On our journey—spiritual, intellectual, emotional—“you may wander, may learn that in order to get to your destination you must turn away from it, become lost, spin about, and then only after the way has become overwhelming and absorbing, arrive, having gone the great journey without having gone far on the ground” (188). I was turned away from it when I was 16, but I have not given up on the non-geographical ground. Always in becoming, never in arriving.
Solnit writes about creativity in terms of light—or, more accurately, in terms of the absence of light, darkness—which she considers generative: “In darkness things merge, which might be how passion becomes love and how making love begets progeny of all natures and forms. Merging is dangerous, at least to the boundaries and definition of self. Darkness is generative, and generation, biological and artistic both, requires this amorous engagement with the unknown, this entry into the realm where you do not quite know what you’re doing and what will happen next. Creation is always in the dark because you can only do the work of making by not quite knowing what you’re doing, by walking into darkness, not staying in the light. Ideas emerge from edges and shadows to arrive in the light, and though that’s where they may be seen by others, that’s not where they are born” (185).
My writing is just like this: I sit down and let things emerge, from the darkness into the light. It is dangerous because it reveals my vulnerability. Merging challenges my sense of self. I merge with my thoughts, which come unexpectedly and trouble me. I am one with them, penetrated by them, my boundaries undone.
“Darkness is a pejorative in English,” yet light, counterintuitively, can make us blind, obstruct our vision, and constrict our thoughts.
Solnit’s description of Iceland is cinematographic and evocative. There is something deeply nostalgic in it. I was particularly struck by her discussion of time. When she asked about the northern light without darkness, she was told that “the year was like a long day in which [her respondent] was out in the world in the summer and lived more introspectively and indoors in winter” (184). Moving to California ten years ago was, for me, a kind of waiting for that “winter” when I could immerse myself in uninterrupted introspection. The constant sun now translates into a longing for cloudy skies and rain, since I recognize that the winter I miss and remember will never come here. Though I am grateful for the mild climate, the heat does not suit me. What I miss—what I need—is the climate of introspection found in gray skies and rain.
Solnit tells the story of Danish cleric Erik Pontoppidan, who “made himself unpopular enough that he had to migrate back to Copenhagen, and there composed another monumental tome, an atlas of Denmark” (181). He lived part of his life in Norway. I find compelling the idea of making oneself so unpopular that one needs to move. But what was his unpopularity based on? Unpopular people always attract me. They stand on their own.
We are not discrete entities, she writes, but are bound to our ancestry: “The language I speak, the body I inhabit with the adaptations and limitations of innumerable ancestors running through it… I am, we each are, the inmost of an endless series of Russian dolls” (190–191). Where is the “mother-doll” I came from? Beyond and above the mother who bore me.
She considers how we listen versus how we hear: “Who hears you? To have something to say is one thing; to have someone who hears it is another. You choose to hear what corresponds to your desires, needs, and interests, and there are dangers in a world that corresponds too well, with curating your world into a mirror that reflects only the comfortable and familiar, and dangers in the opposite direction as well. Listen carefully. … To hear is to let the sound wander all the way through the labyrinth of your ear; to listen is to travel the other way to meet it. It is not passive but active, this listening. It’s as though you retell each story, translate it into the language particular to you, fit it into your cosmology so you can understand and respond, and thereby it becomes part of you. To empathize is to reach out to meet the data that comes through the labyrinth of the senses, to embrace it and incorporate it” (193–194).
To me, empathy means listening and hearing without turning it back to oneself. I do not listen to find that I, too, suffer. I listen to feel empathy for the person in pain, not to make their experience a mirror of mine. The person who suffers is not searching to have her experience reduced to someone else’s. She does not suffer less because I also suffer. She is exhausted and cannot add my suffering on top of her own.
Solnit also reminds us: “Visual art is philosophy by other means and poetry without words” (194). Images are transformed into words, yet we should not assume their meaning is identical to what could have been expressed in language. It is in the gaps—between image and word—that true feeling and understanding often reside. Assumptions ruin the meaning.
