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0335ad1
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Some portion of Woolf's genius, it seems to me, is that having no notion, that negative capability. I once heard about a botanist in Hawaii with a knack for finding new species by getting lost in the jungle, by going beyond what he knew and how he knew, by letting experience be larger than his knowledge, by choosing reality rather than the plan. Woolf not only utilized but celebrated the unpredictable meander, on mind and foot. Her great es..
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Rebecca Solnit |
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370d368
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Not till we are completely lost, or turned round,--for a man needs only to be turned round once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost,--do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of nature. Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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86c02a3
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I turned to the audience and asked, "Have any of you ever been wounded by humanity?" They laughed with me; in that moment, we knew that we were all weird, all in this together, and that addressing our own suffering while learning not to inflict it on others is part of the work we're all here to do. So is love, which comes in so many forms and can be directed at so many things. There are many questions in life worth asking, but perhaps if we..
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Rebecca Solnit |
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46fc62f
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I started out in silence, writing as quietly as I had read, and then eventually people read some of what I had written, and some of the readers entered my world or drew me into theirs. I started out in silence and traveled until I arrived at a voice that was heard far away--first the silent voice that can only be read, and then I was asked to speak aloud and to read aloud. When I began to read aloud, another voice, one I hardly recognized, ..
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Rebecca Solnit |
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beb1e6f
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Making a poem is like making a chair; a poem is as real as a chair and sometimes more useful.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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b8cbbc9
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As Nancy Frey writes of the long-distance pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in Spain, 'When pilgrims begin to walk several things usually begin to happen to their perceptions of the world which continue over the course of the journey: they develop a changing sense of time, a heightening of the senses, and a new awareness of their bodies and the landscape....A young German man expressed it this way: 'In the experience of walking, each ste..
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Rebecca Solnit |
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7fc093d
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Earlier 18th-century literary language was not supple enough to connect the life of the imagination to that of the street.
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street
language
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Rebecca Solnit |
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1bdc276
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Women often find great roles in revolution, simply because the rules fall apart and everyone has agency, anyone can act. As they did in Egypt, where liberty leading the masses was an earnest young woman in a black hijab.
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women
hijab
liberty
revolution
gender
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Rebecca Solnit |
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aa989dc
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Like racism, misogyny can never be adequately addressed by its victims alone.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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221bf69
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Part of what makes roads, trails and paths so unique as built structures is that they cannot be perceived as a whole all at once by a sedentary onlooker. They unfold in time as one travels along them, just as a story does as one listens or reads, and a hairpin turn is like a plot twist, a steep ascent a building of suspense to the view at the summit, a fork in the road an introduction of a new storyline, arrival the end of the story. Just a..
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travel
trails
roads
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Rebecca Solnit |
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fa445fc
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I wrote it in one sitting early the next morning. When something assembles itself that fast, it's clear it's been composing itself somewhere in the unknowable back of the mind for a long time. It wanted to be written; it was restless for the racetrack; it galloped along once I sat down at the computer.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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8c1873b
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mutual aid and pleasure are linked, that the ties that bind are grounds for celebration as well as obligation.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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207a328
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I picked up a book on wilderness survival by Laurence Gonzalez and found in it this telling sentence: "The plan, a memory of the future, tries on reality to see if it fits." His point is that when the two seem incompatible, we often hang onto the plan, ignore the warnings reality offers us and plunge into trouble. Afraid of the darkness of the unknown, the spaces in which we see only dimly, we often choose the darkness of closed eyes, of ob..
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Rebecca Solnit |
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8c5fcf3
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Words travel, because the word arctic comes from arktos, Greek for bear. Cancer comes from the Greek word for crab, karkinos. Memory, or one of its locations in the brain, the hippocampus, means seahorse. A bestiary is buried in our language.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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1dd90c7
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The self is also a creation, the principal work of your life, the crafting of which makes everyone an artist.
