Read Online Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit - Free Book Online
Authors: Rebecca Solnit
Tags: Social Science, Political Science, womens studies, Feminism & Feminist Theory, Current Affairs, Imperialism, Download-Ebook Farm
Ads: Link
plan, ignore the warnings reality offers us, and so plunge into trouble. Afraid of the darkness of the unknown, the spaces in which we see only dimly, we often choose the darkness of closed eyes, of obliviousness. Gonzalez adds, “Researchers point out that people tend to take any information as confirmation of their mental models. We are by nature optimists, if optimism means that we believe we see the world as it is. And under the influence of a plan, it’s easy to see what we want to see.” It’s the job of writers and explorers to see more, to travel light when it comes to preconception, to go into the dark with their eyes open.
Not all of them aspire to do so or succeed. Nonfiction has crept closer to fiction in our time in ways that are not flattering to fiction, in part because too many writers cannot come to terms with the ways in which the past, like the future, is dark. There is so much we don’t know, and to write truthfully about a life, your own or your mother’s, or a celebrated figure’s, an event, a crisis, another culture is to engage repeatedly with those patches of darkness, those nights of history, those places of unknowing. They tell us that there are limits to knowledge, that there are essential mysteries, starting with the notion that we know just what someone thought or felt in the absence of exact information.
Often enough, we don’t know such things even when it comes to ourselves, let alone someone who perished in an epoch whose very textures and reflexes were unlike ours. Filling in the blanks replaces the truth that we don’t entirely know with the false sense that we do. We know less when we erroneously think we know than when we recognize that we don’t. Sometimes I think these pretenses at authoritative knowledge are failures of language: the language of bold assertion is simpler, less taxing, than the language of nuance and ambiguity and speculation. Woolf was unparalleled at that latter language.
What is the value of darkness, and of venturing unknowing into the unknown? Virginia Woolf is present in five of my books in this century, Wanderlust , my history of walking; A Field Guide to Getting Lost , a book about the uses of wandering and the unknown; Inside Out , which focused on house and home fantasies; The Faraway Nearby , a book about storytelling, empathy, illness, and unexpected connections; and Hope in the Dark , a small book exploring popular power and how change unfolds. Woolf has been a touchstone author for me, one of my pantheon, along with Jorge Luis Borges, Isak Dinesen, George Orwell, Henry David Thoreau, and a few others.
Even her name has a little wildness to it. The French call dusk the time “ entre le chien et le loup ,” between the dog and the wolf, and certainly in marrying a Jew in the England of her era Virginia Stephen was choosing to go a little feral, to step a little beyond the proprieties of her class and time. While there are many Woolfs, mine has been a Virgil guiding me through the uses of wandering, getting lost, anonymity, immersion, uncertainty, and the unknown. I made that sentence of hers about darkness the epigram that drove Hope in the Dark , my 2004 book about politics and possibility, written to counter despair in the aftermath of the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq.
Looking, Looking Away, Looking Again
I began my book with that sentence about darkness. The cultural critic and essayist Susan Sontag whose Woolf is not quite my Woolf opened her 2003 book on empathy and photography, Regarding the Pain of Others, with a quote from a later Woolf. She began this way: “In June 1938 Virginia Woolf published Three Guineas, her brave, unwelcomed reflections on the roots of war.” Sontag went on to examine Woolf’s refusal of the “we” in the question that launches the book: “How in your opinion are we to prevent war?”—which she answered instead with the statement, “As a woman I have no country.”
Sontag then argues
Not all of them aspire to do so or succeed. Nonfiction has crept closer to fiction in our time in ways that are not flattering to fiction, in part because too many writers cannot come to terms with the ways in which the past, like the future, is dark. There is so much we don’t know, and to write truthfully about a life, your own or your mother’s, or a celebrated figure’s, an event, a crisis, another culture is to engage repeatedly with those patches of darkness, those nights of history, those places of unknowing. They tell us that there are limits to knowledge, that there are essential mysteries, starting with the notion that we know just what someone thought or felt in the absence of exact information.
Often enough, we don’t know such things even when it comes to ourselves, let alone someone who perished in an epoch whose very textures and reflexes were unlike ours. Filling in the blanks replaces the truth that we don’t entirely know with the false sense that we do. We know less when we erroneously think we know than when we recognize that we don’t. Sometimes I think these pretenses at authoritative knowledge are failures of language: the language of bold assertion is simpler, less taxing, than the language of nuance and ambiguity and speculation. Woolf was unparalleled at that latter language.
What is the value of darkness, and of venturing unknowing into the unknown? Virginia Woolf is present in five of my books in this century, Wanderlust , my history of walking; A Field Guide to Getting Lost , a book about the uses of wandering and the unknown; Inside Out , which focused on house and home fantasies; The Faraway Nearby , a book about storytelling, empathy, illness, and unexpected connections; and Hope in the Dark , a small book exploring popular power and how change unfolds. Woolf has been a touchstone author for me, one of my pantheon, along with Jorge Luis Borges, Isak Dinesen, George Orwell, Henry David Thoreau, and a few others.
Even her name has a little wildness to it. The French call dusk the time “ entre le chien et le loup ,” between the dog and the wolf, and certainly in marrying a Jew in the England of her era Virginia Stephen was choosing to go a little feral, to step a little beyond the proprieties of her class and time. While there are many Woolfs, mine has been a Virgil guiding me through the uses of wandering, getting lost, anonymity, immersion, uncertainty, and the unknown. I made that sentence of hers about darkness the epigram that drove Hope in the Dark , my 2004 book about politics and possibility, written to counter despair in the aftermath of the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq.
Looking, Looking Away, Looking Again
I began my book with that sentence about darkness. The cultural critic and essayist Susan Sontag whose Woolf is not quite my Woolf opened her 2003 book on empathy and photography, Regarding the Pain of Others, with a quote from a later Woolf. She began this way: “In June 1938 Virginia Woolf published Three Guineas, her brave, unwelcomed reflections on the roots of war.” Sontag went on to examine Woolf’s refusal of the “we” in the question that launches the book: “How in your opinion are we to prevent war?”—which she answered instead with the statement, “As a woman I have no country.”
Sontag then argues
Similar Books
