My first response to Rebecca Solnit’s The Faraway Nearby is that I don’t understand why people haven’t been chasing me down the street with a copy yelling, “you have to read this!” I’ve come upon Solnit’s name recently, but mostly in terms of activism and in reference to a well-traveled article on the internet called “Men Explain Things to Me,” which is very good.
But if Solnit is an activist, she is even more so an artist. She does things that an editor would tell you not to do. You cannot pull together in one book, fairytales from a multitude of cultures and the biography of Mary Shelly and your mother’s memory loss and a trip to Iceland and a Colorado River rafting adventure and your own this-could-be-cancer treatments and a pile of rotting apricots and the history of leprosy and the science of fermentation and soil and weather. It’s too much. Pick one, Rebecca, I hear my inner-writing teacher tell me. And, yet, Solnit weaves all these and more together in such a way that they become not so much a tapestry, but a flower, whole and lovely and seamless as though it grew that way inevitably, naturally.
Solnit writes one of the least self-centered memoirs I’ve ever read. And she accomplishes this even when she is writing about something as personal as the radiologist finding a tumor in her chest. There is something in the intimacy of her writing that makes me know I am reading, not so much about her, but about us.
I underlined more in this book than I have in any book since college, usually because Solnit said things that I would’ve like to have said, had I the words, “Of course I have always been mortal, but not quite so emphatically so.”
Here is another of my favorites, “Sometimes I get mail for people who lived in my house before I did, and sometimes my own body seems like a home through which successive people have passed like tenants, leaving behind memories, habits, scars, skills, and other souvenirs.”
And here is one, one more, “Trace it far enough and this very moment in your life becomes a rare species, the result of a strange evolution, a butterfly that should already be extinct and survives by the inexplicabilities we call coincidence. The word is often used to mean the accidental but literally means to fall together.”
And yet, when I go back to read all of these passages, I’m aware that one of the reasons they worked so perfectly was their connection to whatever came before and after, that flower.
And so, this me chasing you, copy of The Faraway Nearby in hand.
Laura Stavoe