Rebecca Solnit

The stars we are given. The constellations we make. That is to say, stars exist in the cosmos, but constellations are the imaginary lines we draw between them, the readings we give the sky, the stories we tell.

Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics

A couple years ago, I was wandering through the French Quarter in New Orleans. It was early November and the shapely Mississippi River glistened under blue skies and feathery clouds. I walked without a map or plan through parks filled with banana trees and birds of paradise, past colorful Creole townhouses with double galleries of ornate ironwork and hanging ferns, past bistros serving alligator pie and Andouille sausage gumbo. Sugar filled the air, from the scent of deep-fried beignets to the sounds of sweet-fingered saxophones. On Chartres Street, a string band’s French folk songs swirled up between buildings like a draft of birds. I walked along Royal Street, Bourbon Street, Dauphine Street, with stinging images of Hurricane Katrina in my mind, until I met the crescent of the Mississippi and followed its curve on raised banks. I wasn’t physically lost. It’s difficult to go astray in an ordered grid of streets abutting such an unmistakable river. But in other ways, I was adrift, frustrated by my inability to get beyond the city’s painted surface to better understand its complex mélange of French, Spanish, African, British, and Native American histories.

Just as humidity and bewilderment peaked, I stepped through the doors of Faulkner House Books on Pirate’s Alley. I needed to reconfigure my dizzied mental map of New Orleans beyond the visible markers of food, music, and architecture just outside the door. I brushed my hands along titles, until one literally stood out from the others—Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas (2013) by Rebecca Solnit and native New Orleanian Rebecca Snedeker. I ran my hands over its tall tan cover, its shape reminding me of old driving atlases my grandparents used to stash in their car. I turned pages of essays accompanied by twenty-two curious, finely illustrated maps of New Orleans with subjects like “The Line-Up: Live Oak Corridors and Carnival Parade Routes,” “Hot and Steamy: Selling Seafood, Selling Sex,” and “Snakes and Ladders: What Rose Up, What Fell Down During Hurricane Katrina.” From its classical typography to faded illustrations, the book’s old-world cartological allure was an invitation to navigate New Orleans below and beyond visible markers. I opened to page one.

“Fathom” is an Old English word that meant outstretched arms and an embrace by those arms. It came to mean a measurement of about 6 feet, the width a man’s arm could reach, as well as the embrace of an idea. To fathom is to understand. Sailors kept the word in circulation as a measurement of depth, and it survives into the present day mostly as a negative, as unfathomable, the water so deep its depths cannot be plumbed, the phenomenon that cannot be fully grasped.

New Orleans is all kinds of unfathomable, a city of amorphous boundaries, where land is forever turning into water, water devours land, and a thousand degrees of marshy, muddy, oozing in-between exists; where lines that elsewhere seem firmly drawn are blurry; where whatever you say requires more elaboration; where most rules are full of exceptions the way most land here is full of water.

Like New Orleans, Rebecca Solnit herself defies easy definition. The geography of her work seems equally immeasurable. Of course, I bought the book.

The second in a trilogy of inventive atlases including Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas (2010) and Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas (2016), Unfathomable City illustrates Solnit’s interest in the ways maps shape how we read and interact with the world. They reflect her desire to revive classic, beautifully illustrated paper maps we can write on, fold in our back pockets, and take control of at a time when many people navigate and perceive the world exclusively through digital devices. “Maps are ubiquitous in one sense and completely missing in another,” she has explained, describing the medium as “a happy collision of visual data, language, and cartography all kind of working together.” Since I knew I’d be wearing an overcoat and scarf the next day in England, I savored the warm early winter in New Orleans and walked to an open-air café. I bought a bag of beignets and a cup of coffee and found a spot near a jazz band, where I turned pages and peeled back the layers of this Great Southern Babylon.

Solnit is a writer, historian, and activist who links ideas and places like string to thumbtacks. Since the mid-1980s, she has written about an astonishing array of subjects—the environment, politics, landscapes, social justice, feminism, and art—inviting readers to think deeply and broadly about nature and culture. A longtime San Franciscan, she has written more than twenty books and countless penetrating cultural critiques in the Guardian, the New Yorker, Literary Hub, TomDispatch, and the London Review of Books—not to mention, she was the first woman in the history of Harper’s magazine to write the bimonthly Easy Chair column. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lannan Literary Award for nonfiction, and the Kirkus Prize, and was a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay.