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work
self-improvement
creativity
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Rebecca Solnit |
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d1cc320
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The purpose of activism and art, or at least of mine, is to make a world in which people are producers of meaning, not consumers, and
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Rebecca Solnit |
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6dfc3c6
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If paradise now arises in hell, it's because in the suspension of the usual order and the failure of most systems, we are free to live and act another way.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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ee66857
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Still, even now, when a woman says something uncomfortable about male misconduct, she is routinely portrayed as delusional, a malicious conspirator, a pathological liar, a whiner who doesn't recognize it's all in fun, or all of the above. The overkill of these responses recalls Freud's deployment of the joke about the broken kettle. A man accused by his neighbor of having returned a broken kettle damaged replies that he had returned it unda..
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Rebecca Solnit |
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625b825
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What you imagine as overwhelming or terrifying while at leisure becomes something you can cope with when you must-there is no time for fear.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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de71ecd
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His point is that when the two seem incompatible we often hang onto the plan, ignore the warnings reality offers us, and so plunge into trouble. Afraid of the darkness of the unknown, the spaces in which we see only dimly, we often choose the darkness of closed eyes, of obliviousness. 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..
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Rebecca Solnit |
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26c8701
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Fear of making mistakes can itself become a huge mistake, one that prevents you from living, for life is risky and anything less is already loss.
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loss
mistakes
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Rebecca Solnit |
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b92d6d6
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I propitiated the knife-wielding deities with presents of books. The gifts to them and the head of nursing were also meant to acknowledge that although people get paid to do their jobs, you cannot pay someone to do their job passionately and wholeheartedly. Those qualities are not for sale; they are themselves gifts that can only be given freely, and are in many, many fields.
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passion
work
giving
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Rebecca Solnit |
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693eecf
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The whites who administered Native American subjugation claimed to be recruiting the Indians to join them in a truer, more coherent worldview--but whether it was about spirituality and the afterlife, the role of women, the nature of glaciers, the age of the world, or the theory of evolution, these white Victorians were in a world topsy-turvy with change, uncertainty and controversy. Deference was paid to Christianity and honest agricultural..
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Rebecca Solnit |
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6710f7c
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The tyranny of the quantifiable is partly the failure of language and discourse to describe more complex, subtle, and fluid phenomena, as well as the failure of those who shape opinions and make decisions to understand and value these slipperier things. It is difficult, sometimes even impossible, to value what cannot be named or described, and so the task of naming and describing is an essential one in any revolt against the status quo of c..
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Rebecca Solnit |
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3a3d99f
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So many men murder their partners and former partners that we have well over a thousand homicides of that kind a year--meaning that every three years the death toll tops 9/11's casualties, though no one declares a war on this particular kind of terror. (Another way to put it: the more than 11,766 corpses from domestic-violence homicides between 9/11 and 2012 exceed the number of deaths of victims on that day and all American soldiers killed..
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Rebecca Solnit |
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6692386
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B]eauty is one of the things that make you cry and so maybe beauty is always tied up in tears.
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tears
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Rebecca Solnit |
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2d5d0d4
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Disaster doesn't sort us out by preferences; it drags us into emergencies that require we act, and act altruistically, bravely, and with initiative in order to survive or save the neighbors, no matter how we vote or what we do for a living.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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7bb0174
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Hysteria derives from the Greek word for "uterus," and the extreme emotional state it denotes was once thought to be due to a wandering womb; men were by definition"
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Rebecca Solnit |
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64020e5
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Feminism has both undone the hierarchy in which the elements aligned with the masculine were given greater value than those of the feminine and undermined the metaphors that aligned these broad aspects of experience with gender. So, there goes women and nature. What does it leave us with? One thing is a political mandate to decentralize privilege and power and equalize access, and that can be a literal spatial goal too, the goal of our desi..
