The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas
by Ursula Le Guin
With a clamor of bells that set the swallows soaring, the Festival of Summer came to the
city Omelas, bright-towered by the sea. The rigging of the boats in harbor sparkled with
flags. In the streets between houses with red roofs and painted walls, between old
moss-grown gardens and under avenues of trees, past great parks and public buildings,
processions moved. Some were decorous: old people in long stiff robes of mauve and
grey, grave master workmen, quiet, merry women carrying their babies and chatting as
they walked. In other streets the music beat faster, a shimmering of gong and
tambourine, and the people went dancing, the procession was a dance. Children
dodged in and out, their high calls rising like the swallows' crossing flights over the
music and the singing. All the processions wound towards the north side of the city,
where on the great water-meadow called the Green Fields boys and girls, naked in the
bright air, with mud-stained feet and ankles and long, lithe arms, exercised their restive
horses before the race. The horses wore no gear at all but a halter without bit. Their
manes were braided with streamers of silver, gold, and green. They flared their nostrils
and pranced and boasted to one another; they were vastly excited, the horse being the
only animal who has adopted our ceremonies as his own. Far off to the north and west
the mountains stood up half encircling Omelas on her bay. The air of morning was so
clear that the snow still crowning the Eighteen Peaks burned with white-gold fire across
the miles of sunlit air, under the dark blue of the sky. There was just enough wind to
make the banners that marked the racecourse snap and flutter now and then. In the
silence of the broad green meadows one could hear the music winding through the city
streets, farther and nearer and ever approaching, a cheerful faint sweetness of the air
that from time to time trembled and gathered together and broke out into the great
joyous clanging of the bells.
Joyous! How is one to tell about joy? How describe the citizens of Omelas?
They were not simple folk, you see, though they were happy. But we do not say the
words of cheer much any more. All smiles have become archaic. Given a description
such as this one tends to make certain assumptions. Given a description such as this
one tends to look next for the King, mounted on a splendid stallion and surrounded by
his noble knights, or perhaps in a golden litter borne by great-muscled slaves. But there
was no king. They did not use swords, or keep slaves. They were not barbarians. I do
not know the rules and laws of their society, but I suspect that they were singularly few.
As they did without monarchy and slavery, so they also got on without the stock
exchange, the advertisement, the secret police, and the bomb. Yet I repeat that these
were not simple folk, not dulcet shepherds, noble savages, bland utopians. They were
not less complex than us. The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by
pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only
pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to
admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can't lick 'em, join 'em.
If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is
to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe a
happy man, nor make any celebration of joy. How can I tell you about the people of
Omelas? They were not naive and happy children--though their children were, in fact,
happy. They were mature, intelligent, passionate adults whose lives were not wretched.
O miracle! but I wish I could describe it better. I wish I could convince you. Omelas
sounds in my words like a city in a fairy tale, long ago and far away, once upon a time.
Perhaps it would be best if you imagined it as your own fancy bids, assuming it will rise
to the occasion, for certainly I cannot suit you all. For instance, how about technology? I
think that there would be no cars or helicopters in and above the streets; this follows
from the fact that the people of Omelas are happy people. Happiness is based on a just
discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what
is destructive. In the middle category, however--that of the unnecessary but
undestructive, that of comfort, luxury, exuberance, etc.--they could perfectly well have
central heating, subway trains, washing machines, and all kinds of marvelous devices
not yet invented here, floating light-sources, fuelless power, a cure for the common cold.
