There is this book “The Left Hand of Darkness” by miss Ursula Le Guin which I’ve thought about a long time. Especially chapter 12 “On Time and Darkness.” It’s very much the heart of the book, you may even call it the center. Now in the eye of Meshe all is bright, saying there is darkness is very foolish, foolish. To Meshe there is no time either, he sees it all on the moment of seeing. The entire chapter is foolish, foolish. Because here we are in the dark.

On the internet I reacted to people several times in the spirit of this book. I was partly tempted to just drop these musings on my blog with no explanation or analysis. Nobody would understand them though. And not understanding is different from uncertainty. Not knowing makes it worth living, but never understanding is a missed opportunity. So here they’re marked as quotes and I offer more guidance.

The first two quotes I had to fish up from discord. I didn’t realize so much time had passed between the things said. I think it’s interesting though, there is a little personal arc here. The third time prompted me to make this collection, because again, nobody is going to connect these dots without me guiding a little better.

2025.04.21

Yak: imagine a world where ekmett had instead designed everyone’s ocular prosthetics

Jappie: We’d have eyes of Meshe, and see all the stars and the darkness between the stars and all be bright.

This was a discord chat I had with a friend. I think at this point I just had finished the book and remembered these lines, because it just happened to fit so well as a reaction. They’re from that chapter “On Time and Darkness.”

ekmett stands for Edward Kmett, a famous Haskell developer who created many fantastic libraries. Yak is an internet friend.

2025.11.05

A fruit-tree in the heart of the Forest of No Return, which lies a hundred miles long and a hundred miles wide, was old and greatly grown, with a hundred branches and on every branch a thousand twigs and on every twig a hundred fruits. The tree said in its rooted being, “All my fruits are seen, but one, this one in the darkness cast by all the others. This one fruit I keep secret to myself. Who will see it in the darkness of my fruits? and who will count the number of them?” Benji passed through the Forest of No Return in his wanderings, and from that one tree plucked that one fruit.

This is another paragraph I adapted from “On Time and Darkness”. My dear friend Benji started on his journey of no return. I don’t think he realized what honor I did him, replacing Meshe. He now is doing the great patchening. And his journey continues. At the time I sent it to him and a few other friends. I wonder if they realized what they read.

2026.07.12

One day I’ll say all the integers, and on the moment of saying, I’ll exist in between all the integers. Realizing half of all wholes, wholesome words of all worlds.

I said this in reply to friends making a counting joke. Here I created something new, adapted the words and they are fully integrated into my mind. I put it into an LLM and it blew up nicely, it spun out thousands of words just analyzing the meaning here. Good.

Ending

Writing pretty dense things brings me joy. It feels like I’m copying miss Le Guin. It’s not quite a book yet, but a little poem, maybe the beginning of one.

I suppose what I lack is the meta play Ursula does: Meshe appears wise, because he sees it all, but he also suffers because he sees. And his seeing was inflicted upon him:

Do you know the story of the Lord of Shorth, who forced the Foretellers of Asen Fastness to answer the question: What is the meaning of life? Well, it was a couple of thousand years ago. The Foretellers stayed in the darkness for six days and nights. At the end, all the Celibates were catatonic, the Zanies were dead, the Pervert clubbed the Lord of Shorth to death with a stone, and the Weaver… He was a man named Meshe.

– chapter 5, “The Domestication of Hunch”.

Meshe died that day. Meshe points out the foolishness of darkness; to him all is bright. The foolishness of beginnings and endings, he sees it all in the one moment. But we foolish, foolish mortals need this. For without uncertainty, there is no life.

Should I ask someone to care as much about these things as I do even? Of course not.