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feminism
landscape
environment
justice
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Rebecca Solnit |
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1729531
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Questions about happiness generally assume that we know what a happy life looks like. Happiness is often described as the result of having a great many ducks lined up in a row - spouse, offspring, private property, erotic experiences - even though a millisecond of reflection will bring to mind countless people who have all those things and are still miserable.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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b11e9c9
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We write history with our feet and with our presece and our collective voice and vision. And yet, of course, everything in the mainstream media suggests that popular resistance is ridiculous, pointless, or criminal, unless it is far away, was long ago, or, ideally, both. These are the forces that prefer the giant remain asleep.
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history
politics
inspirational
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Rebecca Solnit |
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37ae7f2
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Their grumpiness is often the grumpiness of perfectionists who hold that anything less than total victory is failure, a premise that makes it easy to give up at the start or to disparage the victories that are possible. This is Earth. It will never be heaven. There will always be cruelty, always be violence, always be de- struction.
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perfection
politics
pragmatism
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Rebecca Solnit |
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0ae1424
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When I was young, women were raped on the campus of a great university and the authorities responded by telling all the women students not to go out alone after dark or not to be out at all. Get in the house. (For women, confinement is always waiting to envelope you.) Some pranksters put up a poster announcing another remedy, that all men be excluded from campus after dark. It was an equally logical solution, but men were shocked at being a..
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Rebecca Solnit |
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c11ddbe
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There is no money in what is aptly called free association: we are instead encouraged by media and advertising to fear each other and regard public life as a danger and a nuisance, to live in secured spaces, communicate by electronic means, and acquire our information from media rather than each other.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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c485c13
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The stories shatter. Or you wear them out or leave them behind. Over time the story of the memory loses its power. Over time you become someone else. Only when the honey turns to dust are you free.
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time
love
honey
storytelling
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Rebecca Solnit |
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069040a
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A comprehensive utopia may be out of reach, but the effort to realise it shapes the world for the better all the same. The belief may not be true, but it is useful. Belief makes the world.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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fb3aa3a
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I argued that you don't know if your actions are futile; that you don't have the memory of the future; that the future is indeed dark, which is the best thing it could be; and that, in the end, we always act in the dark.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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d31783b
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This work will only mater if it's sustained. To sustain it, people have to believe that the myriad small, incremental actions matter. That they matter even when the consequences aren't immediate or obvious. They must remember that often when you fail at your immediate objective--to block a nominee or a pipeline or to pass a bill--that, even then, you may have changed the whole framework in ways that make broader change more possible. You ma..
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Rebecca Solnit |
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066babd
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Even earthquakes are the consequence of tensions built up over long spans of time, imperceptibly, incrementally. You don't notice the buildup, just the release. You see a sick person, an old person, a dying person, the sight sinks in, and somewhere down the road you change your life. In movies and novels, people change suddenly and permanently, which is convenient and dramatic but not much like life, where you gain distance on something, re..
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Rebecca Solnit |
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710f5a0
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Instar implies something both celestial and ingrown, something heavenly and disastrous, and perhaps change is commonly like that, a buried star, oscillating between near and far.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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88a2d2a
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Modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought, or thoughtfulness.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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20f45d1
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Katrina was an extreme version of what goes on in many disasters,wherein how you behave depends on whether you think your neighbors or fellow citizens are a greater threat than the havoc wrought by a disaster or a greater good than the property in houses and stores around you."
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utopias
solidarity
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Rebecca Solnit |
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9201f73
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thinking is generally thought of as doing nothing in a production-oriented culture, and doing nothing is hard to do. It's best done by disguising it as doing something, and the something closest to doing nothing is walking. Walking itself is the intentional act closest to the unwilled rhythms of the body, to breathing and the beating of the heart. It strikes a delicate balance between working and idling, being and doing.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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923f470
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The evening hour, too, gives us the irresponsibility which darkness and lamplight bestow," [Woolf] writes. "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 friens 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 ..
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Rebecca Solnit |