Ursula K. Le Guin - Day Before the Revolution

VIP免费

2024-11-23 0 0 87.68KB 15 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

The Day Before the Revolution

URSULA LE GUIN

"The Day Before the Revolution" won the Nebula Award for the

best science-fiction short story of 1974. Ursula's The Dispossessed

won the Nebula Award and the Hugo Award for the best novel of

1974. The Le Guin award-winning spree began with her 1969 novel

The Left Hand of Darkness, which won both the Nebula and Hugo

awards and to my mind did more to exploit the potential of the sci-

ence-fiction novel than anything published to that time; and it con-

tinued with her Hugo novella of 1971, "The Word for World Is For-

est," her Hugo short story of 1973, "The Ones Who Walk Away from

Omelas, and the 1973 National Book Award in children's literature

for her novel The Farthest Shore. Ursula comes naturally to writing

and science: her mother was an author, her father an anthropolo-

gist; her husband is a Portland State College professor of French

history, and she herself, besides her family of three children, pos-

sesses an advanced degree in French and Italian Renaissance lit-

erature. The story that follows is cut from the same fictional tapes-

try as The Dispossessed.

The speaker's voice was loud as empty beer-trucks in a stone

street, and the people at the meeting were jammed up close, cobble-

stones, that great voice booming over them. Taviri was somewhere

on the other side of the hall. She had to get to him. She wormed

and pushed her way among the dark-clothed, close packed people.

She did not hear the words, nor see the faces: only the booming,

and the bodies pressed one behind the other. She could not see

Taviri, she was too short. A broad black vested belly and chest

loomed up blocking her way. She must get through to Taviri.

Sweating, she jabbed fiercely with her fist. It was like hitting stones,

he did not move at all, but the huge lungs let out right over her

head a prodigious noise, a bellow. She cowered. Then she under-

stood that the bellow had not been at her. Others were shouting.

The speaker had said something, something fine about taxes or

shadows. Thrilled, she joined the shouting-"Yes! Yes! "-and shoving

on, came out easily into the open expanse of the Regimental Drill

Field in Parheo. Overhead the evening sky lay deep and colorless,

and all around her nodded the tall weeds with dry, white, close-

floreted heads. She had never known what they were called. The

flowers nodded above her head, swaying in the wind that always

blew across the fields in the dusk. She ran among them, and they

whipped lithe aside and stood up again swaying, silent. Taviri stood

among the tall weeds in his good suit, the dark gray one that made

him look like a professor or a playact or, harshly elegant.

He did not look happy, but he was laughing, and saying some-

thing to her. The sound of his voice made her cry, and she reached

out to catch hold of his hand, but she did not stop, quite. She could

not stop. "Oh, Taviri," she said, "it's just on there!". The queer sweet

smell of the white weeds was heavy as she went on. There were

thorns, tangles underfoot, there were slopes, pits. She feared to fall

... she stopped.

Sun, bright morning-glare, straight in the eyes, relentless.

She had forgotten to pull the blind last night. She turned her

back. on the sun, but the right side wasn't comfortable. No use.

Day.

She sighed twice, sat up, got her legs over the edge of the bed,

and sat hunched in her nightdress looking down at her feet.

The toes, compressed by a lifetime of cheap shoes, were almost

square where they touched each other, and bulged out above in

corns; the nails were discolored and shapeless. Between the knob-

like ankle bones ran fine, dry wrinkles. The brief little plain at the

base of the toes had kept its delicacy, but the skin was the color of

mud, and knotted veins crossed the instep. Disgusting. Sad, de-

pressing. Mean. Pitiful. She tried on all the' words, and they all fit,

like hideous little hats. Hideous: yes, that one too. To look at oneself

and find it hideous, what a job! But" then, when she hadn't been

hideous, had she sat around and-, stared at herself like this? Not

much! A proper body's not an object, not an implement, not a be-

longing to be admired, it's just you, yourself. Only when it's no

longer you, but yours, a thing owned, do you worry about it- Is it in

good shape? Will it do? Will it last?

"Who cares?" said Laia fiercely, and stood up.

It made her giddy to stand up suddenly. She had to put out her

hand to the bed table, for she dreaded falling. At that she thought of

reaching out to Taviri, in the dream.

What had he said? She could not remember. She was not sure if

she had even touched his hand. She frowned, trying to force mem-

ory. It had been so long since she had dreamed about Taviri; and

now not even to remember what he had said!

It was gone, it was gone. She stood there hunched in her night-

dress, frowning, one hand on the bed table. How long was it since

she had thought of him-let alone dreamed of him-even,. thought of

him, as "Taviri"? How long since she had said his name?

Asieo said. When Asieo and I were in prison in the North. Before

I met Asieo. Asieo's theory of reciprocity. Oh yes, she talked about

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

Ursula K. Le Guin - Day Before the Revolution.pdf

共15页,预览2页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Ursula K. Le Guin - Day Before the Revolution

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: