Midweek pick-me-up: Ursula K. Le Guin on anger

NOTE: This newsletter might be cut short by your email program. [View it in full](.  If a friend forwarded it to you and you'd like your very own newsletter, [subscribe here]( — it's free.  Need to modify your subscription? You can [change your email address]( or [unsubscribe](. [Brain Pickings]( [Welcome] Hello, {NAME}! This is the Brain Pickings midweek pick-me-up: Once a week, I plunge into my fourteen-year archive and choose something worth resurfacing and resavoring as timeless nourishment for heart, mind, and spirit. (If you don't yet subscribe to the standard Sunday newsletter of new pieces published each week, you can sign up [here]( — it's free.) If you missed last week's edition — James {NAME}'s advice on writing and the endurance of creative work — you can catch up [right here](. And if you find any solace, joy, and value in my labor of love, please consider supporting it with a [donation]( – over these fourteen years, I have spent tens of thousands of hours and tremendous resources on Brain Pickings, and every little bit of support helps keep it – keep me – going. If you already donate: THANK YOU. [FROM THE ARCHIVE | Ursula K. Le Guin on Anger]( [leguin_notimetospare.jpg?fit=320%2C483]( The poet May Sarton experienced anger as [“a huge creative urge gone into reverse.”]( Philosopher Martha Nussbaum has argued that it is often [“an alluring substitute for grieving,”]( granting us the illusion of agency in situations that bereave of us of control. Poet and philosopher David Whyte pulled on anger’s weft thread to reclaim it as [“the deepest form of compassion.”]( But anger, [like silence]( is of many kinds and thunders across a vast landscape of contexts, most of its storms ruinous, and some, just maybe, redemptive. That is what the sharp-minded, large-spirited, incomparably brilliant Ursula K. Le Guin examines in an essay titled “About Anger,” found in her altogether fantastic nonfiction collection [No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters]( ([public library](. [ursulakleguin_benjaminreed.jpg?zoom=2&w=680] Ursula K. Le Guin by Benjamin Reed Le Guin begins with a case study in the cultural history of anger as a tool of social change — epoch-making change she [lived through and helped engender]( [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]In the consciousness-raising days of the second wave of feminism, we made a big deal out of anger, the anger of women. We praised it and cultivated it as a virtue. We learned to boast of being angry, to swagger our rage, to play the Fury. We were right to do so. We were telling women who believed they should patiently endure insults, injuries, and abuse that they had every reason to be angry. We were rousing people to feel and see injustice, the methodical mistreatment to which women were subjected, the almost universal disrespect of the human rights of women, and to resent and refuse it for themselves and for others. Indignation, forcibly expressed, is an appropriate response to injustice. Indignation draws strength from outrage, and outrage draws strength from rage. There is a time for anger, and that was such a time. Anger is a useful, perhaps indispensable tool in motivating resistance to injustice. But I think it is a weapon — a tool useful only in combat and self-defense. Le Guin considers how the uses of anger can metastasize into misuses when its aims are left uncalibrated under the ferment of time: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]Anger points powerfully to the denial of rights, but the exercise of rights can’t live and thrive on anger. It lives and thrives on the dogged pursuit of justice. […] Anger continued on past its usefulness becomes unjust, then dangerous. Nursed for its own sake, valued as an end in itself, it loses its goal. It fuels not positive activism but regression, obsession, vengeance, self-righteousness. Corrosive, it feeds off itself, destroying its host in the process. A century and a half after Walt Whitman admonished that [“America, if eligible at all to downfall and ruin, is eligible within herself, not without,”]( Le Guin adds: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]The racism, misogyny, and counter-rationality of the reactionary right in American politics for the last several years is a frightening exhibition of the destructive force of anger deliberately nourished by hate, encouraged to rule thought, invited to control behavior. I hope our republic survives this orgy of self-indulgent rage. [waterlootrafalgar4.jpg?zoom=2&w=600] Illustration by Olivier Tallec from [Waterloo and Trafalgar]( She examines the tissue of public anger under the microscope of the most private laboratory there is — the self. In a disquieting reflection on the personal experience of getting angry, she writes: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]I find the subject very troubling, because though I want to see myself as a woman of strong feeling but peaceable instincts, I have to realize how often anger fuels my acts and thoughts, how very often I indulge in anger. I know that anger can’t be suppressed indefinitely without crippling or corroding the soul. But I don’t know how useful anger is in the long run. Is private anger to be encouraged? Considered a virtue, given free expression at all times, as we wanted women’s anger against injustice to be, what would it do? Certainly an outburst of anger can cleanse the soul and clear the air. But anger nursed and nourished begins to act like anger suppressed: it begins to poison the air with vengefulness, spitefulness, distrust, breeding grudge and resentment, brooding endlessly over the causes of the grudge, the righteousness of the resentment. A brief, open expression of anger in the right moment, aimed at its true target, is effective — anger is a good weapon. But a weapon is appropriate to, justified only by, a situation of danger. Most of our mundane outbursts of anger, Le Guin points out, are not reactions to actual danger, nor even to perceived danger — they are a kind of reactionary weapon-waving against our own insecurities, impatiences, and irritations. She writes: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]Perhaps the problem is this: when threatened, we pull out our weapon, anger. Then the threat passes or evaporates. But the weapon is still in our hand. And weapons are seductive, even addictive… [mauricesendak_junipertree_grimm18.jpg?zoom=2&w=680] Art by Maurice Sendak for [a special edition]( of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales In an introspective search for any