, scarcity, hunger, otherness, then why participate? That’s perhaps the message most prescient: that complicity is a turn of the knife. That child’s blood is on your hands too, most of all.

Well anyways, that’s that. I don’t know. Le Guin is always incredible, and her novels and stories both always toe that line of being highly political but also not at all political, there’s nothing in that story that really tells you what or how to think about the problem of Omelas, or even that the society of Omelas is specifically ours, and yet by making it so clear what the sacrifice is, she makes heroes of those that walk away. They are the heroes – not the ones who go in and free the child, who begin a revolution and overturn the lives of all of those around them, but who understand their world and no longer consent to its structure and in that disagreement go their own way. That feels to me a bit like the anarchist way (perhaps connecting it because the PDF of that story was from a website called The Anarchist Library), that as David Graeber said the anarchists choose to think that their goal is to simply not be governed and coerced by state force and to act that way. If someone needs help, help them. If you see an injustice, fix it. If things need to change, change them. Don’t write a petition to the government to fix it, go directly to the root. And if the root is that a society is founded upon misery and sadness without measure, walk away.