Hope

When others fear uncertainty, Rebecca Solnit sees hope in what can be found when people feel the most lost.

olnit’s Buddhist influences have come from many traditions. “There’s this interesting American project of creating a kind of hybrid Buddhism, not necessarily between the lineages, but more attuned to contemporary American realities,” she says. “Ambient Buddhism” is how Solnit likes to describe the Buddhist themes that appear in her work and inform her understanding of hope and despair.

“Buddhism is acceptance that you’re not totally in control,” she says. “Then there are psychoanalytic and other perspectives where you have to recognize that you contain immense depth and darknesses. You don’t even know yourself completely, so how can you know someone else? We don’t even understand the present, so how can we understand the future? This gives you, on the one hand, a kind of confidence that maybe what we do matters and also helps us see that we don’t know if it matters or not.” She says one of the many joys of Buddhism is its comfort with paradox. “And being given multiple lifetimes is very helpful,” she laughs.

Coming to Buddhism dovetailed with other avenues of thought she was exploring. “The central idea of ecological thinking is that everything is connected to everything else,” she notes. “Buddhism has another version of that truth—non-attachment and compassion—which are really important parts of my political writing.”

Another Buddhist teaching that informs Solnit’s work is that empathy arises through understanding interconnectedness. “Whole societies can be taught to deaden feeling, to dissociate from their marginal and minority members, just as people can and do erase the humanity of those close to them,” she says. “Empathy makes you imagine the sensation of the torture, of the hunger, of the loss. You make that person into yourself; you inscribe their suffering on your own body or heart or mind, and then you respond to their suffering as though it were your own.”

When she encounters those silenced, Solnit recognizes her own experiences of not being heard or being treated as an outsider. Having a public voice through her writing and activism, she feels she has responsibilities to the powerless and silenced. “It makes you feel a commitment to speaking up for the voiceless, as the only legitimate use of privilege is to try and dismantle the inequalities and unfairnesses of privilege.”
“Every woman knows what I’m talking about. It’s the presumption that makes it hard, at times, for any woman in any field; that keeps women from speaking up and from being heard when they dare; that crushes young women into silence by indicating, the way harassment on the street does, that this is not their world. It trains us in self-doubt and self-limitation just as it exercises men’s unsupported overconfidence.” -Men Explain Things to Me

“Women have been silent and silenced in a lot of ways,” Solnit says. She sees both the ground women have gained and how much is still left to do, particularly in the area of violence against women.

She writes in Men Explain Things to Me about two occasions on which she “objected to the behavior of a man, only to be told that the incidents hadn’t happened at all as I said, that I was subjective, delusional, overwrought, dishonest—in a nutshell, female.”

Her work explores how silencing women happens in subtle and extreme ways, while also seeking to understand what drives men to silence women and what makes some women complicit in their own silencing. “How have they been damaged in a way that makes them damaging?” she asks of both. “And how does that get undone?”

In The Faraway Nearby, she writes, “When I was younger, I studied the men I was involved with so carefully that I saw or thought I saw what pain or limitation lay behind their sometimes crummy behavior. I found it too easy to forgive them, or rather to regard them with sympathy at my own expense. It was as though I saw the depths but not the surface, the causes but not the effect. On them and not myself. I think we call that overidentification, and it’s common among women.”

Solnit also celebrates how men are coming to stand beside women in feminism. “I’ve been really exhilarated to see a lot of male feminists out there in the last few years,” she says, “speaking up in a way that I hadn’t seen men speaking up before. They are suddenly rising to say, ‘Oh my God, all these years, we acted like it was women who were supposed to resolve misogyny. It’s like racism was going to be resolved without the participation of white people.’”

“Let’s talk about climate change as violence. Rather than worrying about whether ordinary human beings will react turbulently to the destruction of the very means of their survival, let’s worry about that destruction—and their survival.”
-The Encyclopaedia of Trouble and Spaciousness

Rebecca Solnit finds solace, inspiration, and teachings in landscapes both rural and urban, from the beach at low tide to homeless people on the street. She is passionate about spreading awareness of climate change, a cause in which she sees great advancement.

“I’ve seen the revolution and we’re living it,” she says. “It’s slow and broad and deep and has changed innumerable things immeasurably. To appreciate that, you need to be able to perceive subtle, complex, slow things.”

“What does climate change teach us?” she asks. “First, that everything is connected. So we need to have international cooperation, to make our decisions together. We already have everything we need, and we don’t need to burn the fossils from millions and billions of years ago.”

Facing perhaps the greatest existential crisis in human history in climate change, Solnit says we need to ask ourselves, “Who are we in the face of this? What does it ask of us, and how do we respond?” Yet when others despair, Solnit has faith in the power of human awareness, action, and cooperation. “It feels like millions, maybe billions, of people are walking away from a status quo that didn’t serve them, that didn’t describe the world accurately, and who are now making more beautiful versions, together.” When others fear uncertainty, Rebecca Solnit sees hope in what can be found when people feel the most lost.


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