Leguin on Secondhand Reality
rachel lindstrom (baubo@primenet.com)
Sat, 15 Jun 1996 01:05:06 -0700
"Elfland is what Lord Dunsany called the place. It is also known as Middle Earth, and
Prydain, and the Forest of Broceliande, and Once Upon a Time; and by many other names.
Let us consider Elfland as a great national park, a vast and beautiful place where a
person goes alone on foot, to get in touch with reality in a special, private, profound
fashion. But what happens when it is considered merely as a place to "get away to"?
Well, you know what has happened to Yosemite. Everybody comes, not with an ax and a
box of matches, but in a trailer with a motorbike on the back and a motorboat on top and
a butane stove, five aluminum folding chairs, and a transistor radio on the inside. They
arrive totally encapsulated in a secondhand reality. And then they move on to
Yellowstone, and it's just the same there, all trailers and transistors. They go from
park to park, but they never really go anywhere; except when one of them who thinks that
even the wildlife isn't real gets chewed up by a genuine firsthand bear.
The same sort of thing seems to be happening in Elfland, lately. A great many people
want to go there, without knowing what it is they're really looking for, driven by a
vague hunger for something real. With the intention or under the pretense of obliging
them, certain writers of fantasy are building six-lane highways and trailer parks with
drive-in movies, so that the tourists can feel at home just as if they were back in
Poughkeepsie.
But the point about Elfland is that you are not at home there. It's not
Poughkeepsie. It's different. "
Ursula Leguin, "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie", The Language of the Night,
HarperPerennial, 1989, pp. 78-79.