|
37d97ef
|
What doesn't go back in the jar or the box are ideas. And revolutions are, most of all, made up of ideas. You can whittle away at reproductive rights, as conservatives have in most states of the union, but you can't convince the majority of women that they should have no right to control their own bodies.
|
|
|
Rebecca Solnit |
|
1a669dc
|
Sometimes it's valuable to return to the circumstances of childhood with an adult's resources and insights, and that time around I realized that I could not feel at all. Not for her, or for myself, except a dim horror, as if from a long way away. I had returned to the state in which I had spent my childhood, frozen, in suspended animation, waiting to thaw out, to wake up, waiting to live. I thought of her unhappiness as a sledge to which I ..
|
|
|
Rebecca Solnit |
|
7e57e9a
|
I'm not arguing here that women and children don't lie. Men, women, and children lie, but the latter two are not disproportionately prone to doing so, and men--a category that includes used-car salesmen, Baron von Munchhausen, and Richard Nixon--are not possessed of special veracity.
|
|
|
Rebecca Solnit |
|
fe63285
|
Jenny Chiu tweeted, "Sure #NotAllMen are misogynists and rapists. That's not the point. The point is that #YesAllWomen live in fear of the ones that are." Women--and men (but mostly women)--said scathing things brilliantly. * #YesAllWomen because I can't tweet about feminism without getting threats and perverted replies. Speaking out shouldn't scare me. * #YesAllWomen because I've seen more men angry at the hashtag rather than angry at the ..
|
|
|
Rebecca Solnit |
|
db8c931
|
When I first began to write, I had been a child for most of my life, and my childhood memories were vivid and potent, and the forces that shaped me, Most of them have grown fainter with time, and whenever I write one down, I give it away: it ceases to have the shadowy life of memory and becomes fixed in letters: it ceases to be mine; it loses that mobile unreliability of the live.
|
|
writing
memory
nostalgia
|
Rebecca Solnit |
|
23805b5
|
Ultimately the destruction of the Earth is due in part, perhaps in large part, to a failure of the imagination or to its eclipse by systems of accounting that can't count what matters. The revolt against this destruction is a revolt of the imagination, in favor of subtleties, of pleasures money can't buy and corporations can't command, of being producers rather than consumers of meaning, of the slow, the meandering, the digressive, the expl..
|
|
|
Rebecca Solnit |
|
789c71e
|
Cause-and-effect assumes history marches forward, but history is not an army. It is a crab scuttling sideways, a drip of soft water wearing away stone, an earthquake breaking centuries of tension. Sometimes one person inspires a movement, or her words do decades later; sometimes a few passionate people change the world; sometimes they start a mass movement and millions do; sometimes those millions are stirred by the same outrage or the same..
|
|
|
Rebecca Solnit |
|
2e17e14
|
In [fairy tales], power is rarely the right tool for survival anyway. Rather the powerless thrive on alliances, often in the form of reciprocated acts of kindness - from beehives that were not raided, birds that were not killed but set free or fed, old women who were saluted with respect. Kindness sown among the meek is harvested in crisis
|
|
|
Rebecca Solnit |
|
ea8dc4e
|
One merely had to imagine a woman candidate doing what Trump did, from lying to leering, to understand what latitude masculinity possesses. "No advanced step take by women has been so bitterly contested as that of speaking in public," Susan B. Anthony said in 1900. "For nothing which they have attempted, not even to secure the suffrage, have they been so abused, condemned and antagonized." Or as Mary Beard put it last year, "We have never e..
|
|
|
Rebecca Solnit |
|
56848ed
|
What are human murmurations, I wondered? They are, speaking of choruses, in Horton Hears a Who, the tiny Whos of Whoville, who find that if every last one of them raises their voice, they become loud enough to save their home. They are a million-and-a-half young people across the globe, on March 15, 2019, protesting climate change; coalitions led by First Nations people, holding back fossil fuel pipelines across Canada; the lawyers and othe..
|
|
|
Rebecca Solnit |
|
51f9e7f
|
Or maybe there's one thing to say, about the capitalism of the heart, the belief that the essence of life too can be seized and hoarded, that you can corner the market on confidence, stage a hostile takeover of happiness.
