#tlhod

My two TLHOD paintings I made on a whim. Crossing the cavern and Genly's normal foretelling vision

Why does this feel like reading a love confession

“In his attempt to formulate a love of country that is borderless and anti-nationalist, Estraven turns first to the local and the natural. It’s telling that he places “knowing” the natural world—the “towns, farms, hills, and rivers and rocks”—as parallel to and equal with “knowing” other people. The natural world, to him, is subjective and alive. This awareness of nonhuman agency serves as an antidote or an alternative to the jingoistic patriotism both Genly and Estraven fall victim to in their own ways over the course of the novel. It is also through this naturalist turn—and the interconnected world it reveals—that Le Guin’s characters are able to refuse the violence of borders, both personal and political. It’s after this conversation and during their vividly described trek across the Gobrin Ice, an environment which becomes a character in its own right, that Estraven first uses mindspeech with Genly (an alien in a literal rather than politicized sense, as a visitor on the planet Winter). Not only do the two travelers put aside their national loyalties on their journey in pursuit of survival, they for a moment dissolve the border between the self and the other. Le Guin’s ecologically grounded vision of resistance is a thematic through line that is picked up and elaborated on by other speculative work examining the ideas of nation and nationalism.”