Or they could have none of that; it doesn't matter. As you like it. I incline to think that
people from towns up and down the coast have been coming in to Omelas during the
last days before the Festival on very fast little trains and double-decked trams, and that
the train station of Omelas is actually the handsomest building in town, though plainer
than the magnificent Farmers' Market. But even granted trains, I fear that Omelas so far
strikes some of you as goody-goody. Smiles, bells, parades, horses, bleh. If so, please
add an orgy. If an orgy would help, don't hesitate. Let us not, however, have temples
from which issue beautiful nude priests and priestesses already half in ecstasy and
ready to copulate with any man or woman, lover or stranger, who desires union with the
deep godhead of the blood, although that was my first idea. But really it would be better
not to have any temples in Omelas--at least, not manned temples. Religion yes, clergy
no. Surely the beautiful nudes can just wander about, offering themselves like divine
soufflés to the hunger of the needy and the rapture of the flesh. Let them join the
processions. Let tambourines be struck above the copulations, and the glory of desire
be proclaimed upon the gongs, and (a not unimportant point) let the offspring of these
delightful rituals be beloved and looked after by all. One thing I know there is none of in
Omelas is guilt. But what else should there be? I thought at first there were not drugs,
but that is puritanical. For those who like it, the faint insistent sweetness of drooz may
perfume the ways of the city, drooz which first brings a great lightness and brilliance to
the mind and limbs, and then after some hours a dreamy languor, and wonderful visions
at last of the very arcana and inmost secrets of the Universe, as well as exciting the
pleasure of sex beyond belief; and it is not habit-forming. For more modest tastes I think
there ought to be beer. What else, what else belongs in the joyous city? The sense of
victory, surely, the celebration of courage. But as we did without clergy, let us do without
soldiers. The joy built upon successful slaughter is not the right kind of joy; it will not do;
it is fearful and it is trivial. A boundless and generous contentment, a magnanimous
triumph felt not against some outer enemy but in communion with the finest and fairest
in the souls of all men everywhere and the splendor of the world's summer: this is what
swells the hearts of the people of Omelas, and the victory they celebrate is that of life. I
really don't think many of them need to take drooz.
Most of the procession have reached the Green Fields by now. A marvelous smell of
cooking goes forth from the red and blue tents of the provisioners. The faces of small
children are amiably sticky; in the benign grey beard of a man a couple of crumbs of rich
pastry are entangled. The youths and girls have mounted their horses and are
beginning to group around the starting line of the course. An old women, small, fat, and
laughing, is passing out flowers from a basket, and tall young men where her flowers in
their shining hair. A child of nine or ten sits at the edge of the crowd, alone, playing on a
wooden flute. People pause to listen, and they smile, but they do not speak to him, for
he never ceases playing and never sees them, his dark eyes wholly rapt in the sweet,
thin magic of the tune.
He finishes, and slowly lowers his hands holding the wooden flute.
As if that little private silence were the signal, all at once a trumpet sounds from the
pavilion near the starting line: imperious, melancholy, piercing. The horses rear on their
slender legs, and some of them neigh in answer. Sober-faced, the young riders stroke
the horses' necks and soothe them, whispering, "Quiet, quiet, there my beauty, my
hope...." They begin to form in rank along the starting line. The crowds along the
racecourse are like a field of grass and flowers in the wind. The Festival of Summer has
begun.
Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the city, the joy? No? Then let me describe
one more thing.
In a basement under one of the beautiful public buildings of Omelas, or perhaps in the
cellar of one of its spacious private homes, there is a room. It has one locked door, and
no window. A little light seeps in dustily between cracks in the boards, secondhand from
a cobwebbed window somewhere across the cellar. In one corner of the little room a
couple of mops, with stiff, clotted, foul-smelling heads stand near a rusty bucket. The
floor is dirt, a little damp to the touch, as cellar dirt usually is. The room is about three
paces long and two wide: a mere broom closet or disused tool room. In the room a child
is sitting. It could be a boy or a girl. It looks about six, but actually is nearly ten. It is
feeble-minded. Perhaps it was born defective, or perhaps it has become imbecile
through fear, malnutrition, and neglect. It picks its nose and occasionally fumbles
vaguely with its toes or genitals, as it sits hunched in the corner farthest from the bucket
and the two mops. It is afraid of the mops. It finds them horrible. It shuts its eyes, but it
knows the mops are still standing there; and the door is locked; and nobody will come.
