Very Far Away from Anywhere Else

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Book: Read Very Far Away from Anywhere Else for Free Online
Authors: Ursula K. Le Guin
time he was writing it; he just sat and wrote it and stuck it into a box and worked as an insurance broker or something. She disapproved of that. She said getting it played was part of the job. But she wasn't very consistent, because her two idols were Schubert, who never heard most of his big works, and Emily Brontë, who never really forgave her sister Charlotte for publishing her poems, or even in fact for reading them. The three songs that were to be performed in April were settings of Emily Brontë poems.

    Wuthering Heights
was Natalie's favorite book; and she knew a lot about the Brontë family, these four genius children living in a vicarage in a village on a moor in the middle of Nowhere, England, a hundred and fifty years ago. Talk about being isolated! I read a biography of them she gave me; and I realized that maybe I thought I had been lonely, but my life had been an orgy of sociability, compared to those four. But they did have each other. The kind of frightening thing was that it was the boy, the only son, who couldn't take it, and cracked up—went on drugs and alcohol, got hooked, and died of it. Because they'd all expected the most of him, because he was the boy. The girls, whom nothing was expected since they were only girls, went on and wrote
Jane Eyre
and
Wuthering Heights.
It gives you to think. Maybe I was not so unlucky in having parents who expected less of me than I wanted to give, after all. Maybe also it is not an unmixed blessing to be born male.

    What the Brontë kids did for years was write stories and poems about these countries they made up. Maps and wars and adventures and all. Charlotte and Branwell had "Angria," and Emily and Anne had "Gondal." Emily burned all her Gondal stories when she realized she was going to die of TB, but by then Charlotte had made her save the poems. They all learned how to write, they practiced at it by writing these long, involved romances about non-existent countries, for years. It came as a shock to me, because between twelve and sixteen I had done sort of the same thing, though I had no sister to show it to.

    I had this country called Thorn. I drew maps of it and stuff, but mostly I didn't write stories about it. Instead I described the flora and fauna, and the landscape and the cities, and figured out the economy and the way they lived, their government and history. It started out as a kingdom when I was twelve, but by the time I was fifteen or sixteen it had become a kind of free socialistic set-up, and so I had to work out all the history of how they got from autocracy to socialism, and also their relationships to other nations. They weren't at all friendly with Russia, China, or the United States. In fact they traded only with Switzerland, Sweden, and the Republic of San Marino. Thorn was a very small country, on an island in the South Atlantic, only about sixty miles across, and a very long way from anywhere else. The wind blew all the time in Thorn. The coasts were high and rocky. Sailing ships had very seldom been able to land there; the Greeks or Phoenicians had found it once, which gave rise to the myths of Atlantis, but it wasn't rediscovered until 1810. They had still, intentionally, not built a harbor for big ships, or any kind of landing field for planes. Fortunately it was small enough and poor enough that the Great Powers hadn't yet bothered to bring it into a sphere of influence and make it into a missile base. They let it alone. I had spent a lot of time on Thorn, for four years. But for over a year I hadn't been back; it all seemed long ago, kid stuff. Still, when I happened to think about it, I could see the steep cliffs over the and the wind blowing over the long sheep pastures, and the city of Barren on the south coast, my favorite city, built of granite and cedarwood, looking out over the windy cliffs to the Antarctic Ocean and the South Pole.

    I dug out some of the History of Thorn and showed it to Natalie. She really liked

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