She recounts her mother’s decline with Alzheimer’s: “She had achieved something of the state people strive for through spiritual practice: a lack of attachment to the past and future and a wholehearted participation in the present. It had come as part of a catastrophic terminal illness, not a devotional pursuit, but it came” (224). This description is gut-wrenching.
“The Ancient Greeks used a word, sungnome, that means to understand, to sympathize, to forgive, to pardon—a word that refuses to distinguish between thinking and feeling. It proposes that understanding is the beginning of forgiveness or the thing itself. The scope of this word implies that it takes empathy to try to understand and understanding to reach the empathy that is forgiveness—that they proceed together, helping each other along the way. Or that they were never separate in the first place” (233).
But does understanding always lead to forgiveness? If I understand that Eichmann acted simply as a conscientious worker, would my understanding lead to empathy for him? I doubt it. Is understanding the same as knowledge? I may know why Robinson killed Kirk, but does that mean I understand? In my view, understanding does not necessarily lead to forgiveness and even less so to empathy. I understand the motivations of Hamas, but I do not accept them.
Solnit explores our attachment to stories—even painful ones: “A physical therapist told me that chronic pain is treatable sometimes by training people to experience it differently, but the sufferer ‘has to be ready to give up their story.’ Some people love their story that much even if it’s of their own misery, even if it ties them to unhappiness, or they don’t know how to stop telling it. … You have to die a little to be reborn, and death comes first, the death of a story, a familiar version of yourself” (242). Allowing our image to change is, in a way, death and rebirth. It is far from easy.
We become attached to the image we create. Yet as Virginia Woolf put it: “It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole.” Solnit quotes her further: “This wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me; it gives me, perhaps because by doing so I take away the pain, a great delight to put the severed parts together. … It is the rapture I get when in writing I seem to be discovering what belongs to what” (240).
This resonates. I sit with a blank page, pen in hand, watching as words float before me but refuse to settle. Not ready yet. Still, the delay feels like productive waiting. I should trust it will come.
Solnit also recounts her trip down the Colorado River with remarkable vividness: “What was absent colored experience too: no money, no commerce, no news, no reflections or mirrors except the tiny one in which I checked how I was doing with the smearing of sunscreen each morning; no windows, no doors, no architecture, no buildings, no keys, no locks, no clock, no hours or minutes, no breaking up of the day into disjointed fragments of indoors and out, solitary and crowds, noisy and silent, hot and cold, sunlit and artificially illuminated or dark” (253). This is something I could never do—not because of the absence, but because I fear the physical challenge of the river itself. The absence of people I love, I do fear.
Peter Singer distinguishes two ways of grasping reality: the affective system and the deliberate system. The former relies on images and stories, generating emotional response; the latter relies on facts and figures, appealing to rational reasoning. Which attracts more attention? The affective. Feels in the gaps again.
Near the book’s end, Solnit reflects on endings themselves: “Essayists too face the temptation of a neat ending, that point when you bring the boat to shore and tie it to the dock and give up the wide sea. … It is easy to do, and I’ve done it again and again, sometimes with a sense of betrayal of the complexity of what came before, and sometimes when I haven’t done it, an editor has asked for the gift wrap and ribbon.”
I think I need to trust my sense of “the wide sea,” no matter what gift wrap or ribbon others may want. My true audience will sail with me.
In a way, Solnit’s book is an ode to her mother, the one she never knew until it was too late. It made me think of my own mother—how much more I would have loved to know her.
She began her book with reminiscences of her mother and ended it with reflections on her as well. Yet, in the closing pages, she returned her mother to the image and person she had been before Alzheimer’s—a person shaped differently before the illness changed her. The search was for the mother she did not truly know before, and though the illness brought loss, it also unexpectedly deepened their relationship. Where once her mother saw Rebecca as a competitor, that dynamic was transformed. This complex mother-daughter struggle illuminates the book and, in many ways, defines the Solnit she has become.
That was a great book to read.