In Ursula K. Le Guin’s story (1973), a city’s real, unforced happiness depends on one child kept alone in a locked cellar. Everyone knows. Most make their peace with it; a few walk away. She subtitled it “Variations on a theme by William James”, who imagined the same bargain in 1891.
Make the festival perfect. Then go down the steps.
Plenty of happy arrangements rest on a cost someone carries out of sight. Le Guin asks what you do once you’ve seen it, and leaves out one answer: changing the terms.
Ask yourself. Who’s quietly paying for the way things work for you?
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Ask yourself
Your week with
Most people skip this. The ones who don’t are the ones it changes.
That’s the whole collection examined, every room. Now imagine doing this with your own life, for a year, with two people who come to know it well. That’s membership.