FRAGMENTS

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To know history is to be able to see beyond the present; to remember the past gives you capacity to look forward as well, to see that everything changes and the most dramatic changes are often the most unforeseen. 

- Rebecca Solnit, Call Them by Their True Names, American Crises (and Essays), p.178

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Hope is a belief that what we do might matter, an understanding that the future is not yet written. It’s an informed, astute, open-mindedness about what can happen and what role we might play in it. Hope looks forward but draws its energies from the past, from knowing histories, including our victories, and their complexities and imperfections. It means not fetishizing the perfect that is the enemy of the good, not snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, not assuming you know what will happen when the future is unwritten, and part of what happens is up to us. 

- Rebecca Solnit, Call Them by Their True Names, American Crises (and Essays), p.174

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Every bad story is a prison; breaking the story breaks someone out of prison. It’s liberation work. It matters. It changes the world. 

- Rebecca Solnit, Call Them by Their True Names, American Crises (and Essays), p.163

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The writer’s job is not to look through the window someone else built, but to step outside, to question the framework, or to dismantle the house and free what’s inside, all in service of making visible what was locked out of the view. News journalism focuses on what changed yesterday rather than asking what are the underlying forces and who are the unseen beneficiaries of this moment’s status quo. 

- Rebecca Solnit, Call Them by Their True Names, American Crises (and Essays), p.163

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Objective is a fiction that there is some neutral ground, some political no man’s land you can hang out in, you and the mainstream media. Even what you deem worthy to report and whom you quote is a political decision. We tend to treat people on the fringe as ideologues and those in the center as neutral, as though the decision not to own a car is political and the decision to own one is not, as though to support a war is neutral and to oppose it is not. There is no apolitical, no sidelines, no neutral ground; we’re all engaged. 

- Rebecca Solnit, Call Them by Their True Names, American Crises (and Essays), p.162

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A city is a book we read by wandering its streets, a text that favors one version of history and suppresses others, enlarges your identity or reduces it, makes you feel important or disposable depending on who you are and what you are. 

- Rebecca Solnit, Call Them by Their True Names, American Crises (and Essays), p.136

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One is a passage from Shankar Vedantam’s The Hidden Brain in which he talks about a swim he once took. A decent swimmer in his own estimate, Vedantam went out into the sea one day and felt that he had become superb and powerful: he was instantly proud of his new abilities. Far from shore, he realized he had been riding a current and was going to have to fight it all the way back to shore. “Unconscious bias influences our lives in exactly the same manner as that undercurrent,” Vedantam writes. “Those who travel with the current will always feel they are good swimmers; those who swim against the current may never realize they are better swimmers than they imagine.”

- Rebecca Solnit, Call Them by Their True Names, American Crises (and Essays), p.121

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Those without houses are too often regarded as problems to people rather than people with problems. No wonder the means of addressing them is often that used to address litter, dirt, and contamination: removal. 

- Rebecca Solnit, Call Them by Their True Names, American Crises (and Essays), p.120

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Because the revolt against brutality begins with a revolt against the language that hides that brutality. 

- Rebecca Solnit, Call Them by Their True Names, American Crises (and Essays), p.87

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Correspondence, that beautiful word, describes both an exchange of letters and the existence of affinities; we correspond because we correspond. [...] But at their best, they reinforced that our perceptions and emotions were not baseless or illegitimate, that others were on our side and shared our experiences, that we had value and possibility. We were strengthening ourselves and our ties to one another. [...]

In an ideal intellectual exchange, disagreement doesn’t mean tearing down a rival but testing and strengthening the structure of a proposal, an analysis. It is what you do when you agree with people in general but have specifics to work out; and that work can be joy. It’s anti-evangelical work you go into with an open mind, as willing to be convinced as you are eager to convince. For those inclined that way, this exploration of ideas is an adventure full of the subtle pleasures of expanding meaning and understanding, of going beyond where one started. An idea goes back and forth like a tennis ball, but one that grows and changes with every volley. It’s an arrangement in which no one is the preacher or the choir, in which everything is open to question, in which ideas are beautiful and precision is holy. 

- Rebecca Solnit, Call Them by Their True Names, American Crises (and Essays), p.78

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What is the alternative to naïve cynicism? An active response to what arises, a recognition that we often don’t know what is going to happen ahead of time, and an acceptance that whatever takes place will usually be a mixture of blessings and curses that will unfold over considerable time. Such an attitude is bolstered by historical memory, by accounts of indirect consequences, unanticipated cataclysms and victories, cumulative effects, and long timelines. Naïve cynicism loves itself more than the world; it defends itself in lieu of defending the world. 

- Rebecca Solnit, Call Them by Their True Names, American Crises (and Essays), p.58

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The Keystone fight was a transnational education in tar-sands and pipeline politics, as well as in the larger dimensions of climate issues. It was a successful part of a campaign to wake people up and make them engage with the terrifying stakes in this conflict. It changed the culture. 

- Rebecca Solnit, Call Them by Their True Names, American Crises (and Essays), p.56

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Maybe it also says something about the tendency to oversimplify. If simplification means reducing things to their essentials, oversimplification tosses aside the essential as well. It is a relentless pursuit of certainty and clarity in a world that generally offers neither, a desire to shove nuances and complexities into clear-cut binaries. Naïve cynicism concerns me because it flattens out the past and the future, because it reduces the motivation to participate in public life, public discourse and even intelligent conversation that distinguishes shades of gray, ambiguities and ambivalences, uncertainties , unknowns and opportunities. Instead, we conduct our conversations like wars, and the heavy artillery of grim confidence is the weapon many reach for. 

- Rebecca Solnit, Call Them by Their True Names, American Crises (and Essays), p.52

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Most new ideas begin in the margins or shadows and move toward the center. They are often something that a few people thought, something that seemed radical or edgy or a bit too much, or just something hardly anyone noticed or felt strongly about. If they were ideas about justice, they were considered extreme or unrealistic. Then the idea kept traveling, and by the end of the journey it was what everyone always thought. Or, rather, what they thought they had always thought because it’s convenient to ignore that they used to not pay attention or had thought something completely different, something that now looks like discrimination or cluelessness. A new idea is like a new species: it evolves; it expands its habitat; it changes the ecosystem around it; and then it fits in as though it was always there...

- Rebecca Solnit, Call Them by Their True Names, American Crises (and Essays), p.33

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So this is how history gets rewritten, she thought. This is how it begins, with exaltation. Now it is not enough for a man merely to have been a man; now the etiquette of grief demands that we change him into a prince, a king. Now the flaws of a man have to be ironed out like the creases in a suit, until he is spread out before us as smooth and unblemished as the day he was born. As if the earth would refuse to receive him, as if the vultures at the Tower of Silence would refuse to peck at him, unless he was restored to his original glory. In death, all men become saints, she thought, and she both welcomed and rebelled against the thought. Perhaps it was better this way--this erasing of bad memories, this replacement with happier ones, like changing a dirty tablecloth. But if this was true, what to do about this heavy, lumpen body of hers, this body that cried out its true history, this body that wanted to testify, to bear witness to what had been done to it? [...] would this body have to be dead, would its blood have to freeze into immobility before anyone sang its praises and called it the body of a princess or a queen?

- Thrity Umrigar, The Space Between Us, pp.304-305

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Beti, the past is always present [...] No such thing as bringing it up. The past is like the skin on your hand--it was there yesterday and it is here today. It never goes anywhere.

- Thrity Umrigar, The Space Between Us, p.287

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sometimes serpents walk around disguised as people. 

-Thrity Umrigar, The Space Between Us, p.266