Through the prism of place—deserts, gardens, mines, wilderness—Solnit has explored the hidden histories of Yosemite National Park and the Nevada Test Site (Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Hidden Wars of the American West, 1994), the global impact of nonviolent activism over five decades (Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities, 2004), the human nature of altruism during catastrophes (A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster, 2009), the boundaries of storytelling and the creation of our own narratives (The Faraway Nearby, 2013), and many more.

A Berkeley-educated journalist, Solnit dissolves the boundaries of traditional reportage by blending memoir, pellucid prose, and a strong sense of place to create radiant personal essays. Her voice is approachable and the journey sometimes meandering—as we read, we feel we are with her on a walk. When I was lucky enough to meet her after a reading, I was delighted to learn this luminosity is not limited to the page but shines the same in person: her unflinching blue eyes seem to see dimensions others overlook or refuse to examine.

Solnit is a leading voice in revising the feminist roadmap. Her first book for children, Cinderella Liberator (2019), illustrated by Arthur Rackham, is a progressive and modern retelling of the classic fairytale. Her essay “Men Explain Things to Me,” which gifted us the term “mansplaining,” is highly referenced and cited. This scathing and comic essay was drawn from her own encounter with the host of a dinner party. Upon hearing she was a writer, he asked her to describe her latest work. When she began to tell him about River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (2003), her book about “the annihilation of time and space and the industrialization of everyday life,” the man bulldozed the conversation to summarize a book review he’d read about the very same subject—and he continued to hold forth, oblivious that there was someone more expert than him present, and despite Solnit’s friend repeatedly telling him that, actually, Solnit was the author of the very book he was referencing. Mansplaining—the gendered and patronizing dynamic when men assume women don’t know things, or the attitude that women are, as Solnit describes, “empty vessels to be filled with [men’s] wisdom”—was dubbed Word of the Year by the New York Times in 2010.

This essay also led to Solnit’s 2014 book, Men Explain Things to Me, a collection of seven essays about marriage equality, Virginia Woolf’s embrace of doubt and ambiguity, the continuing ways women around the world are silenced, and much more. Her 2017 follow-up, The Mother of All Questions, is a collection of twelve feminist essays published during the #MeToo tidal wave—it covers ground familiar from Men Explain Things to Me, including the ways in which Rachel Carson was silenced. You get the feeling many women in its pages were treated to mansplaining.

Frankly, I want Solnit to explain things to me. After I moved to England, two of her books—Wanderlust: A History of Walking (2000) and A Field Guide to Getting Lost (2005)—became unexpected bookends to my strange new expat life, helping me connect dots between past, present, and the unknown future. In both books, Solnit reflects how mystery and ambiguity, wandering and feeling lost, are inherent in life. I’ve learned that it’s one thing to romantically sketch out a life abroad on a napkin in a café, but quite another to live out that transatlantic plan, especially when you hold one-way tickets to Europe and watch as the known life—farm, friends, family, job, city, community, culture, country (have I missed anything?)—becomes the past and the faraway nearby, as you climb through clouds and tears into the sky then land with a thump in a country where crosswalks are “zebra crossings,” Englishmen wear yellow socks with dark suits, and the word “aluminium” is simply impossible to pronounce. Solnit’s prose—personal, poetic, and wise—brought me perspective and comfort as I walked into an unknown time and space, both figuratively and literally.

In Wanderlust, Solnit asks profound questions about something basic: what does it mean to walk in the world? In a city? As a woman? On a pilgrimage, in a protest march, as a philosopher, or up a mountain? I read the book five years into my new expat life, when walking at the slow pace of my young children was a singular way of getting to know the new country underfoot. It deepened my understanding of walking in all settings—urban, rural, wild—from a historic perspective. It made me far more aware of the way societies have limited a woman’s movement. Solnit also examines the literature of walking and profiles important perambulators in history, including William Wordsworth and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Wanderlust is a fascinating exploration of the interplay between our bodies, our minds, and the world around us, but like so much of Solnit’s writing, it’s about far more—it’s a field guide into the unknown, as we put one foot in front of the other to move forward.

