Books In English "City Of Illusions" Ursula K. Le Guin | Page 139

hands, it was real, it was there. He picked it up very carefully and stared at
the page that it opened to. Columns of beautiful meaningless patterns, lines
of half-comprehensible script, changed from the letters he had learned long
ago in the First Analect, deviant, bewildering. He stared at them and could
not read them, and a word of which he did not know the meaning rose up
from them, the first word:
The way …
He looked from the book to his own hand that held it. Whose hand,
darkened and scarred beneath an alien sun? Whose hand?
The way that can be gone
is not the eternal Way.
The name—
He could not remember the name; he would not read it. In a dream he
had read these words, in a long sleep, a death, a dream.
The name that can be named
is not the eternal Name.
And with that the dream rose up overwhelming him like a wave rising,
and broke.
He was Falk, and he was Ramarren. He was the fool and the wise
man: one man twice born.
In those first fearful hours, he begged and prayed to be delivered
sometimes from one self, sometimes from the other. Once when he cried
out in anguish in his own native tongue, he did not understand the words
he had spoken, and this was so terrible that in utter misery he wept; it was
Falk who did not understand, but Ramarren who wept.
In that same moment of misery he touched for the first time, for a
moment only, the balance-pole, the center, and for a moment was himself:
then lost again, but with just enough strength to hope for the next moment
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