Stop it, Ursula. Just stop.

I love Ursula K. Le Guin.  I've read many of her essays and her speeches, but this is my first time reading her fiction.  It's finding a home right inside me.  I've been devouring the Earthsea series.  And at the end of The Farthest Shore, I've found some of the most beautiful things written about death and life.  A young person is falling into the trap of searching for a way to Immortality.  In fact, the whole book is about people giving up all their art, their luck, their lives for the hope of Immortality.  Only one wise old person is able to withstand that call and it's because he won't listen:

"I, who am old, who have done what I must do, who stand in the daylight facing my own death, the end of all possibility, I know that there is only one power that is real and worth the having.  And that is the power, not to take, but to accept."

The whole book is such a hard and horrible and precious look at what we give up when we seek Immortality and what it takes to ultimately come face to face with death and the truth about the end of life.

"There are two, two that make one: the world and the shadow, the light and dark.  The two poles of the Balance.  Life rises out of death, death rises out of life; in being opposite they yearn to each other, they give birth to each other and are forever reborn.  And with them all is reborn, the flower of the apple tree, the light of the stars.  In life there is death.  In death there is rebirth.  What then is life without death?  Life unchanging, everlasting, eternal? - What is it but death - death without rebirth?"

The following is spoken by the older person to the young person to bring this young person sharply into focus on life, while holding hands "in a hard grasp, so that both by eye and by flesh they touched."

"(Insert your name here), this is.  And thou art.  There is no safety, and there is no end.  The word must be heard in silence; there must be darkness to see the stars.  The dance is always danced above the hollow place, above the terrible abyss."

 Now you see why I say, Stop it, Ursula.  Just stop.