Read Online Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit - Free Book Online Page A

with Woolf about that we, about photography, about the possibility of preventing war. She argues with respect, with an awareness that historical circumstances had changed radically (including the status of women as outsiders), with the utopianism of Woolf’s era that imagined an end to war altogether. She doesn’t only argue with Woolf. She argues with herself, rejecting her earlier argument in her landmark book On Photography that we grow deadened to images of atrocity and speculating on how we must continue to look. Because the atrocities don’t end and somehow we must engage with them.
    Sontag ends her book with thoughts about those in the midst of the kind of war that raged in Iraq and Afghanistan. As she wrote of people in war , “‘We’—this ‘we’ is everyone who has never experienced anything like what they went through—don’t understand. We don’t get it. We truly can’t imagine what it was like. We can’t imagine how dreadful, how terrifying, war is; and how normal it becomes. Can’t understand, can’t imagine.”
    Sontag, too, calls on us to embrace the darkness, the unknown, the unknowability, not to let the torrent of images that pour down on us convince us that we understand or make us numb to suffering. She argues that knowledge can numb as well as awaken feeling. But she doesn’t imagine the contradictions can be ironed out; she grants us permission to keep looking at the photographs; she grants their subjects the right to have the unknowability of their experience acknowledged. And she herself acknowledges that even if we can’t completely comprehend, we might care.
    Sontag doesn’t address our inability to respond to entirely unseen suffering, for even in this era of daily email solicitations about loss and atrocity and amateur as well as professional documentation of wars and crises, much remains invisible. And regimes go to great lengths to hide the bodies, the prisoners, the crimes, and the corruption: still, even now, someone may care.
    The Sontag who began her public career with an essay she entitled “Against Interpretation” was herself a celebrant of the indeterminate. In opening that essay, she wrote, “The earliest experience of art must have been that it was incantatory, magical….” Later in the essay, she adds, “Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is largely reactive, stifling. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish.” And of course she then went on to a life of interpretation that, in its great moments, joined Woolf in resisting the pigeonholes, the oversimplifications and easy conclusions.
    I argued with Sontag as she argues with Woolf. In fact, the first time I met her I argued with her about darkness and, to my astonishment, did not lose. If you go to her last, posthumous essay collection, At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches , you will find a small paragraph of my ideas and examples interpolated in her essay, like a burr in her sock. Sontag was writing her keynote speech for the Oscar Romero Award in the spring of 2003, just as the Iraq War broke out. (The award went to Ishai Menuchin, chairman of the committee of selective refusal of military service in Israel.)
    Sontag had been about nine when Woolf died. I visited her when she was seventy, in her top-floor apartment in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood, with a view of the backside of a gargoyle out the window and a pile of printed-out fragments of the speech on the table. I read them while drinking a dank dandelion-root tea I suspect she’d had in her cupboard for decades, the only alternative to espresso in that kitchen. She was making the case that we should resist on principle, even though it might be futile. I had just begun trying to make the case for hope in writing, and I argued that you don’t know if your actions are futile; that you don’t have the memory of the future; that the future is indeed dark, which is the best thing it could