![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
This is a short chapter, very introspective and somewhat claustrophobic in tone after the wide open spaces and conversations of the last one. I think this is deliberate, as it’s the last time Hugh will be alone in the Beginning Place.
We get Hugh’s point of view of the scene that concluded the last chapter. It’s a close echo of Irena’s experience. She was frightened and angry that there was an intruder in her secret place, and felt intimidated and violated by Hugh’s male, physical presence and by the modern stuff he brought with him. Hugh is also frightened and angry for the exact same reasons, but is intimidated not so much by Irena’s physicality as by her hostility. (He mistakes her for a boy at first, but she scares him even then.)
He’s unable to find the way out until she shows him, which is something that will come up again: he can always get in but not always get out, and she can always get out but not always get in. This is mostly there as an externalized metaphor of how the two of them need each other and work well together, and is not really used as a plot device, as they would have been forced to interact for other reasons without it.
I think the reason for who has which problem is that Irena has already had her time in the other land, and is growing away from it, while Hugh is the one who’s specifically needed by Tembreabrezi to slay the dragon, and so the land is trying to keep him there until he’s done his job. (Not very smart of the land if so, because Irena is needed too, but I don’t think the land is sentient as such, and magic works by intuitive rather than strict logic. Besides, he can always bring her with him.)
The water imagery continues, as Hugh washes in the creek after his encounter with Irena.
The water washed his face and his hands, washed away shame and fear. “This is my home,” he said to the earth and rocks and trees, and with his lips almost on the water, whispered, “I am you. I am you.”
This lovely passage is doing some interesting things. We already see the water as a baptism, and that Hugh feels at home in the Beginning Place as he never did in the suburbs. But he takes it a step further, and says he is the land and the water. Going by traditional ideas about elements, Hugh would be a water type, as Irena would be fire. He’s… I hate to use the word passive, which is so negative in Western culture… let’s say, receptive rather than active. He’s intuitive and goes with the flow, yin to Irena’s yang. LeGuin notably does not see that as negative, and in fact has written quite a lot celebrating yin qualities.
The other idea of note is that Hugh is not really part of the land, not even as much as Irena is (and Irena’s not really part of it either), and this is what enables him to be useful to it. He doesn’t feel the magical fear that overwhelms the people of Tembreabrezi until the creature that generates it is practically on top of him, and Irena feels it but not so strongly that it overcomes her. They’re outsiders, and much as that ends up stinging them both, it’s also a valuable gift.
Back at Sam’s Thrift-E-Mart (a hell of a jolt for Hugh and the reader—coming right after the passage I excerpted, just the name makes you shudder), Donna figures out that Hugh has something up his sleeve. She thinks it’s a woman, and she’s really not that far off the mark. Though Donna’s insights are all filtered through her tacky modern phrasing, she’s pretty intuitive.
“Ain’t it wonderful to be young? But I wouldn’t go through it again if you paid me.”
This remark applies to both the situation Donna thinks is going on (Hugh has a girlfriend) and the real one. If you look past the obvious irony, she’s making a lot of sense: the whole story of the book is wonderful and painfully intense, and it is about growing up, even if it’s not exactly the sort of experience Donna thinks she’s talking about. Except that it is exactly what Donna is talking about: Hugh does experience first love, and second (and true) love too, and he does have sex, and Donna probably wouldn’t want to face that metaphoric or literal dragon all over again. There’s a wise woman peeking out from below Donna’s awful haircut.
Hugh returns to the Beginning Place and communes some more with the creek and the trees. And he notices something of import: there are no animals there, and no birds sing. He also realizes that calling the place the evening land, as he had been doing, is wrong because evening is a time of change, and this place doesn’t change. What this all means is that the Beginning Place is not a place you can live in. It changes you, but it does not have an ecosystem, there is no song that you don’t bring from outside, and the twilight never deepens into night or brightens with dawn. It seems to be in transition, but it isn’t; it’s stuck at the time of change without actually changing. This is why Hugh and Irena end up leaving, I think: once you pass through adolescence, that liminal phase, you have to keep growing and changing. If the Beginning Place is eternal adolescence and the suburbs are eternally "driving in neutral," the city—both the city in the other land and the city in our world—is the grown-up place, where people can continue to grow.
I am not sure how Tembreabrezi fits into this. It does have people in it who grow up physically, at least, though the people we meet don’t seem to change themselves, though our perceptions of them do.
While Hugh is there, he remembers his father and a girl named Cheryl who had a nervous breakdown; he thinks about people being strange and people being crazy; and there’s a lovely passage where he imagines the creek joining the ocean. But I am running out of time to discuss that.
He hikes into Tembreabrezi, and the chapter concludes with this line, which is especially striking after all the solitude which preceded it,
There was home, and he walked towards it, and came down the street between the lamp-lit windows, hearing a child’s voice calling words he did not understand.
