The personal essay is a
popular genre of nonfiction these days, taking up prominent column inches in
magazines and often assigned to high school and college students as a way to
break them into writing or as a vehicle for admissions officers to separate
those they want from those they don’t.
The thing is, the personal essay is difficult to write, and a high wire
act that offers a number of possible pitfalls for the author.
The best writers travel the razor sharp edge
between blatant narcissism and deeply felt resonance, managing to take their
life stories and hold them up like mirrors in which we, the readers, see
ourselves.
I am thinking now of the
greats like
Michel De Montaigne, Henry David Thoreau, E.B. White,
Joan Didion,
Annie Dillard, and Richard Rodriguez.
A new
name to add to the list is Rebecca Solnit.
Solnit is the author
of twelve books, all of which are great, but two loosely connected collections
make for a good entry point into her oeuvre.
A Field Guide to Getting Lost (Penguin,
2005) and more recently,
The Faraway Nearby (Viking, 2013) display her mastery of the craft of the personal
essay.
The books are about her, yet they
are also about so much more—geography, history, literature, illness, and the
journeys we travel.
In A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Solnit advocates getting lost in the
blueness of the world. She believes that
only when we lose the world can we find ourselves, a paradox more than worthy
of further exploration. This blue light
of the world of which she speaks is “the light that got lost.” She goes on to say that “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.” She returns to
this theme of exploration of the blueness in subsequent interludes of chapters
all titled, “The Blue of Distance.”
Getting lost is not
being lost at all, and Solnit cites no less an authority than Socrates. “They say that the soul of man is immortal,
and at one time has an end, which is termed dying, and at another time is born
again, but is never destroyed.” In that
passage, Socrates, the man of rhetoric and logic becomes a mystic, or is he a
Buddhist? A metaphysicist? She quotes a bit more of the great dialogist: “The soul, then, as being immortal, and
having been born again many times, and having seen all things that exist,
whether in this world or in the world below, has knowledge of them all…all
enquiry and all learning is but recollection.”
Solnit explains that “Socrates says you can know the unknown because you
remember it. You already know what seems
unknown; you have been here before, but only when you were someone else.”
Like the best personal
essayists—Joan Didion comes to mind immediately—Solnit can dive into memory and
narrative, personal history, the journey of family members to a new country, her
own journeys, and have them all resonate within the reader. Her personal becomes personal for us. The narrative is not lost in translation, but
carried forward on the strength of its composition with grace and
resonance. There are deeply felt
emotions here, but Solnit avoids sentimentality or nostalgia. She observes with clarity and a razor-sharp
perspective. Could her skill as a truth
teller be due to her own history? She
thinks so: “I think sometimes that I
became a historian because I didn’t have a history, but also because I was
interested in telling the truth in a family in which truth was an elusive
entity.”
That is the strength
of her writing in both books. She is the
scientist, the environmentalist, the storyteller, combining strands of life and
memory into a coherent, crystalized picture of the world. To Solnit, getting lost in the world is a
necessary transfigurative experience.
The stranger is uncomfortable, disturbed on an almost molecular level
because he has lost his way, but that is a good thing. She compares this to early explorers or
settlers lost or captured by natives in the new world. “Often, initially, these strays and captives
felt that they were far from home,” she writes, “distant from their desires,
and then at some point, in a stunning reversal, they came to be at home and
what they had longed for became remote, alien, unwanted…the dreams of home must
have faded by stages among the increasingly familiar details of their
surroundings.”
Her writing is
Emersonian and beautifully rich with metaphor, one of the most potent of which
is the butterfly. The death of the
caterpillar begets the butterfly. Decay
is necessary and inevitable for rebirth, and becoming lost is a way of
recovering the self. So our journeys
into the unknown of our lives are a way of transforming ourselves into the
beautiful.
Solnit’s personal transformation
comes at a crossroads in her life, the death of a friend and the death of her
father. These events forced her into
letting go of what was. “I wrestled with
some highly educational demons,” she writes.
“I quit my job and embarked on the life I’m still living, that of an
independent writer…I lost a whole life and gradually gained another one, more
open and more free.” This is what awaits
us on our own journey into being lost, the caterpillar into a chrysalis and
finally into a butterfly.
