The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas

'The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas', From the book 'The Wind's Twelve Quarters' 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
description such as this one tends to make certain assumptions. Given a descrip‑
tion 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 slave. 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 so‑
ciety, 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 marvel‑
ous 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 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 no 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
all 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 processions 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 woman, small, fat, and laughing, is passing out flowers from a basket, and tall
young men wear 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. Soberfaced,
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 start‑
ing 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 per‑
haps 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 no‑
body 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 mak‑
ers, 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, impo‑
tence, 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 snivelling 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.