I’ve been a fan of Rebecca Solnit’s writing since I read Wanderlust: A History of Walking ten years ago. I’ve always meant to return to that book, but I’ve never found the time. I like her book on hope, too, Hope In the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities, which I mention several times in my forthcoming book, Walking the Bypass: Notes on Place from the Side of the Road. So when I saw No Straight Road Takes You There in a store somewhere, I bought it.
Yesterday, I started reading it. “Maybe it’d be useful to teach from,” I thought. I think it might be. The essays are short, and because they were mostly published in newspapers and online, primarily in The Guardian and Lithub, they’re relatively accessible. They cover a range of topics–climate change, politics, feminism, hope–from Solnit’s particular perspective. Of course I would not expect students to agree with her on anything, but I would expect them to learn to summarize her arguments accurately, especially if they don’t think they’re correct, before responding to them. In particular, her arguments about hope might speak to young people who seem to lack that vital approach to the future. She points out, correctly, that history is full of events that surprised people at the time. We might think the end of the Soviet Union was inevitable now, looking back at the events of 1989 through 1991, but at the time, she points out, it was unimaginable. I remember William Gibson pointing that out in an interview; in the speculative fiction he wrote in the early 1980s, he imagined all kinds of possibilities except that the Soviet Union would end. Change takes a long time and requires patience–something the American right has learned over the past decades–and we have no idea what the effect of our actions might be. Hope asks us to understand that the future is a story yet to be told, while pessimism and despair and optimism all pretend that we know what’s going to happen, positive or negative.
It’s hard to say what will land in a classroom, of course, and I could easily be disappointed by the response students have to this book. But I could just as easily be pleasantly surprised. And it’s also possible that reading No Straight Road Takes You There might plant seeds that germinate long after the course is over. Teaching has to be a hopeful activity; otherwise, what’s the point?