The Farthest Shore brings a fitting close to Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea trilogy. But first there is a crisis. Magic seems to be fading from the known world, first at its far reaches, but like a disease it begins to spread. It leaves the inhabitants listless, directionless, regardless of whether they had magical abilities to begin with; some are even driven mad. The young protagonist from A Wizard of Earthsea, now older and wiser, must embark on a quest to discover why this is happening before the world falls apart.
The disappearance of magic has been explored by writers who immerse their tales in legend. Arthurian Tales, The Lady of the Lake and Excalibur, Merlin and Morgana, imagine a medieval Britain where magic was once powerful in the realm. After the great events of The Lord of the Rings, as the Elves depart and Middle Earth becomes the realm of Men, magic seems to fade away. The contemporary Once Upon a Time TV series begins with a transplanted fairy tale world cursed to a realm without magic (although they bring it back quickly enough). In our own realm, we consider scientific thinking to have displaced magical thinking as children grow up, or as societies develop technology – the new magic. We’d love to think it might be present yet hidden, perhaps in the wizarding societies of Harry Potter’s world.
Great works of fiction and narrative explore the profound and mysterious, in a way both more powerful and accessible than the non-fiction treatises laden with philosophy and theology. Tolkien’s stories are powerful in that regard; more so (in my opinion) than Rowling’s world which does attempt to juxtapose good and evil, and takes up the questions of what it means to fear death and the costs of trying to be immortal. Le Guin ponders the same questions, but goes deeper than Rowling and gives the reader a glimmer of the mysterious and profound questions of life and death, good and evil, existence and free will. While I don’t subscribe to the yin-yang underpinnings of Earthsea as the underlying truth of our cosmos, there’s much that is insightful in The Farthest Shore.
I’ve tried not to give away the story for those who want to experience the wonder of reading it for themselves. But I’ll quote one passage from the main protagonist that speak strongly to the human condition. “The little traitor soul in us, in the dark, like the worm in the apple. He talks to us. But only some understand him. The wizards and the sorcerers. The singers; the makers. And the heroes, the ones who seek to be themselves. To be one’s self is a rare thing and a great one. To be one’s self forever: is that not better still?”
Much of Earthsea magic parallels the skilled work of expert artisans. One might similarly ask the question of what is lost when expertise is denigrated and eventually lost. A race to the bottom. Reversion to the mean – and perhaps not the statistical measure, but the brutishly mean. Mass production. That’s why I’m concerned with the diminishing of the arts in education. Science and technology, the new magic, has been placed on too high a pedestal – the new gods, as it were, and mean ones too. It’s why I worry about the ways machine intelligence has increasingly permeated the world of education, promising to personalize, but is likely to lead to further depersonalization and widening the every-increasing gap between the haves and the have-nots.
The flatter world has become the meaner world. As the protagonist in The Farthest Shore says: “But when we crave power over life – endless wealth, unassailable safety, immortality – then desire becomes greed. And if knowledge allies itself to that greed, then comes evil. Then the balance of the world is swayed, and ruin weighs heavy in the scale.”
The best fiction functions like a mirror, but a mirror darkly – not so clear and shiny that we notice only the superficial. It won’t get everything right; there’s much that we still don’t know about ourselves, the world around us, and the world beyond us. We should be careful not to trade life for death in a quest for the new scientific philosopher's stones of power. The fading of magic, true magic, is perhaps an ominous sign.
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