We get Hugh’s point of view of the scene that concluded the last chapter. It’s a close echo of Irena’s experience. She was frightened and angry that there was an intruder in her secret place, and felt intimidated and violated by Hugh’s male, physical presence and by the modern stuff he brought with him. Hugh is also frightened and angry for the exact same reasons, but is intimidated not so much by Irena’s physicality as by her hostility. (He mistakes her for a boy at first, but she scares him even then.)
He’s unable to find the way out until she shows him, which is something that will come up again: he can always get in but not always get out, and she can always get out but not always get in. This is mostly there as an externalized metaphor of how the two of them need each other and work well together, and is not really used as a plot device, as they would have been forced to interact for other reasons without it.
I think the reason for who has which problem is that Irena has already had her time in the other land, and is growing away from it, while Hugh is the one who’s specifically needed by Tembreabrezi to slay the dragon, and so the land is trying to keep him there until he’s done his job. (Not very smart of the land if so, because Irena is needed too, but I don’t think the land is sentient as such, and magic works by intuitive rather than strict logic. Besides, he can always bring her with him.)
The water imagery continues, as Hugh washes in the creek after his encounter with Irena.
The water washed his face and his hands, washed away shame and fear. “This is my home,” he said to the earth and rocks and trees, and with his lips almost on the water, whispered, “I am you. I am you.”
This lovely passage is doing some interesting things. We already see the water as a baptism, and that Hugh feels at home in the Beginning Place as he never did in the suburbs. But he takes it a step further, and says he is the land and the water. Going by traditional ideas about elements, Hugh would be a water type, as Irena would be fire. He’s… I hate to use the word passive, which is so negative in Western culture… let’s say, receptive rather than active. He’s intuitive and goes with the flow, yin to Irena’s yang. LeGuin notably does not see that as negative, and in fact has written quite a lot celebrating yin qualities.
The other idea of note is that Hugh is not really part of the land, not even as much as Irena is (and Irena’s not really part of it either), and this is what enables him to be useful to it. He doesn’t feel the magical fear that overwhelms the people of Tembreabrezi until the creature that generates it is practically on top of him, and Irena feels it but not so strongly that it overcomes her. They’re outsiders, and much as that ends up stinging them both, it’s also a valuable gift.
Back at Sam’s Thrift-E-Mart (a hell of a jolt for Hugh and the reader—coming right after the passage I excerpted, just the name makes you shudder), Donna figures out that Hugh has something up his sleeve. She thinks it’s a woman, and she’s really not that far off the mark. Though Donna’s insights are all filtered through her tacky modern phrasing, she’s pretty intuitive.
“Ain’t it wonderful to be young? But I wouldn’t go through it again if you paid me.”
This remark applies to both the situation Donna thinks is going on (Hugh has a girlfriend) and the real one. If you look past the obvious irony, she’s making a lot of sense: the whole story of the book is wonderful and painfully intense, and it is about growing up, even if it’s not exactly the sort of experience Donna thinks she’s talking about. Except that it is exactly what Donna is talking about: Hugh does experience first love, and second (and true) love too, and he does have sex, and Donna probably wouldn’t want to face that metaphoric or literal dragon all over again. There’s a wise woman peeking out from below Donna’s awful haircut.
Hugh returns to the Beginning Place and communes some more with the creek and the trees. And he notices something of import: there are no animals there, and no birds sing. He also realizes that calling the place the evening land, as he had been doing, is wrong because evening is a time of change, and this place doesn’t change. What this all means is that the Beginning Place is not a place you can live in. It changes you, but it does not have an ecosystem, there is no song that you don’t bring from outside, and the twilight never deepens into night or brightens with dawn. It seems to be in transition, but it isn’t; it’s stuck at the time of change without actually changing. This is why Hugh and Irena end up leaving, I think: once you pass through adolescence, that liminal phase, you have to keep growing and changing. If the Beginning Place is eternal adolescence and the suburbs are eternally "driving in neutral," the city—both the city in the other land and the city in our world—is the grown-up place, where people can continue to grow.
I am not sure how Tembreabrezi fits into this. It does have people in it who grow up physically, at least, though the people we meet don’t seem to change themselves, though our perceptions of them do.
While Hugh is there, he remembers his father and a girl named Cheryl who had a nervous breakdown; he thinks about people being strange and people being crazy; and there’s a lovely passage where he imagines the creek joining the ocean. But I am running out of time to discuss that.
He hikes into Tembreabrezi, and the chapter concludes with this line, which is especially striking after all the solitude which preceded it,
There was home, and he walked towards it, and came down the street between the lamp-lit windows, hearing a child’s voice calling words he did not understand.