Damage begets a different destiny than one you might have had otherwise, but it does not preclude having a life or making things that matter. Sometimes it’s not despite but because of something terrible that you become who you are meant to be and set to the work you’re meant to do. I heard “meant to be” not as though there was no damage but that it had not prevented me from doing what I was here to do. And some of my work was about that damage as it applied to so many of us. I’ve often wondered what people whose work is for justice and rights would’ve been in a world without the injustices, the lack of rights. Who would Martin Luther King Jr. have been in a nonracist society, Rachel Carson in an unpoisoned America? Unless you imagine them in a world without pain and harm, they might have found other wounds to try to heal. Paradise is often described as a place with nothing to do, nothing required of its inhabitants. I don’t desire a paradise that demands nothing of us, and I see paradise as not a destination to arrive in, but a pole star by which to navigate.
The fortune-teller was a woman, and perhaps as women often do, as I often do, she only wanted to give me something to make me feel good, to make that microscopic utopia that is a moment of kindness, though even that a stranger wanted to give me a gift signifies. A few years ago, a man ran after me at the farmers’ market and handed me a little hexagonal jar of honey from his stand; he had recognized me, though I’d never seen him before. To become a person that, occasionally, strangers want to reward because they felt I’ve given them something is an amazement. Once a young woman passing by an outdoor booth where I was signing books burst into a spontaneous jig at the sight of me, and that might be the pinnacle of my career, to be somehow an occasion for someone else’s exuberance. We’d never set eyes on each other before, but that’s the work that books do, reaching out further than their writers.
There’s another story about wounds and repair that has captured a lot of imaginations in recent years. It’s about the Japanese art of kintsugi, which literally means golden repair. It’s a method of mending broken ceramic vessels with a bond made of powdered gold mixed with lacquer. The result turns the breaks into veins and channels of gold, emphasizing rather than hiding that the vessel has been broken and making it precious in another way than it was before. It’s a way to accept that things will never be what they were but that they can become something else with a different kind of beauty and value. They are exquisite objects, these cups and bowls with their channels of gold like magical scars, like oracular patterns, road maps, hieroglyphs. They make me love gold.
My friend Roshi Joan Halifax, a feminist Buddhist leader, an anthropologist, and a constant traveler, has on several visits to Japan held these repaired vessels in her hands, and a few years ago, she explored them as a metaphor: “I am not suggesting that we should seek brokenness as a way of gaining strength, although some cultures do pursue crisis in their rites of passage as a way to strengthen character and open the heart,” she wrote. “Rather, I am proposing that the wounds and harms that arise from falling over the edge into moral suffering can . . . be the means for the ‘golden repair,’ for developing a greater capacity to stand firm in our integrity without being swayed by the wind.” And then my friend who had given me the desk sent me a letter to approve what I’d written about her that ended with a line from William Stafford: “I have woven a parachute out of everything broken.”
People aren’t really meant to be anything, because we’re not made; we’re born, with some innate tendencies, and thereafter molded, thwarted, scalded, encouraged by events and encounters. Despite everything suggests the forces that try to stop a person or change her nature and purpose, and who you were meant to be suggests that those forces did not altogether succeed. It was a lovely fortune to be handed by a stranger, and I took it, and with it the sense that who I was meant to be was a breaker of some stories and a maker of others, a tracer of the cracks and sometimes a repairwoman, and sometimes a porter or even a vessel for the most precious cargo you can carry, the stories waiting to be told, and the stories that set us free.
Acknowledgments
Looking back, this is a book about obstacles and animosities, but also about bridge builders and kindnesses, and for the latter I owe so many thanks; to the latter I owe my survival. I’m here because of the forces that protect the vulnerable, encourage the eccentric, and educate the ignorant.
Thank you Mr. James V. Young (1920–1989) for a home and friendship.
Thank you, Western Addition, for an education in urbanism.
Thank you _ _ _ _ for a desk to write on.
Thank you to the three main Davids of my twenties.
Thank you gay men, thank you queer culture, thank you city of refuge in those days when your principles were higher than your rents. Thank you City of San Francisco rent control policy, without which my trajectory would not have been possible.
Thank you Lyon-Martin Clinic for free health care for this straight kid in your queer-friendly spaces.
Thank you Ocean Beach, thank you Pacific, thank you foghorns and seagulls. Thank you to the people who protected the vast greenbelt around San Francisco in which I have been wandering this past half century.
Thank you San Francisco Public Library and then UC Berkeley libraries for all the hours spent there and all the books and archives accessed there and the ideals you uphold. Thank you independent bookstores, especially Moe’s, City Lights, Green Apple, Green Arcade, and all the bygone used bookstores.
