Rebecca Solnit
Rebecca Solnit
Rebecca Solnitis an American writer. She has written on a variety of subjects, including the environment, politics, place, and art. Solnit is a contributing editor at Harper's Magazine, where bi-monthly she writes the magazine's "Easy Chair" essay...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth11 June 1961
CountryUnited States of America
growing-up book native-american
Growing up north of San Francisco, I immersed myself in the local landscape and in books about Native Americans, cowboys, and pioneers that seemed to ground me in it, but to pursue culture in those days meant being spun around until dizzy and then pushed east.
book solitude
Books are solitudes in which we meet.
lying book writing
You write your books. You scatter your seeds. Rats might eat them, or they might rot. In California, some seeds lie dormant for decades because they only germinate after fire, and sometimes the burned landscape blooms most lavishly.
real book heart
The object we call a book is not the real book, but its seed or potential, like a music score. It exists fully only in the act of being read; and its real home is inside the head of the reader, where the seed germinates and the symphony resounds. A book is a heart that only beats in the chest of another.
book intimate reader
Before writers are writers they are readers, living in books, through books, in the lives of others that are also the heads of others, in that act that is so intimate and yet so alone.
book heart beats
A book is a heart that only beats in the chest of another.
activists among best built count freedoms gifts last protected struggles won
The world you live in is not a given; much of what is best in it has been built through the struggles of passionate activists over the last centuries. They won us many freedoms and protected many beauties. Count those gifts among your growing heap.
collective disasters role society
We have a real role in how our own collective lives, our nation, and our world and society turn out. Seizing those opportunities is important, and disasters are sometimes one of those opportunities.
exception
To say that everything without exception is going straight to hell is not an alternative vision but only an inversion of the mainstream's 'everything's fine.'
arctic colossal coral costs including melting money planet species
The more we heat up the planet, the more it costs all of us, not just in money, but in colossal famines, displacements, deaths, and species extinctions, as well as in the loss of some of the things that make this planet a blue-green jewel, including its specialized habitats from the melting Arctic to bleaching coral reefs.
becoming begins body exercise expressive familiar imagine rather
The exercise of democracy begins as exercise, as walking around, becoming familiar with the streets, comfortable with strangers, able to imagine your own body as powerful and expressive rather than a pawn.
babies bad collapsed emergency everybody feed few hospital improvise kitchen next pattern people putting systems whether work
It's not that bad things never happen. But there's a pattern in which most people are calm, resourceful, altruistic, and they improvise emergency systems that work really well - whether it's getting the babies out of a collapsed hospital or putting together a community kitchen to feed everybody for the next few months.
according holding man men though
Men explain things to me, still. And no man has ever apologized for explaining, wrongly, things that I know and they don't. Not yet, but according to the actuarial tables, I may have another fortysomething years to live, more or less, so it could happen. Though I'm not holding my breath.
anxieties concerns emotions future gratuitous intense people pulls talk trivial
I feel often that we don't have the right language to talk about emotions in disasters. Everyone is on edge, of course, but it also pulls people away from a lot of trivial anxieties and past and future concerns and gratuitous preoccupations that we have, and refocuses us in a very intense way.