Tag: Rebecca Solnit

33. Rebecca Solnit, No Straight Road Takes You There: Essays for Uneven Terrain

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?

Wanderlust

I finally finished Rebecca Solnit’s book Wanderlust: A History of Walking yesterday afternoon. It’s a tremendous book, one that manages to be both broad in scope and deeply attentive to details at the same time–the kind of book that makes you wonder just how its author came to know so much and think so clearly.

Wanderlust is not just a history, although the subtitle describes it as one. The topics Solnit covers range from the anthropological debates about the role walking played in making humans into humans to the pilgrimage to Chimayó in New Mexico, to the history of gardening and William Wordsworth’s legs (the fact that he was an inveterate walker escaped me in the course I took on Romantic poetry so many years ago), to the fight for access to public lands in Britain and elsewhere. There are chapters on walking in the city (with an obligatory discussion of Walter Benjamin and the flâneur) and the way that the freedom to walk is not equally distributed, something I was reminded of recently when an acquaintance from the Filmpool, Simon Ash Moccasin, went public with a story about being beaten up by the police here for the crime of Walking While Aboriginal. The last chapters, which focus on walking in contemporary North America, a place not always hospitable to that activity, are particularly thought-provoking. I especially enjoyed the discussion of walking as an art form, which helped clarify some of my responses to the work of Richard Long, which I’ve discussed in this blog before.

wanderlust

Solnit’s notes and sources have pointed the way to more books about walking–as if I’ll have time for extracurricular reading now that the winter semester has begun. I also found myself wondering about the feasibility of the pilgrimage from Denver to Chimayó, a village near Santa Fé. I heard about that in Spain but didn’t know much about it until I read Solnit’s discussion of the annual Easter pilgrimage. I’ll put it on the list of walks I’d like to take someday.

I started Wanderlust in the summer and put it aside before we went to England. I’m glad I picked it up again this Christmas and I’m looking forward to reading Solnit’s other work. So many books to read and so little time to do it.