On my tenth anniversary of expat life, I found A Field Guide to Getting Lost to be a meaningful glance backward. A slim volume of nine peregrinations around loss and getting lost, it’s an exquisite mosaic of aesthetic criticism, autobiography, and cultural history that covers everything from hermit crabs and country music to Yves Klein’s 1960 photograph Leap into the Void.

The world is blue at its edges and in its depths. This blue is the light that got lost. Light at the blue end of the spectrum does not travel the whole distance from the sun to us. It disperses among the molecules of the air, it scatters in water. Water is colorless, shallow water appears to be the color of whatever lies underneath it, but deep water is full of this scattered light, the purer the water the deeper the blue. The sky is blue for the same reason, but the blue at the horizon, the blue of land that seems to be dissolving into the sky, is a deeper, dreamier, melancholy blue, the blue at the farthest reaches of the places where you see for miles, the blue of distance. This light that does not touch us, does not travel the whole distance, the light that gets lost, gives us the beauty of the world, so much of which is in the color blue.

For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go. For the blue is not in the place those miles away at the horizon, but in the atmospheric distance between you and the mountains. “Longing,” says the poet Robert Hass, “because desire is full of endless distances.” Blue is the color of longing for the distances you never arrive in, for the blue world. One soft humid early spring morning driving a winding road across Mount Tamalpais, the 2,500-foot mountain just north of the Golden Gate Bridge, a bend reveals a sudden vision of San Francisco in shades of blue, a city in a dream, and I was filled with a tremendous yearning to live in that place of blue hills and blue buildings, though I do live there, I had just left there after breakfast, and the brown coffee and yellow eggs and green traffic lights filled me with no such desire, and besides I was looking forward to going hiking on the mountain’s west slope.

We treat desire as a problem to be solved, address what desire is for and focus on that something and how to acquire it rather than on the nature and the sensation of desire, though often it is the distance between us and the object of desire that fills the space in between with the blue of longing. I wonder sometimes whether with a slight adjustment of perspective it could be cherished as a sensation on its own terms, since it is as inherent to the human condition as blue is to distance? If you can look across the distance without wanting to close it up, if you can own your longing in the same way that you own the beauty of that blue that can never be possessed? For something of this longing will, like the blue of distance, only be relocated, not assuaged, by acquisition and arrival, just as the mountains cease to be blue when you arrive among them and the blue instead tints the next beyond. Somewhere in this is the mystery of why tragedies are more beautiful than comedies and why we take a huge pleasure in the sadness of certain songs and stories. Something is always far away.

It makes sense that the mind-blowing maps in her atlas trilogy are absent in this field guide. When Solnit writes about the natural world, and anything else for that matter, it’s always about more than what our physical eyes take in. A Field Guide to Getting Lost is about navigating inner landscapes of mystery, letting go of the finite, and embracing the unknown. When the familiar falls away, and fewer markers guide us, we begin to see possibilities in the once unfathomable.

Works by Rebecca Solnit

Secret Exhibition: Six California Artists of the Cold War Era (1991)

Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Hidden Wars of the American West (1994)

A Book of Migrations: Some Passages in Ireland (1998)

Wanderlust: A History of Walking (2000)

As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender, and Art (2001)

Hollow City: The Siege of San Francisco and the Crisis of American Urbanism (2002)

River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (2003)

Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities (2004)

A Field Guide to Getting Lost (2005)

Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics (2007)

A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster (2009)

A California Bestiary (2010)

Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas (2010)

Ruins (2011)

The Faraway Nearby (2013)

Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas (2013)

Men Explain Things to Me (2014)

The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness (2014)

Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas (2016)

The Mother of All Questions (2017)

Call Them by Their True Names (2018)

Drowned River: The Death and Rebirth of Glen Canyon on the Colorado (2018)

Cinderella Liberator (2019)