positive use of anger, Le Guin finds one — the safeguarding of self-respect. But upon closer inspection, she recognizes that what we may perceive — and react to — as disrespect often turns out to be mere misunderstanding or a case of two human fallibilities awkwardly bumping into one another without ill intent. After all, if Joan Didion was right in the astute observation that self-respect springs from [“the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life”]( — and of course she was right — then rising to anger upon feeling slighted by another is a maladaptive abdication of that responsibility. Le Guin, inquiring deeper with disarming self-awareness, acknowledges as much: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]As my great-aunt Betsy said of a woman who snubbed her, “I pity her poor taste.” Mostly my anger is connected less with self-respect than with negatives: jealousy, hatred, fear. Fear, in a person of my temperament, is endemic and inevitable, and I can’t do much about it except recognize it for what it is and try not to let it rule me entirely. If I’m in an angry mood and aware of it, I can ask myself, So what is it you’re afraid of? That gives me a place to look at my anger from. Sometimes it helps get me into clearer air. [nutcracker_sendak81.jpg?zoom=2&w=680] Illustration by Maurice Sendak for a [special edition]( of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Nutcracker In a sentiment evocative of Cicero’s case for [the constructive side of envy]( Le Guin considers a particularly pernicious species of fear: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]Jealousy sticks its nasty yellow-green snout mostly into my life as a writer. I’m jealous of other writers who soar to success on wings of praise, I’m contemptuously angry at them, at the people who praise them — if I don’t like their writing. I’d like to kick Ernest Hemingway for faking and posturing when he had the talent to succeed without faking. I snarl at what I see as the unending overestimation of James Joyce. The enshrinement of Philip Roth infuriates me. But all this jealous anger happens only if I don’t like what they write. If I like a writer’s writing, praise of that writer makes me happy. I can read endless appreciations of Virginia Woolf. A good article about José Saramago makes my day. So evidently the cause of my anger isn’t so much jealousy or envy as, once again, fear. Fear that if Hemingway, Joyce, and Roth really are The Greatest, there’s no way I can ever be very good or very highly considered as a writer — because there’s no way I am ever going to write anything like what they write or please the readers and critics they please. The circular silliness of this is self-evident; but my insecurity is incurable. Fortunately, it operates only when I read about writers I dislike, never when I’m actually writing. When I’m at work on a story, nothing could be farther from my mind than anybody else’s stories, or status, or success. [ulysses_paladino1.jpg?zoom=2&w=600] Illustration by Mimmo Paladino for [a rare edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses]( Le Guin comes back to the notion that all anger is a response to fear. (Descartes [framed fear as the antipode of hope]( which implies the most damaging aspect of anger: the relinquishing and active annihilation of hope.) She examines the elemental core of her fears: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]My fears come down to fear of not being safe (as if anyone is ever safe) and of not being in control (as if I ever was in control). Does the fear of being unsafe and not in control express itself as anger, or does it use anger as a kind of denial of the fear? One view of clinical depression explains it as sourced in suppressed anger. Anger turned, perhaps, against the self, because fear — fear of being harmed, and fear of doing harm — prevents the anger from turning against the people or circumstances causing it. If so, no wonder a lot of people are depressed, and no wonder so many of them are women. They are living with an unexploded bomb. […] I see in the lives of people I know how crippling a deep and deeply suppressed anger is. It comes from pain, and it causes pain. Le Guin ends with a mighty open question, partly challenge and partly — indeed mostly — a rhetorical verdict: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]What is the way to use anger to fuel something other than hurt, to direct it away from hatred, vengefulness, self-righteousness, and make it serve creation and compassion? Complement this portion of [No Time to Spare]( a magnificent read in its tessellated totality, with Martha Nussbaum on [anger and forgiveness]( and a Zen master on [the four types of anger and its paradoxical constructive side]( then revisit Le Guin on [being a “man,”]( [the artist’s task]( [the sacredness of public libraries]( [imaginative storytelling as a force of freedom]( and [what beauty really means](. [Forward to a friend]( Online]( [Like on Facebook]( donating=loving Every week since 2006, I have been pouring tremendous time, thought, love, and resources into Brain Pickings, which remains free and is made possible by patronage. If you find any joy and solace in my labor of love, please consider supporting it with a donation. And if you already donate, from the bottom of my heart: THANK YOU. (If you've had a change of heart or circumstance and wish to rescind your support, you can do so [at this link]( monthly donation You can become a Sustaining Patron with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a Brooklyn lunch.  one-time donation Or you can become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation in any amount. [Start Now]( [Give Now]( Partial to Bitcoin? You can beam some bit-love my way: 197usDS6AsL9wDKxtGM6xaWjmR5ejgqem7 RELATED READING: [thewellofbeing_weill0.jpg]( [Ursula K. Le Guin on Suffering and Getting to the Other Side of Pain]( * * * [nutcracker_sendak0.jpg]( [Poet and Philosopher David Whyte on Anger, Forgiveness, and What Maturity Really Means]( * * * [marthanussbaum2.jpg]( [Philosopher Martha Nussbaum on Anger, Forgiveness, the Emotional Machinery of Trust, and the Only Fruitful Response to Betrayal in Intimate Relationships]( [---] You're receiving this email because you subscribed on Brain Pickings. This weekly newsletter comes out each Wednesday and offers a highlight from the Brain Pickings archives for a midweek pick-me-up. Brain Pickings NOT A MAILING ADDRESS 159 Pioneer StreetBrooklyn, NY 11231 [Add us to your address book]( [unsubscribe from this list](   [update subscription preferences](