Hollywood producers might not agree, but there are many ways to fall in love. The majority of our popular culture reserves love for only a few kinds of relationships. The most common is of course those boy-meets-girl stories, heterosexual romantic ooh la la love. But there are others. Parents and kids are popular pairings for the language of love. LGBTQ romantic relationships are becoming more common every year, a sign that our collective understanding of romance is shifting and that, straight or queer, love is love.
But there are still some loves that just don’t really find a place to thrive in popular culture.
I was thinking about this while reading Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Farthest Shore, the third book in her Earthsea Cycle. The books follow the adventures of the Archmage Sparrowhawk, the most powerful wizard of Earthsea. In book 1, A Wizard of Earthsea, Sparrohawk is a young man coming of age and into power, not yet the greatest wizard in the land. In book 2, The Tombs of Atuan, Sparrowhawk is a man, locked in an underground labyrinth, at the mercy of a priestess who becomes his friend and ally. In The Farthest Shore, age has caught up with the Archmage. He is old, and though his power remains, magic is now being pulled out of the world.
Each of these stories is, in their own way, a love story. In A Wizard of Earthsea, Sparrowhawk, an impetuous youth, must learn to love himself, and accept that he has both light and dark within him. In Tombs of Atuan, it is the priestess Tenar who is coming into adulthood; she and the wizard grow to trust and respect each other. Their relationship is never romantic, but their lives become wholly interdependent.
In The Farthest Shore, we get our clearest vision of love in the archipelago of Earthsea, as Le Guin provides a real, thriving love story. This is clear from the first scene of the book. The Archmage relaxes under a tree in the Court of the Fountain, a peaceful escape for the aging leader. Then comes Arren, a young noble, who seeks out the Archmage for aid. While Arren and Sparrowhawk discuss the problems that all of Earthsea are facing, the young Arren becomes enchanted by the man.
As their conversation comes to a close, Sparrowhawk places his hands on Arren’s back, gently leading the two out of the Court. ” He pushed Arren lightly between the shoulder blades,” Le Guin writes, “a familiarity no one had ever taken before, and which the young prince would have resented from anyone else; but he felt the Archmage’s touch as a thrill of glory. For Arren had fallen in love.”
Thus is Le Guin’s heartfelt story set: the 17-year old prince Arren and the old man Sparrowhawk, in love.
Le Guin portrays this scene in the language of the romance novel. As a child, Arren had “played at loving,” but had “never given himself entirely to anything.” Now, though, in Sparrowhawk’s presence, “the depths of him were wakened.” The author makes clear that the moment Arren falls in love is the moment that he becomes a man. “So the first step out of childhood is made all at once, without looking before or behind, without caution, and nothing held in reserve.”
So many sci-fi/fantasy authors conceive of complicated worlds, full of fascinating, challenging stories. But I think no SFF author conceives of more complicated vision of what it means to be human than Ursula K. Le Guin. Her imagination extends not only to the concepts and scenarios of SFF, but also to the conception of identity. What it means to enter into a relationship in a Le Guin story is always surprising. In her best work, race and gender and normative behaviors are almost non-existent.
The most obvious example of Le Guin’s imaginative turns on love and sex come in Left Hand of Darkness, where on the planet Winter distinctions between individual men and women are essentially non-existent. Each shifts their emotional and sexual identities, at times inseminating and at other times carrying offspring.
Where Left Hand goes for the deep dive, though, The Farthest Shore pulls back, exploring the subtleties of love not as sexual-there is almost no romantic love in The Earthsea Cycle-but as social, inter-generational, and unexpected. The language Le Guin uses to draw out the relationship of Sparrowhawk and Arren is passionate. They fight; Arren doubts his devotion, only to supplicate himself in apology for those doubts.
It is unqualified love between a young man and his mentor. And it makes reading Le Guin intriguing experience for those who undertake her work. Because in the midst of a fantasy series about wizards and dragons and lands of the dead, you just might come across an expression of love in science-fiction/fantasy that leaves you breathless.
Here, for example, when the companions have re-committed, and together reject the promise of eternal but empty life, in favor committing to travel together into death.
“Listen to me, Arren. You will die. You will not live forever. Nor will any man nor any thing. Nothing is immortal. But only to us is it given to know that we must die. And that is a great gift: the gift of selfhood. For we have only what we know we must lose, what we are willing to lose…That selfhood which is our torment, and our treasure, and our humanity, does not endure. It changes; it is gone, a wave on the sea. Would you have the sea grow still and the tides cease, to save one wave, to save yourself? Would you give up the craft of your hands, and the passion of your heart, and the light of sunrise and sunset, to buy safety for yourself—safety forever? That is what they seek to do on Wathort and Lorbanery and elsewhere. That is the message that those who know how to hear have heard: By denying life you may deny death and live forever!—And this message I do not hear, Arren, for I will not hear it. I will not take the counsel of despair. I am deaf; I am blind. You are my guide. You in your innocence and your courage, in your unwisdom and your loyalty, you are my guide—the child I send before me into the dark. It is your fear, your pain, I follow. You have thought me harsh to you, Arren; you never knew how harsh I use your love as a man burns a candle, burns it away, to light his steps. And we must go on. We must go on. We must go all the way. We must come to the place where the sea runs dry and joy runs out, the place to which your motal terror draws you.”
“Where is it, my lord?”
“I do not know.”
“I cannot lead you there. But I will come with you.”
We must go all the way.
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