Highlights from Recollections Of My Nonexistence by Rebecca Solnit Last read on June 23, 2021
Highlights from this book
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Part of what keeps you sitting in that chair in that room enduring harassment or abuse from a man in power is that, as a woman, you have rarely seen another end for yourself. In the novels you've read, in the films you've seen, in the stories you've been told since birth, the women so frequently meet disasterous ends.
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The word adult implies that all the people who've attained legal majority makeup a coherent category, but we are all travelers who change and traverse a changing country as we go. The road is tattered and elastic. Childhood fades gradually in some ways, never ends in others; adulthood arrives in small, irregular installments if it arrives; and every person is on her own schedule, or rather, there is none for the many transitions.
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Youth is a high risk business.
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Cults: as a seemingly radical way to return to the conservatism of blind obedience and harsh heirarchy, there was a crevasse between two modes of being into which many people fell.
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The neighborhood was alive in a way that made the suburban places I'd grown up in seem dead and bereft, those subdivisions that were by design and ethos about withdrawal from public space and human contact, where the adults drove and people kept to themselves, and the fences between houses were taller than our heads.
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The newcomers lived in the space their money secured, not the space that belonged to everyone, and a vitality faded away as the neighborhood became less a neighborhood.
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We were not the intended audience for such art, including the stuff lauded as masterpieces and upheld as canonical. Sometimes the male protagonists protected women, particularly beautiful women, from other men, and protector was one face of their power, but destroyer was still the other face, and either one put your fate in their hands.
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So much of what makes young women good targets is self doubt and self effacement. I was young and trained not to make a fuss and to let others determine what was acceptable and even to determine what was real.
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What is armor after all but a cage that moves with you.
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At its best, a conversation is a joy and a collaborative experience, building an idea, an insight, sharing experiences; at its worst it is a battle for territories and most women have experiences of being pushed out one way or another.
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Femininity at its most brutally conventional is a perpetual disappearing act, an erasing and a silencing to make room for me.
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I had since childhood imagined interrogations in which lacking the right answers was punished, interrogations that must have gotten something of their format from quiz shows seen in early childhood as well as the mockery that comes or came with getting something wrong in school or at the dinner table. One of the reasons I squirrelled away information was anxiety about this infernal inquisition and that knowledge could protect you from a punitive, incoherent universe.
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Someone I cherished then as a person I could trust and talk to, perhaps because of who he was or because of who I imagined he was, or how I filled up what I didn't know about him with what I needed.
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The sheer pleasure of meeting new voices and ideas and possibilities, having the world become more coherent in some subtle or enormous way, extending or filling your map of the universe, is not nearly celebrated enough, nor is the beauty in finding pattern or meaning.
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There is a problem as well with those who spend too little time being anyone else; it stunts the imagination in which empathy takes root, that empathy that is the capacity to shape-shift and roam out of your sole self. One of the convenient afflictions of power is a lack of this imaginative extension. For many men it begins in early childhood, with almost exclusively being given stories with male protagonists.
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And all the grail seekers and ring bearers and western explorers and chasers and conquerers and haters of women and inhabitants of worlds where women were absent. And the task of finding ones own way must be immeasurable harder when all the heroes, all the protagonists, are not only another gender but another race, or another sexual orientation, and when you find that you yourself are described as the savages or the servants or the people who don't matter. There are so many forms of annihilation.
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The words are instructions, the book a kit, the full existence of the book something immaterial, internal, an event rather than an object, and then an influence and a memory. Its the reader who brings the book to life.
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Becoming a writer formalizes the task that faces us all in making a life: to become conscious of what the overarching stories are and whether or not they serve you, and how to compose versions with room for who you are and what you value.
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To include a performer meant that the grammatical tense of the piece was in the making and the doing, rather than in the past tense of made and done. Later on in other pieces of hers, the performers would be undoing something, unraveling, or erasing, so that the work was being unmade as well as made for the duration of the exhibition.
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Before you can make art you have to have a culture in which to make it, a context that gives it meaning, and people from whom to learn and to whom to show your work.
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Nonfiction is at its best an act of putting the world back together -- or tearing some piece of it apart to find whats hidden beneath the assumptions or conventions - and in this sense creation and destruction can be akin. Something you didn't know well comes into focus, and the world makes sense in a new way, or an old assumption is gutted, and then you try and write it down.
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That derangement came up from Arthur Rimbauld a century before and evolved into another fixture of counterculture, the idea that you got to your creative self by getting fucked up, that some genius is lurking behind the inhibitions and you just have to let the genius out to do its thing without plan or discipline or structure.
