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

be; and that, in the end, we always act in the dark. The effects of your actions may unfold in ways you cannot foresee or even imagine. They may unfold long after your death. That is when the words of so many writers often resonate most.
    Here we are, after all, revisiting the words of a woman who died three quarters of a century ago and yet is still alive in some sense in so many imaginations, part of the conversation, an influence with agency. In Sontag’s resistance speech published at TomDispatch that spring 2003 and in At the Same Time a few years later, you can see a paragraph in which Sontag refers to Thoreau’s posthumous influence and to the Nevada Test Site (the place where more than a thousand nuclear bombs were detonated, and where for several years, starting in 1988, I joined the great civil-disobedience actions against the nuclear arms race). The same example ended up in Hope in the Dark : it was about how we antinuclear activists did not exactly shut down the Nevada Test Site, our most overt goal, but inspired the people of Kazakhstan to shut down the Soviet Test Site in 1990. Totally unforeseen, totally unforeseeable.
    I learned so much from the Test Site and the other places I wrote about in my book Savage Dreams: The Landscape Wars of the American West , about the long arc of history, about unintended consequences, delayed impacts. The Test Site as a place of great convergence and collision—and the example of authors like Sontag and Woolf—taught me to write. And then, years later, Sontag leavened her argument about acting on principle with my examples from that kitchen conversation and some details I wrote down. It was a small impact I could have never imagined, and it took place in a year when we were both invoking Virginia Woolf. The principles we both subscribed to in the books that cited her could be called Woolfian.

    Two Winter Walks
    To me, the grounds for hope are simply that we don’t know what will happen next, and that the unlikely and the unimaginable transpire quite regularly. And that the unofficial history of the world shows that dedicated individuals and popular movements can shape history and have, though how and when we might win and how long it takes is not predictable.
    Despair is a form of certainty, certainty that the future will be a lot like the present or will decline from it; despair is a confident memory of the future, in Gonzalez’s resonant phrase. Optimism is similarly confident about what will happen. Both are grounds for not acting. Hope can be the knowledge that we don’t have that memory and that reality doesn’t necessarily match our plans; hope like creative ability can come from what the Romantic poet John Keats called Negative Capability.
    On a midwinter’s night in 1817, a little over a century before Woolf’s journal entry on darkness, the poet John Keats walked home talking with some friends and as he wrote in a celebrated letter describing that walk, “several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature.… I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”
    Keats walking and talking and having several things dovetail in his mind suggests the way wandering on foot can lead to the wandering of imagination and to an understanding that is creation itself, the activity that makes introspection an outdoor pursuit. In her memoir “A Sketch of the Past,” Woolf wrote, “Then one day walking round Tavistock Square I made up, as I sometimes make up my books, To the Lighthouse ; in a great, apparently involuntary, rush. One thing burst into another. Blowing bubbles out of a pipe gives the feeling of the rapid crowd of ideas and scenes which blew out of my mind, so that my lips seemed syllabling of their own accord as I walked. What blew the bubbles? Why then? I have no