- The last words of the Mahabharata* are, “By no means can I attain a goal beyond my reach.” It is likely that justice, a human idea, is a goal beyond human reach. We’re good at inventing things that can’t exist.Maybe freedom cannot be attained through human institutions but must remain a quality of the mind or spirit not dependent on circumstances, a gift of grace… My problem with it is that its devaluation of work and circumstance encourages institutional injustices which make the gift of grace inaccessible. A two-year-old child who dies of starvation or a beating or a firebombing has not been granted access to freedom, nor any gift of grace, in any sense in which I can understand the words. We can attain by our own efforts only an imperfect justice, a limited freedom. Better than none. Let us hold fast to that principle, the love of Freedom, of which the freed slave, the poet, spoke.
~ Ursula K. LeGuin 1929-1918 United States Writer, Poet
Historical Age: Age of Reason, 1650-1950; Astrological Age, Pisces, April 1 AD – 2000; Sun Sign, Libra
*The Mahabharata is one of the world’s longest and most influential epic poems where questions of justice, duty, loyalty, and morality are explored.
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