Thank you San Francisco State University for making room for a transfer student and for schedules that that worked for working students; thank you Shakespeare professor Noel Wilson for encouragement and for getting me my first media job, as a fact-checker intern at San Francisco Magazine.
Thank you San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the research/collections staff there and librarian Genie Candau. Thank you Sierra Club for thirty-five years of overlap and evolution.
Thank you Graduate School of Journalism, especially Bernard Taper, David Littlejohn, and Ben Bagdikian.
Thank you to the artists who taught me to think of myself as a writer, Linda Connor, Ann Hamilton, Richard Misrach, Lewis DeSoto, Meridel Rubenstein.
Thank you Gent Sturgeon and Rex Ray at City Lights and later on Paul Yamazaki there.
Thank you Rebecca Biggs, Steve Rosenberg, and Rob Lagenbrunner, early publishers of mine in Frank magazine; thank you Tim Yohannon and Maximum Rock’n’Roll, ditto, thank you Flora at Music Calendar, Cecile McCann at Artweek, then Gary Kornblau at Art issues.
Thank you Bill Berkson, Michael McClure, and Barbara Stauffacher Solomon, early encouragers who came along when I was in my twenties, and Mike Davis and Lucy Lippard who showed up for me in my thirties.
Thank you to both my 1991 Gulf War and 2002–3 Iraq War Bay Area Direct Action Secret Society (BADASS) antiwar affinity groups.
Thank you to the handsome bikers at the Denny’s on the I-5 north of Los Angeles who listened and let me convince them that Anita Hill was telling the truth, one morning at a shared table in October 1991.
Thank you Nevada: Bob Fulkerson, Carrie and Mary Dann, Corbin Harney, Chief Raymond Yowell, Bernice Lalo, Grace Potorti, Virginia/Dee-Dee Sanchez, Jo Anne Garrett, Marla Painter, Kaitlin Backlund, and my collaborators in the early version of the Western Shoshone Defense Project.
Thank you anti-intervention and environmental movements of the 1980s and Rainforest Action Network where I volunteered then (and where I met Brad Erickson of the Environmental Project on Central America, from whom I learned so much about environmental justice back then when he was learning it from Gwichin and Masaii elders); thank you antinuclear movement and Nevada Test Site activist friends of the 1990s; thank you climate activists of the twenty-first century among whom are so many friends and colleagues now, Bill and May and Anna and Joe and Steve and Mike B. and Antonia and Red.
Thank you Cleve Jones for that moment in 2018 when, because I showed up with t
he magnificent banner artist Stephanie Syjuco had made, you put me at the head of a march of gay men down our central boulevard, perhaps my greatest moment of arrival as a San Franciscan. Thank you for the democracy banner, Stephanie.
Thank you Garnette Cadogan, Elena Acevedo, and Jaime Cortez for friendship and insight and comments on this manuscript.
Thank you, six books later, Paul Slovak at Viking, my editor and encourager since he got the book proposal for Wanderlust in 1997. Thank you Penguin for first all the low-cost paperbacks that formed me and then for the glory of seeing my Viking hardcovers as Penguin paperbacks with the orange spines and Penguin logos. Thank you Bella Lacey and Pru Rowlandson at Granta.
Thank you Agent Frances Coady, encourager, first reader of this book.
Thank you to so many friends now—Marina, Astra, Sam, Leigh, Tina, Ana Teresa, Catherine—and especially to Charles, walking alongside me and sharing tea and more all through the writing of this book.
Thank you to all the women who have proved that stories can change the world, who have changed the collective story from the old overarching story built on endless silencing, thank you to the innumerable storytellers on social media, in public forums, in conversations, in the news, in books and courtrooms, who have broken that silence with their voices and made room thereby for other voices to be heard, perhaps before they too become survivors with terrible stories to tell.
Thank you feminism. Thank you intersections.
Here’s to the liberation of all beings.
About the Author
Rebecca Solnit is the author of more than twenty books, including A Field Guide to Getting Lost, The Faraway Nearby, A Paradise Built in Hell, River of Shadows, and Wanderlust: A History of Walking. She is also the author of Men Explain Things to Me and many essays on feminism, activism and social change, hope, and the climate crisis. A product of the California public education system from kindergarten to graduate school, she is a regular contributor to the Guardian and Lit Hub.
*That men on the margins should be punished for sexual violence, especially against white women, and that privileged and powerful men should not reinforces a hierarchy of relative value. It’s one in which what is being protected is not women per se, but who has property rights over which women (as was explicit in earlier laws that treated rape as trespass or damage of another man’s property and, into the 1980s in the USA, that reserved a husband’s right to rape his wife, and almost never punished white men for raping women of color).
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Recollections of My Nonexistence Page 19