CL Pauwels at Large

Given the unending chaos of the past several months, Rebecca Solnit’s No Straight Road Takes You There: Essays for Uneven Terrain is a welcome reminder that change does indeed happen – even when it’s in such an incredibly slow manner that we may not realize it until it’s over.

In “Despair is a Luxury,” Solnit reminds us, “If you do not take the long view, take in time in large increments, you cannot see how campaigns build, how beliefs change, how what was once thought to be impossible or outlandish comes to be the status quo, and how the last half century has been an extraordinary period of change for society, beliefs, and values.”

I’ll read just about anything Solnit shares – essays, social media, books* (I own 3…4? Count is iffy because I loan them out and they may not always come back.). Her perceptive insight is framed in precise, elegant language that makes reading a pleasure. And no matter the topic of any of the 20 essays in this collection, I’ve found numerous sentences that give me pause as much for the content as for the presentation.

Whether it’s about Silicon Valley (“Tech billionaires often seem more interested in surviving the apocalypse than preventing it.”), democracy (“Those who have more power push those facts out of the room and into silence or make the cost of stating those facts dangerously high.”), or biases (“People fail to recognize things that do not fit into their world-view, which is why those in power have not adequately responded to decades of terrorism by white men”), her truths are blunt and honest.

Solnit is a historian, activist, and an unabashed feminist, and as such, often raises hackles in the conservative community. “When only half the divide is being tasked with making the peace, there is no peace to be made, but there is a unilateral surrender on offer. We are told this is bipartisanship, but the very word means that both sides abandon their partisanship, and the right has absolutely no interest in doing that” (from “On Not Meeting Nazis Halfway”).

If you’re a writer like me searching for a reason to continue creating art in light of the apparent crumbling of our democracy, she offers an eloquent purpose. In “Sky Full of Forests,” a piece addressing climate change, Solnit says, “We are leaving behind our old familiar world whose stability we can remember as a great kindness and entering into a rough new set of circumstances. Like refugees leaving a place, we are leaving a time. What should we carry with us? …We will need stories more than ever.”

Keep telling our stories, often sharing more truth in fiction than would ever be received in nonfiction.

As quoted in a 2016 post by the incomparable Maria Popova, Solnit says, “My own task these past twenty years or so of living by words has been to try to find or make a language to describe the subtleties, the incalculables, the pleasures and meanings — impossible to categorize — at the heart of things.”

We would do well to join her in that task.

*Don’t miss Men Explain Things to Me – labeled by The New Republic as the piece that helped introduce “the term ‘mansplaining’”).