|
|
thoughts
life
therapy
|
Rebecca Solnit |
|
b60dfbb
|
Ci, ktorych przeraza rownosc malzenska, sa, na co wskazuje wiele znakow, tak samo przerazeni wizja rownosci w parach heteroseksualnych jak rownoscia par tej samej plci.
|
|
małżeństwo
równość
związki-małżeńskie
queer
|
Rebecca Solnit |
|
197b834
|
When you say lone gunman, everyone talks about loners and guns, but not about men
|
|
violence-in-society
toxic-masculinity
|
Rebecca Solnit |
|
b28fb63
|
We're fighting for a society in which everyone is important.
|
|
|
Rebecca Solnit |
|
f4530a7
|
Sulkowicz's genius was to make her burden tangible, and in so doing make it something others could share. Solidarity has been a big part of this feminist movement against violence. ("An Insurrectionary Year")"
|
|
rape
feminism
art
|
Rebecca Solnit |
|
9320a34
|
The moment when mortality, ephemerality, uncertainty, suffering, or the possibility of change arrives can split a life in two. Facts and ideas we might have heard a thousand times assume a vivid, urgent, felt reality. We knew them then, but they matter now. They are like guests that suddenly speak up and make demands upon us; sometimes they appear as guides, sometimes they just wreck what came before or shove us out the door. We answer them..
|
|
|
Rebecca Solnit |
|
411294d
|
The question, then, is not so much how to create the world as how to keep alive that moment of creation, how to realize that Coyote world in which creation never ends and people participate in the power of being creators, a world whose hopefulness lies in its unfinishedness, its openness to improvisation and participation. The revolutionary days I have been outlining are days in which hope is no longer fixed on the future: it becomes an ele..
|
|
|
Rebecca Solnit |
|
e6ac601
|
David Graeber
|
|
|
Rebecca Solnit |
|
7c9991d
|
Thanks to demographics, that conservative push is not going to work--the United States is not going to be a mostly white country again--and because genies don't go back into bottles and queer people are not going back into the closet and women aren't going to surrender. It's a war, but I don't believe we're losing it, even if we won't win it anytime soon either;
|
|
|
Rebecca Solnit |
|
7999fe1
|
There are those who receive as birthright an adequate or at least unquestioned sense of self and those who set out to reinvent themselves, for survival or for satisfaction, and travel far. Some people inherit values and practices as a house they inhabit; some of us have to burn down that house, find our own ground, build from scratch, even as a psychological metamorphosis.
|
|
|
Rebecca Solnit |
|
d3c2636
|
Six years ago, when I sat down and wrote the essay "Men Explain Things to Me," here's what surprised me: though I began with a ridiculous example of being patronized by a man, I ended with rapes and murders. We tend to treat violence and the abuse of power as though they fit into airtight categories: harassment, intimidation, threat, battery, rape, murder. But I realize now that what I was saying is: it's a slippery slope. That's why we nee..
|
|
|
Rebecca Solnit |
|
9d93795
|
That thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you is usually what you need to find, and finding it is a matter of getting lost. The word "lost" comes from the Old Norse los, meaning the disbanding of an army, and this origin suggests soldiers falling out of formation to go home, a truce with the wide world. I worry now that many people never disband their armies, never go beyond what they know. Advertising, alarmist news, technology,..
|
|
|
Rebecca Solnit |
|
5092991
|
the language of free speech is used to protect hate speech, itself an attempt to deprive others of their freedom of speech, to scare them into shutting up.
|
|
|
Rebecca Solnit |
|
1961a6a
|
Feminism is not a scheme to deprive men but a plan to liberate us all
|
|
|
Rebecca Solnit |
|
6bc6327
|
Eliminate your mother, then your two grandmothers, then your four great-grandmothers. Go back more generations and hundreds, then thousands disappear. Mothers vanish, and the fathers and mothers of those mothers. Ever more lives disappear as if unlived until you have narrowed a forest down to a tree, a web down to a line. This is what it takes to construct a linear narrative of blood or influence or meaning.
