Very far Away From Anywhere Else

Very Far Away from Anywhere Else, by Ursula Le Guin is a story about growing up, high school life and the pressure to adjust, to fit in, and be like everybody else. Owen and Natalie, the main characters, find each other and learn what building a relationship is all about.

Owen is the narrator.

Here's an excerpt from the book. Read it, choose the passage you like best and write down your own thoughts about it.

"It's OK, you know, up to about the sixth grade.  Nobody really cares, least of all yourself.  The teachers are mostly pretty nice to you, because you're easy to teach.  Some of them love you for it, and give you neat books for extra reading.  Some of them resent it, but they're too busy with the Behavior Problem types to have time to really make you feel lousy for being ahead of the others in math and reading.  And there's always a few other kids, usually girls, who are as smart as you are, or smarter, and you and they write the class skits, and make lists for the teacher, and so on.  And besides, for all the talk about how cruel little kids are, they haven't got a patch on older people for cruelty.  Little kids are just dumb, the smart ones and the slow ones.  They do dumb things.  They say what they think.  They haven't learned yet to say what they don't really think.  That comes later, when kids begin to turn into people and find out that they are alone. 

I think what you mostly do when you find you really are alone is to panic.  You rush to the opposite extreme and pack yourself into groups--clubs, teams, societies, types.  You suddenly start dressing exactly like the others.  It's a way of being invisible.  The way you sew the patches on the holes in your blue jeans becomes incredibly important.  If you do it wrong you're not with it.  You have to be with it.  That's a peculiar phrase, you know?  With it.  With what?  With them.  With the others.  All together.  Safety in numbers.  I'm not me.  I'm a basketball letter.  I'm a popular kid.  I'm my friends' friend.  I'm a black leather growth on a Honda.  I'm a member.  I'm a teen-ager.  You can't see me, all you can see is us.  We're safe.

And if We see You standing alone by yourself, if you're lucky we'll ignore you.  If you're not lucky, we might throw rocks.  Because we don't like people standing there with the wrong kind of patches on their blue jeans reminding us that we're each alone and none of us is safe."

Quotes from Very Far Away from Anywhere Else:

 “Maybe when you meet the people you are supposed to meet you know it, without knowing it.”

“She said it seemed like the only choices offered were to want to be what other people were, or to be what other people wanted you to be.” 

“We decided that it was no good asking what is the meaning of life, because life isn't an answer, life is the question, and you, yourself, are the answer.” 

“And I needed a rock. Something to hold onto, to stand on. Something solid. Because everything was going soft, turning into mush, into marsh, into fog. Fog closing in on all sides. I didn't know where I was at all.”