‘I pondered that a good while, as we walked side by side through the rain, under the dark branches of the Forest of the Otherhord. Within the white hood Faxe’s face was tired and quiet, its light quenched. Yet he still awed me a little. When he looked at me with his clear, kind, candid eyes, he looked at me out of a tradition thirteen thousand years old: a way of thought and way of life so old, so well established, so integral and coherent as to give a human being the unself-consciousness, the authority, the completeness of a wild animal, a great strange creature who looks straight at you out of his eternal present…’
from The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K Le Guin
Absence Club 