Member-only story
Solitude
A short story about culture and belonging by Ursula K. Le Guin
This short story is set in Le Guin’s Hainish universe (Earth or Terra being one of many planets colonized by Hain in the distant past) but when interstellar travel ceased the various colonies forgot that others existed.
In Solitude, an ethnologist goes to live on a backwater planet called Eleven-Soro in order to study what seems to be a socially and culturally impoverished and dysfunctional world. She takes her two young children with her, a girl of about 5 and a slightly older boy, and has to send reports back periodically to the mother ship. The daughter narrates the story, which unfolds over the course of a couple of decades.
The society consists of women in separate households who live in an auntring. Adult women are not allowed to enter the houses of other adult women, and they don’t talk much, so the ethnologist has to rely on reports from her children as to what goes on in other women’s houses.
Boys only live in the auntring until puberty, when they are cast out to fend for themselves and meet up with other boys and men who live on the outskirts of villages or in the wild. Men and women meet to mate, but otherwise don’t spend much time together.
One of the mottos that the women teach the children is: be aware. This means to be completely present in the…
