Omelas

The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas is a science fiction short story.
It is one of the things that touches me most deeply.


The way it tells itself, the straightforwardness and plea to live as genuinely as we can the presented hypothetical world, stands out to me.

There is a very basic ethical dilemma proposed, and the answer I choose is one which demands that I give the world all I have to give.

Each time I read it, it is such beauty it moves me to tears.
(And again, each time I say such things, I am quick to follow it up with, "But that is probably only me, don't expect the same, everyone is different...." (I cannot hope for anyone to understand how I am).....)
I am not exaggerating. It is beautiful. It moves me to tears.

I write now, because I do not think my experience of The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas is the common one.

I read the part about the child and I thought, I am supposed to feel disgust and fear and dislike for these people, but I stubbornly will not. I will not be told by an author "look at this thing. This thing is terrible."

And then I started to get it. Get what The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas means to me.

I don't know if we must always have great evil to have great good. I do not know if people are doomed to stagnation if they are content. I do not know if it is only war that can make us achieve great strides in history. I do not know if great good can only be created or only be seen if it stands against the worst of evils. I do not know if the meaning of good will evaporate once we have nothing to compare it to.

I was told by the author, this is a perfect town. And I balked. Suuuure. It probably is this happy religious goody goody "haven" all shallow and lies but somehow the people are "happy" because everyone knows that the virtuous good life is the one true happiness.

And then it told me that this town was a place of freedom. It was not perfect. Perfection is not happiness. The happiness was in the correction of mistakes and the hope and the comradeship. Sex and drugs are sources of happiness, and the problems and negative elements had been overcome through understanding and choice. People were free to do as they pleased, and so everyone went their own way, but always came back to share and appreciate. People excelled, people reached out, people understood, and people were happy in that wholesome, diverse way that the best happiness I know is.



And then I was told, that there were some people who left. Perhaps I was supposed to imagine them as mysterious dreamers and pilgrims. The necessary question mark at the end of a story designed to tease your mind. But instead I realized I believed them to be hard, practical and daring individuals. They were courageous enough to do something simple. To dare to believe that there could be something better. And they were willing to sacrifice all they had in order to try to find that something.

These people....they looked at their happiness, at the closest thing to perfection I can imagine, and they said, I believe we can do better. I believe we are greater even than utopia. I believe we can improve, and I believe it is the only thing for me to do, to go and seek that thing.

Maybe idealism is nonsense, it can't coexist in a flawed universe. Maybe idealism is wrong in this world.

But that brilliant hope, determination, striving for what is beyond possible... that.... shear willingness to not give in to reality. To believe and pursue something ... something ideal. To treat the ideal seriously. To treat ideals... as real.


What can I say to encompass the beauty, the power of that concept?
What can I do but cry tears and hope that maybe we should live like that and maybe we can. Maybe we can hope and maybe we can bring about things beyond what I thought possible. Maybe you truly can live by ideals. Maybe you truly can live by ideals.

Maybe we can be so strong, so beautiful, so understanding, so close to perfection that we can Walk Away from Omelas.
Maybe it's possible to dream beyond the possible. And then to act beyond reality. And then to be beyond dreams.