The door is always locked; and nobody ever comes, except that sometimes--the child
has no understanding of time or interval--sometimes the door rattles terribly and opens,
and a person, or several people, are there. One of them may come in and kick the child
to make it stand up. The others never come close, but peer in at it with frightened,
disgusted eyes. The food bowl and the water jug are hastily filled, the door is locked, the
eyes disappear. The people at the door never say anything, but the child, who has not
always lived in the tool room, and can remember sunlight and its mother's voice,
sometimes speaks. "I will be good," it says. "Please let me out. I will be good!" They
never answer. The child used to scream for help at night, and cry a good deal, but now
it only makes a kind of whining, "eh-haa, eh-haa," and it speaks less and less often. It is
so thin there are no calves to its legs; its belly protrudes; it lives on a half-bowl of corn
meal and grease a day. It is naked. Its buttocks and thighs are a mass of festered
sores, as it sits in its own excrement continually.
They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas. Some of them have come to see it,
others are content merely to know it is there. They all know that it has to be there. Some
of them understand why, and some do not, but they all understand that their happiness,
the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children,
the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their
harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child's abominable
misery.
This is usually explained to children when they are between eight and twelve, whenever
they seem capable of understanding; and most of those who come to see the child are
young people, though often enough an adult comes, or comes back, to see the child. No
matter how well the matter has been explained to them, these young spectators are
always shocked and sickened at the sight. They feel disgust, which they had thought
themselves superior to. They feel anger, outrage, impotence, despite all the
explanations. They would like to do something for the child. But there is nothing they
can do. If the child were brought up into the sunlight out of that vile place, if it were
cleaned and fed and comforted, that would be a good thing indeed; but if it were done,
in that day and hour all the prosperity and beauty and delight of Omelas would wither
and be destroyed. Those are the terms. To exchange all the goodness and grace of
every life in Omelas for that single, small improvement: to throw away the happiness of
thousands for the chance of the happiness of one: that would be to let guilt within the
walls indeed.
The terms are strict and absolute; there may not even be a kind word spoken to the
child.
Often the young people go home in tears, or in a tearless rage, when they have seen
the child and faced this terrible paradox. They may brood over it for weeks or years. But
as time goes on they begin to realize that even if the child could be released, it would
not get much good of its freedom: a little vague pleasure of warmth and food, no doubt,
but little more. It is too degraded and imbecile to know any real joy. It has been afraid
too long ever to be free of fear. Its habits are too uncouth for it to respond to humane
treatment. Indeed, after so long it would probably be wretched without walls about it to
protect it, and darkness for its eyes, and its own excrement to sit in. Their tears at the
bitter injustice dry when they begin to perceive the terrible justice of reality, and to
accept it. Yet it is their tears and anger, the trying of their generosity and the acceptance
of their helplessness, which are perhaps the true source of the splendor of their lives.
Theirs is no vapid, irresponsible happiness. They know that they, like the child, are not
free. They know compassion. It is the existence of the child, and their knowledge of its
existence, that makes possible the nobility of their architecture, the poignancy of their
music, the profundity of their science. It is because of the child that they are so gentle
with children. They know that if the wretched one were not there sniveling in the dark,
the other one, the flute-player, could make no joyful music as the young riders line up in
their beauty for the race in the sunlight of the first morning of summer.
Now do you believe in them? Are they not more credible? But there is one more thing to
tell, and this is quite incredible.
At times one of the adolescent girls or boys who go to see the child does not go home
to weep or rage, does not, in fact, go home at all. Sometimes also a man or woman
much older falls silent for a day or two, and then leaves home. These people go out into
the street, and walk down the street alone. They keep walking, and walk straight out of
the city of Omelas, through the beautiful gates. They keep walking across the farmlands
of Omelas. Each one goes alone, youth or girl, man or woman. Night falls; the traveler
must pass down village streets, between the houses with yellow-lit windows, and on out
into the darkness of the fields. Each alone, they go west or north, towards the
mountains. They go on. They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and
they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to
most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does
not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from
Omelas.