|
|
|
Rebecca Solnit |
|
718828e
|
Studies of the Surgeon General's office reveal that domestic violence is the leading cause of injury to women between the ages of fifteen and forty-four, more common than automobile accidents, muggings, and cancer deaths combined.
|
|
|
Rebecca Solnit |
|
88d0c39
|
The past is set in daylight, and it can become a torch we can carry into the night that is the future.
|
|
|
Rebecca Solnit |
|
49e1b64
|
When we are attracted, we draw near; when we draw near, the sight that attracted us dissolves: the face of the beloved blurs or fractures as one draws near for a kiss, the smooth cone of Mount Fuji becomes rough rock rising from underfoot to blot out the sky.
|
|
|
Rebecca Solnit |
|
1849f71
|
De Certeau's metaphor suggests a frightening possibility: that if the city is a language spoken by walkers, then a postpedestrian city not only has fallen silent but risks becoming a dead language, one whose colloquial phrases, jokes, and curses will vanish, even if its formal grammar survives.
|
|
|
Rebecca Solnit |
|
28deda7
|
Few remember that there was no significant US homeless population before the 1980s, that Ronald Reagan's new society and economy created these swollen ranks of street people. Even
|
|
|
Rebecca Solnit |
|
f622de9
|
The light belies the bony solidity of the land, playing over it like emotion on a face, and in this the desert is intensely alive, as the apparent mood of mountains changes hourly, as places that are flat and stark at noon fill with shadows and mystery in the evening, as darkness becomes a reservoir from which the eyes drink, as clouds promise rain that comes like passion and leaves like redemption, rain that delivers itself with thunder, w..
|
|
|
Rebecca Solnit |
|
a4face3
|
In the distance was the celestial drama of summer thunderstorms, clouds assembling in vast arrays that demonstrated how far the sky went and how high, that shifted from the bundled white cumulus into the deep blue of storm clouds, and when we were lucky, poured down rain and lightning and shafts of light and vapor trails like a violent redemption. It was as though the whole world consisted of the tiny close-up realm of these creatures and t..
|
|
|
Rebecca Solnit |
|
d77cf61
|
The end of the world was wind-scoured but peaceful, black cormorants and red starfish on wave-washed dark rocks below a sandy bluff, and beyond them all the sea spreading far and then farther.
|
|
|
Rebecca Solnit |
|
ee25cbb
|
Utopia is on the horizon," declares Eduardo Galeano. "When I walk two steps, it takes two steps back. I walk ten steps and it is ten steps further away. What is utopia for? It is for this, for walking." Judeo-Christian"
|
|
|
Rebecca Solnit |
|
d2424e2
|
A Freudian would claim to know what they have and I lack, but intelligence is not situated in the crotch--
|
|
|
Rebecca Solnit |
|
74c9814
|
What's meant by "reproductive rights," of course, is the right of women to control their own bodies. Didn't I mention earlier that violence against women is a control issue?"
|
|
|
Rebecca Solnit |
|
ab72588
|
One day in Auschwitz, the writer Primo Levi recited a canto of Dante's Inferno to a companion, and the poem about hell reached out from six hundred years before to roll back Levi's despair and his dehumanization. It was the canto about Ulysses, and though it ends tragically, it contains the lines You were not made to live like animals But to pursue virtue and know the world which he recited and translated to the man walking with him.
|
|
|
Rebecca Solnit |
|
da4c21f
|
We are no longer quite ourselves. As we step out of the house on a fine evening between four and six, we shed the self our friends know us by and become part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers, whose society is so agreeable after the solitude of one's own room." Here she describes a form of society that doesn't enforce identity but liberates it, the society of strangers, the republic of the streets, the experience of being a..
|
|
|
Rebecca Solnit |
|
eb87d07
|
Gonzalez adds, "Researchers point out that people tend to take any information as confirmation of their mental models. We are by nature optimists, if optimism means that we believe we see the world as it is. And under the influence of a plan, it's easy to see what we want to see."
|
|
|
Rebecca Solnit |
|
68f33f0
|
When one begins to lose touch with reality, the ill brain latches obsessively and delusionally onto whatever it's immersed in--the surrounding culture's illness.
|
|
|
Rebecca Solnit |