INTRODUCTION
In a large, diverse society, it is easy to avoid seeing the hardships of others and, as a consequence, to be complicit in allowing the suffering to persist. More sophisticated societies, like America’s, develop ways - some unintentional - to keep populations separate, which eventually segregates wealth, health, opportunity, and social position.
In her 1973 short story, Ursula K. LeGuin (1929-2018) addresses this problem by describing the utopian city of Omelas (“Salem, O” spelled backward, a reference to both the town in Oregon and the mythic Jerusalem). The excerpt provided here begins three quarters of the way through the story, when LeGuin reveals that the town’s continued happiness depends upon the perpetual misery of a single child kept imprisoned in darkness in a basement. The citizens are faced with the choice of accepting the child’s suffering or endangering the collective happiness. Some, unable to bear the injustice, walk out of the city into an unknown darkness.
EXCERPTS
Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the city, the joy? No? Then let me describe one more thing.
In a basement under one of the beautiful public buildings of Omelas, or perhaps in the cellar of one of its spacious private homes, there is a room. It has one locked door, and no window. . . . In the room a child is sitting. It could be a boy or a girl. It looks about six but actually is nearly ten. It is feeble-minded. Perhaps it was born defective or perhaps it has become imbecile through fear, malnutrition, and neglect. . . . The door is always locked; and nobody ever comes, except that sometimes - the child has no understanding of time or interval – sometimes the door rattles terribly and opens, and a person, or several people, are there. . . . The food bowl and the water jug are hastily filled, the door is locked, the eyes disappear.
They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas. Some of them have come to see it, others are content merely to know it is there. They all know that it has to be there. Some of them understand why, and some do not, but they all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child’s abominable misery.
. . .
Often the young people go home in tears, or in a tearless rage, when they have seen the child and faced this terrible paradox. They may brood over it for weeks or years. But as time goes on they begin to realize that even if the child could be released, it would not get much good of its freedom: a little vague pleasure of warmth and food, no doubt, but little more. . . Their tears at the bitter injustice dry when they begin to perceive the terrible justice of reality, and to accept it.
. . .
At times one of the adolescent girls or boys who go to see the child does not go home to weep or rage, does not, in fact, go home at all. Sometimes also a man or woman much older falls silent for a day or two and then leaves home. . . . They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.