Spare time?

Just a matter of days after acquiring Ursula K. Le Guin's No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters, I saw that the author had died. She died on Jan. 22 at the age of 88. Truly she didn't have time to spare.

The author of more than a score of novels, mostly science fiction, and several books of poetry, Le Guin turned to blogging when she reached her 80s. It was a way to stay in the writing game, but with short essays rather than an exhausting book, a book she might never live to finish. This book collects the best of her blog.

Her book's title comes from the last line of its first essay, one called "In Your Spare Time." This was triggered by a questionnaire she received from Harvard for her 60th class reunion. (She actually graduated from Radcliffe in 1951, but Radcliffe was affiliated with Harvard.) One question asked what she did in her spare time.

Le Guin reflects on how the meaning of the phrase "spare time" changes as one ages. For younger people it means "leisure time," whatever time is left after work and after household chores and parenting and other responsibilities are taken care of. At some point, after retirement, virtually all time becomes leisure time, meaning people can use their time however they wish. At least this seems true in theory, however untrue it may be in practice. Yet because time grows short as we age, there really is none to spare.

From there Le Guin goes on to tackle a variety of subjects, some relating to aging, others to literature, nature, her cat and, in one of her most entertaining pieces, putting our soldiers in camouflage. "I find it not only degrading but disturbing that we dress our soldiers in clothes suitable to jail or the loony bin, setting them apart not by looking good, looking sharp, but by looking like clowns from a broken-down circus."

As for her cat, she writes about Pard more than any other topic: how she got him, how he misbehaves only when he has an audience, how he catches mice but doesn't know what to do with them, and so on. Another essay focuses on a much bigger cat, a captive lynx that captivates her.