Burroughs was seen by some of the young people around me as exemplerary of all this, and he had spent a lot of time taking a lot of drugs, buffered by family allowance and an apparently iron constitution. The young man I knew had neither. I remember with affection one evening with him when he was hallucinating and wielding colored markers, trying to draw on paper (and album covers) and scrawling directly on the floor of the apartment. Then its with sadness that I remember him becoming more and more of a meth addict, and then a homeless person walking barefoot in dirty jeans on market street unable to recognize me. He was cared for by a kind older man for a while, and then I heard he jumped off the golden gate bridge, a sweet and talented young soul, dead of many things, including the prevailing mythology.
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Though some doors slammed because of my gender, others remained open because of my race.
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The common tragedy is to suffer without having appeared.
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Its not always possible to say that a given weather event is due to climate change, but that climate change shapes the trends is clear, and the same can be said of discrimination - that this particular event may or may not be due to someones attitudes about people in your category, but the cumulative effect suggested a pattern.
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Often what a woman says is weighed for what kind of woman that makes her and whether she's still pleasing to others rather than its factual content.
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Though looking amazing is usually thought of as either a mildly despicable self-glorification or a straightforward strategy to sex, it can be a gift to people around you, a sort of public art and a celebration, even a kind of wit and commentary.
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The city (San Francisco) was a magnet for people desperate to get away from the wholesome America that wanted to kill them.
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An acquaintance told me about going home, long ago, with a college friend whose father was a Wall Street banker. The rest of the family was enjoying dinner in their lavish Upper East Side apartment when the father arrived. Everyone fell silent, and he sat down and roared, apropos of his day at the stock market, "I fucked him up the ass". Winning over his competitor was like having sex with him, and sex is hostile and punitive at one end and humiliating at the other, an interesting thing to proclaim to your wife and children at the dinner table.
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Inside homophobia is misogyny: the act of being a man is a constant striving not to be a woman.
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If humor consists of noting the gap between what things are supposed to be and what they actually are -- then those least invested in things as they are supposed to be, or who are actually adversaries and victims of conventionality, are most inclined and able to celebrate those gaps. The straight man is a figure in humour, the one who doesn't make or get the joke, and straight suggests linear thinking and conventional paths as well as heterosexuality.
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Rural safety consists of distance from danger, not the barriers against it and the recourse from it that urban structures and systems provide. Access to nature is also contingent on your sense of safety, as people of color know.
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The nuclear bombs being exploded there regularly were a brutality against all the living things downwind, reservation dwellers, ranchers, livestock, small town people, and wildlife, in those rehearsels for the end-of-the-world war.
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I sometimes thought of this as the Madonna Whore theory of landscape: human contact was imagined as inevitably violating a vulnerable, passive nature that was inevitably degraded by us.
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We would like the people involved in monstrosity to be recognizable monsters, but many of them are diligent, unquestioning, obedient adherents to the norms of their time, trained in what to feel and think and notice, and what not to. The men who wrote those reports seemed like earnest bureaucrats, sometimes sympathetic to the plight of the people or the people they were helping to exterminant, always convinced of their own decency. It is the innocence that constitutes the crime.
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In many parts of American society, kindness has increasingly become a criterion applied to all forms of interaction, but its absence before was elusive, because its too easy to not notice who and what is not in the room.
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Consequences are not always direct, or immediate, or obvious, and the indirect consequences matter.
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I'd eventually realize that what I was doing could equally be characterized as stealing away the best excuse for doing nothing: that you have no power and nothing you do matters. It was nurture of people's sense of possibility, and it was dissent from a lot of the most familiar narratives in which despair and cynicism - that weird formula in which overconfidence about outcome undermines ones will to play a role - justify nonparticipation.
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Works of art that had an impact in their time sometimes look dated or obvious because what was fresh and even insurrectionary about them has become the ordinary way things are, how we edit films or see history or nature or sexuality, or understand rights and their violations. Thus the vision of one or a few becomes the perspective of many. They have been rendered obselete by their success -- which makes the relevance of even much nineteenth century feminist writing a grim reminder that though we've come far, its not enough.
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Change is the measure of time, and these movements were often regarded as having failed to realize short term or specific goals but in the long term they often changed the very premises by which decisions were made and facts were interpreted, and how people imagined themselves, each other, their possibility, their rights, and society. And who decided, who intepreted, what was visible and audible, whose voice and vision mattered.
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Efficiency says that grief should follow a road map and things should be gotten over and that there should be that word that applies to wounds and minds both: closure. But time and pain are a more unpredictable business, expanding and contracting, closing, and opening and changing.
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Paradise is not a destination to arrive in, but a pole star by which to navigate.
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(Kintsugi) is a way to accept that things will never be what they were but they can become something else with a different kind of beauty and value.