Writers Who Inspire Us: The Sharp Wisdom of Rebecca Solnit
“Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go.”
― Rebecca Solnit
For a few years, a good friend kept recommending I read Rebecca Solnit’s ‘Men Explain Things to Me’. Without doing any exploration of the text, I kept dismissing it because it sounded like one of those pink-covered, drippy feminist books that didn’t have much to say apart from ‘men are bad and woman aren’t’ - and I wasn’t game for it. I wanted conversations that went to more complex and nuanced levels within feminism and our gendered society.
One day at the library, I saw the book sitting lonely on the ‘Hot Picks’ shelf, and as the cover was a blue/purple hue and not pink, I decided to give it ago.
Of course, I should have just listened to my friend in the first place. I ended up loving the essay collection in its entirety, and Solnit now occupies a very dedicated section of my home library.
In her scathing, yet humorous essay that forms the book’s title, Men Explain Things to Me, Solnit takes on what goes wrong in conversations between men and women. She writes about men who assume they know things and women don't, why this arises, and how this aspect of the gender wars works, utilising her own experiences. Solnit and her friend go to a party and are cornered by the male host. When Solnit mentions she has written a book on the photographer Eadweard Muybridge, the host subjects her and her friend to a lecture about a Muybridge book that has just been published. Her friend attempts to interject and advise the host “that’s her book,” but the host doesn’t hear nor care and continues lecturing them, “with that smug look I know so well in a man holding forth, eyes fixed on the fuzzy far horizon of his own authority.”
We now owe our thanks to Solnit for the all-encompassing term for this phenomenon: Mansplaining.
But Solnit’s writing is more than sharp side-eyes at the conversational dynamics that exist across genders. She has written more than seventeen books and her essays and thought-pieces have appeared in numerous journals, media outlets and anthologies. She examines disaster utopia, arctic expeditions, walking and getting lost, cities, place and nature, silenced voices, and history’s inability to effectively capture reality. As Katy Waldo surmises in her essay on Solnit for The New Yorker: “To read Solnit is to brush up against emotions and intuitions you almost don’t recognise because language is so seldom considered the best way to approach them.”
Her book, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, is one of my most thumbed and adored books. An investigation into loss, losing and being lost, Solnit explores the challenges of living with uncertainty and deftly crosses between subjects as eclectic as memory and mapmaking, Hitchcock movies and Renaissance painting. Combining memoir, history and philosophy - it’s a book that reminds me of what it can mean to be human, with a mind that wanders, and the importance of never shrinking my thoughts down. I adore how she weaves connections across her chosen subject matter and how these fall lightly on the reader. It never feels forced or coerced:
“Getting lost was not a matter of geography so much as identity, a passionate desire, even an urgent need, to become no one and anyone, to shake off the shackles that remind you who you are, who others think you are.”
Another favourite of mine is her Wanderlust: A History of Walking. As someone who would regularly spend her weekends walking out into my London city, with no aim, nowhere to be and no agenda, it makes sense to feel such a close connection with the ways Solnit describes walking, and it’s power:
“Walkers are ‘practitioners of the city,’ for the city is made to be walked. A city is a language, a repository of possibilities and walking is the act of speaking that language, of selecting from those possibilities.”
Solnit’s writing and particular opinions and perspectives won’t be to everyone’s taste. She’s been branded as a ‘pop feminist’, and I have struggled with some of her work, not being able to get to the heart of what it is she was trying to say (Hope in the Dark is a book I have yet to find a connection with). But I haven’t personally met a single person who has said they don’t love some faction of Solnit’s work. As writers, she also has wisdom to impart, and I especially like the simplicity of her quote:
“Writing is primarily about gathering.”
Gathering our thoughts, our loves, lives and experiences: and gathering as a community. Writing is practice to be shared and I have loved sharing Solnit’s work, or perhaps more aptly, having it shared with me.
Recommended Reading
Men Explain Things to Me (2014)
“Some women get erased a little at a time, some all at once. Some reappear. Every woman who appears wrestles with the forces that would have her disappear. She struggles with the forces that would tell her story for her, or write her out of the story, the genealogy, the rights of man, the rule of law. The ability to tell your own story, in words or images, is already a victory, already a revolt.”
A short but powerful essay collection, Including the title essay and six others, including an examination of the writer Virginia Woolf’s embrace of mystery, of not knowing, of doubt and ambiguity, a highly original inquiry into marriage equality, and a terrifying survey of the scope of contemporary violence against women.
Wanderlust: A History of Walking (2002)
“A lone walker is both present and detached, more than an audience but less than a participant. Walking assuages or legitimises this alienation.”
Through a series of essays, Solnit offers a history of walking in the Western world, exploring the relationship between thinking and walking, and walking and culture. Starting with Rousseau and the Romantics, Solnit argues walking became self-conscious. Against the French Revolution and industrialisation’s backdrop, the act of walking began to accrue dynamic, democratic, and subversive cultural meanings it had never before held in Western societies. She argues for preserving the time and space to walk in an ever more car-dependent and accelerated world.
A Field Guide to Getting Lost (2006)
“Worry is a way to pretend that you have knowledge or control over what you don't--and it surprises me, even in myself, how much we prefer ugly scenarios to the pure unknown.”
A profound collection of essays about distance; introspective but painted on a multi-dimensional canvas: they focus on place (deserts, forests, mountains, cities) and loss (abandonment, separation), all mediated through culture (literature, music, and art) and relationships. A Field Guide to Getting Lost, draws on emblematic moments and relationships in Solnit's own life to explore the issues of wandering, being lost, and the unknown. The result is distinctive, stimulating, and a poignant voyage of discovery.
Hope in the Dark (2004)
“Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth's treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal... To hope is to give yourself to the future - and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.”
With Hope in the Dark, Rebecca Solnit makes a radical case for hope as a commitment to act in a world whose future remains uncertain and unknowable. Drawing on her decades of activism and an expansive reading of environmental, cultural, and political history, Solnit argues that radicals have a long, neglected account of transformative victories, that the positive consequences of our acts are not always immediately seen, directly knowable, or even measurable, and that pessimism and despair rest on unwarranted confidence about what is going to happen next.
Recollections of My Nonexistence (2020)
“I read, I daydreamed, I wandered the city so ardently in part because it was a means of wandering in my thoughts, and my thoughts were runaways, constantly taking me away in the midst of the conversation, the meal, the class, the work, the play, the dance, the party. They were a place I wanted to be, thinking, musing, analysing, imagining, hoping, tracing connections, integrating new ideas, but they grabbed me and ran with me from the situations at hand over and over. I disappeared in the middle of conversations, sometimes because I was bored but just as often because someone said something so interesting that my mind chased after the idea they offered and lost track of the rest of what they said. I lived in a long reverie for years, went days without much interruption to it, which was one of the gifts of solitude.”
In Recollections of My Nonexistence, Solnit describes her formation as a writer and feminist in 1980s San Francisco, in an atmosphere of gender violence on the street and throughout society and the exclusion of women from cultural arenas. She tells of being poor, hopeful, and adrift in the city that became her great teacher; of the small apartment that, when she was nineteen, became the home in which she transformed herself; of how punk rock gave form and voice to her fury and explosive energy.
About Elaine Mead
Elaine is a freelance copy and content writer, editor and proofreader, currently based in Hobart Tasmania. Her work has been published internationally in both print and digital publications, including with Darling Magazine, Healthline, Wild Wellbeing, Live Better Magazine, Writer's Edit and others. She is the in-house book reviewer for Aniko Press and a dabbler in writing very short fiction. You can find more of her words at wordswithelaine.com
