I get the sense that as Le Guin formed this meditation, she smiled. A vibration shot from her heart to the pen, sent by the resonance between her own vocation as a writer and that of her intergalactic-traveler character, Genly Ai.

Ai farfetches. He grasps at a unity that does not quite present itself in strict and perceivable forms of evidence. He is attempting to grasp at some truth floating about the political and social world of the place in which he visits. An ambassador from another world, he perceives something weightless, not quite right about what he experiences there. “Why,” he asks, “did the people I met, whether well or ill disposed toward me, also seem insipid?” Then the farfetching makes a judgment: “Each of them lacked some quality, some dimension of being; and they failed to convince. They were not quite solid.”

Gathering up his vague perceptions (he is in a new country on an alien planet, everything must be a little vague), Ai projects those discrete and hazy impressions into a discernable whole. He is attempting to give some common and binding theme (a throughline, if you will) to the particles of new and fuzzy experience. This is the work of the imagination.

The imagination is often thought of as something other than truth, even a flight from it. People sometimes tell me they don’t read fiction because it isn’t true, as if avoiding it were a point of valor.

But the work of metaphor and the surging energy of the human imagination, whether active in our day-to-day lives or brightening the pages of a novel, is neither true nor false. Imagination is an ingredient of human truth-seeking.

We, like Ai, see, but dimly. The half-smirks and winces and sheepish, breathless mutters of others, especially those we do not know, impress themselves upon us in ways we cannot easily interpret. We make guesses, often we are wrong.

We inhabit communal and cultural spaces whose emotional and social processes are highly developed and rooted in complicated histories. We are members of families and institutions with unstated rules of engagement that get danced and danced and danced around, and the dancing is often our way of communicating. How are we to fully see? To understand? And if not these, how are we to inhabit the ‘real world’?

The imagination’s task is not to flee into some safe and fantastic territory. Its task is not to escape the thorny and difficult world, but to indwell it more honestly. By the imagination, we find ways of rooting ourselves in our native soil. The imagination gathers a day’s discrete impressions, a faith’s creeds, a person’s history, binds them together and shapes them into something coherent. A whole. In the whole, the parts find meaning. It is by making meaning that the human truly dwells.

The imagination is not something non-literary people do not use. It is rather like a structural faculty of the human mind. It is something we must always use, something always at work, even when we do not know it. You might not be fanciful in your imaginative musings, but the imagination is that breath of life that quickens truth, making it stand up tall and work for us in ways compatible with our embodied and psychological experience. It makes truth human.

Without imagination, fact and perception lie scattered, cold, inert on the ground. The imagination gathers the pieces, binds them, breathes life into the whole, and calls upon them: “stand! move! to show us something real!”

Only then can we say: it is true.