She ends this book
with a recurring image that will carry into The
Faraway Nearby: the image of Russian nesting dolls, one inside the other,
and each successive doll becoming smaller and smaller. In this way she conveys that life is an
existence of interdependency. This plays
into her writing as an environmentalist.
In both books, she uses geography such as deserts and frozen tundra as
the set piece backdrops to events in her life, like recovery from illness or a
difficult relationship with a significant other. Her stories nest inside each other, and the
narratives are enveloped and intertwined, giving a wonderful symmetry to her
writing. In our lives, we cannot escape
the nesting of stories, and Solnit’s argument is, why would we want to? She believes we must welcome getting lost in
this world, at every level, on every overgrown path.
The Faraway Nearby, her most recent book, picks up again with her
themes, but here the controlling metaphor is 100 pounds of apricots from her
mother’s tree which now sit on a sheet in the middle of her bedroom floor. She is forced to pick out the rotting ones
almost daily, and cannot decide what to do with so much fruit. The apricots are a windfall from the sale of
her mother’s house as she is moved into a home for Alzheimer’s patients. Through this bounty and the resulting
dilemma, Solnit is able to transition into an analysis of her relationship with
her mother. The book begins and ends
with the apricots, and the chapters are like rungs on a ladder leading up and
then back down. She echoes Joan Didion’s
great essay in the opening pages: “We
tell ourselves stories in order to live, or to justify taking lives, even our
own, by violence or by numbness and the failure to live; tell ourselves stories
that save us and stories that are the quicksand in which we thrash and the well
in which we drown, stories of justification, of accursedness, of luck and
star-crossed love, or versions clad in the cynicism that is at times a very
elegant garment.”
Solnit again examines
her own life, and the chapters are a palindrome that mirrors her mother’s
Alzheimer’s. Where she was once a mirror
of her mother, now her mother mirrors her, an adult who has been rendered a
child by a brain-wasting disease.
Through this mirror, we see how Solnit broke free from her past. Her motto:
“Never turn down an adventure without a really good reason.” It is this motto that launched her on a
thousand journeys, several of them key in her life.
Along the way, she
uses literature and history again to cement her ideas together, including Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein, the global
impact of an erupting volcano, the history of the Tang dynasty, the science of
methamphetamine, and the letters of Georgia O’Keefe, from whom Solnit got her
book’s title. A major portion of the
book is a meditation on her own disease of breast cancer, but she approaches
the subject differently than any other writer I’ve encountered. In her writing she owes more to Susan Sontag’s
essay work on illness, but she gives it her own particular nuances. She spends her recovery in Iceland, which
becomes yet another geographical set piece for the healing and the recovery of
self. She learns on this particular leg
of the journey that “nearly all things live by the death of other things.” Her meditations on illness lead her to
consider Che Guevara and his work in a leper colony, and how this led him to be
the legend and revolutionary we all know so well. Disease, death, disappointments, failures—all
remake us into different people, like those lost and never found again because
they have changed so completely into something else.
“Life was in those
days grim,” she tells us. “I marched
forward in determination to move through the ordeals that had sprung up one
after another and come out the other end. I was old enough to know that I would and that
the grimness was passing weather, but it didn’t pass rapidly. Now I can see that I was going to be remade,
and the timing seemed good after the ordeals of the season before.” Again, she is the caterpillar accepting the
transformation of the chrysalis. “Mostly
we tell the story of our lives, or mostly we’re taught to tell it, as a quest
to avoid suffering, though if your goal is a search for meaning, honor,
experience, the same events may be victories or necessary steps.” In her illness, she sees that “Many lives
have a moment of rupture that is an awakening and a change of direction…The
moment when mortality, ephemerality, uncertainty, suffering, or the possibility
of change arrives can split a life in two.”
In the end, upon
returning to those apricots, Solnit believes “that we—I mean all human beings—are
connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts
of the work of art.” All suffering, all
transformation, all rebirth, all of life’s intricacies nest in art, inside of
each level, each chapter of the greater book of us. “And this book,” Solnit asks, “who drinks
your tears, who has your wings, who hears your story?”
To answer these
questions, one must read these books by Rebecca Solnit, and then find the
response somewhere out there, within, lost, so faraway yet paradoxically, so
nearby.