“The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” is one of my favorite pieces of literature. When I first read it, I took it as a socialist commentary, the bourgeoisie existing in comfort at the expense of the exploited working class.
After much life experience and many slings and arrows, my reading of it is very different. I now read it as being about the denied self. I’ve known a few people, me included, who tried their best to live in “Omelas” while keeping just such a despised, deprived child hidden away. I could only live in Omelas (which she explicitly makes the reader create as their own fantasy) as long as that child was left to starve in its dungeon. As life happens, some of us become aware of that child but decide to go on living in Omelas. Some of us take a chance on faith and abandon the comfort of that dynamic for an unknown wilderness.
“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 it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.”
And she is right, and I have been struggling lately with the possibility that “it does not exist.” Here I sit, no partner, no dog. Heart still in pieces over long gone loves. That is, legit, sad, but you know what I have are some freakin’ awesome friends. And I remember when that seemed as unlikely as living on the Moon.
Whatever, I think that once you walk away from Omelas you can’t turn around and go back. I don’t want to anyway. Even if I have to live with that poor kid’s sadness and shame and guilt and fear and pain and all of those things that are pleasantly absent from Omelas, I’ll take it and go on.