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Also by Rebecca Solnit Secret Exhibition: Six California Artists of the Cold War Era Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Landscape Wars of the American West A Book of Migrations: Some Passages in Ireland Wanderlust: A History of Walking Hollow City: The Siege of San Francisco and the Crisis of American Urbanism (with Susan Schwartzenberg) As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender, and Art River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities A Field Guide to Getting Lost Yosemite in Time: Ice Ages, Tree Clocks, Ghost Rivers (with Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe) Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas VIKING Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA USA | Canada | UK | Ireland | Australia | New Zealand | India | South Africa | China Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England For more information about the Penguin Group visit penguin.com Copyright © Rebecca Solnit, 2013 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Solnit, Rebecca. The faraway nearby / Rebecca Solnit. pages cm ISBN 978-1-101-62277-3 1. Solnit, Rebecca. 2. Autobiography—Authorship. 3. Storytelling. 4. Narration (Rhetoric)— Psychological aspects. I. Title. PS3569.O585Z46 2013 814'.54—dc23 [B] 2013001563 Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone. for the mothers and the wolves Contents Also by Rebecca Solnit Title Page Copyright Dedication 1. Apricots 2. Mirrors 3. Ice 4. Flight 5. Breath 6. Wound 7. Knot 8. Unwound 9. Breath 10. Flight 11. Ice 12. Mirrors 13. Apricots Moths Thanks 1 • Apricots What’s your story? It’s all in the telling. Stories are compasses and architecture; we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice. To love someone is to put yourself in their place, we say, which is to put yourself in their story, or figure out how to tell yourself their story. Which means that a place is a story, and stories are geography, and empathy is first of all an act of imagination, a storyteller’s art, and then a way of traveling from here to there. What is it like to be the old man silenced by a stroke, the young man facing the executioner, the woman walking across the border, the child on the roller coaster, the person you’ve only read about, or the one next to you in bed? 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. Sometimes the story collapses, and it demands that we recognize we’ve been lost, or terrible, or ridiculous, or just stuck; sometimes change arrives like an ambulance or a supply drop. Not a few stories are sinking ships, and many of us go down with these ships even when the lifeboats are bobbing all around us. In The Thousand and One Nights, known in English as The Arabian Nights, Scheherazade tells stories in order to keep the sultan in suspense from night to night so he will not kill her. The backstory is that the sultan caught his queen in the embrace of a slave and decided to sleep with a virgin every night and slay her every morning so that he could not be cuckolded again. Scheherazade volunteered to try to end the massacre and did so by telling him stories that carried over from one night to the next for nights that stretched into years. She spun stories around him that kept him in a cocoon of anticipation from which he eventually emerged a less murderous man. In the course of all this telling she bore three sons and delivered a labyrinth of stories within stories, stories of desire and deception and magic, of transformation and testing, stories in which the action in one freezes as another storyteller opens his mouth, pregnant stories, stories to stop death. We think we tell stories, but stories often tell us, tell us to love or to hate, to see or to be blind. Often, too often, stories saddle us, ride us, whip us onward, tell us what to do, and we do it without questioning. The task of learning to be free requires learning to hear them, to question them, to pause and hear silence, to name them, and then to become the storyteller. Those ex-virgins who died were inside the sultan’s story; Scheherazade, like a working-class hero, seized control of the means of production and talked her way out. • • • Sometimes the key arrives long before the lock. Sometimes a story falls in your lap. Once about a hundred pounds of apricots fell into mine. They came in three big boxes, and to keep them from crushing one another under their weight or from rotting in close quarters, I spread them out on a sheet on the plank floor of my bedroom. There they presided for some days, a story waiting to be told, a riddle to be solved, and a harvest to be processed. They were an impressive sight, a mountain of apricots in every stage from hard and green to soft and browning, though most of them were that range of shades we call apricot: pale orange with blushes of rose and yellow-gold zones, upholstered in a fine velvet, not as fuzzy as peaches, not as smooth as plums. The ripe ones had the faint sweet perfume particular to that fruit. I had expected them to look like abundance itself and they looked instead like anxiety, because every time I came back there was another rotten one or two or three or dozen to cull, and so I fell to inspecting the pile every time I passed by instead of admiring it. The reasons why I came to have a heap of apricots on my bedroom floor are complicated. They came from my mother’s tree, from the home she no longer lived in, in the summer when a new round of trouble began. Two summers before the apricots, my mother had begun to get confused, to get lost, to lock herself out of her own house, to have serial emergencies that often prompted her to call me for a rescue or a solution. She had memorized my phone number decades before; my three brothers lived no farther away, but they had other area codes and newer numbers, and she had always hidden her troubles from them. They were the audience for her best self, for whom she wished to be seen as, and I was stationed backstage, where things were messier. I told my middle and younger brothers that we needed to make it a group effort, because if this chaos remained my mother’s and my secret, as most of her illnesses and complaints had been before, it could consume me. These brothers did a lot for her in other ways; they stepped up, and the burden was shared, but all her emergency calls still came to me. One day I asked her why she always called me and not them. “Well, you’re the girl,” she said, then added, “and you’re just sitting around the house all day doing nothing anyway.” That was one way to describe the life of a writer. She lost her car, and I went over and drove her around until we found it; we crossed our fingers until she lost her driver’s license for good; she lost her purse and I turned her house upside down until it showed up on the seat of a chair pushed into a desk days after we’d given up; she lost her keys or her wallet, and we came over and unlocked the door with our keys and made more keys and left one with her nearby friend, and hid one on the premises, and then a replacement, and then one after that. I never knew when the phone would ring with an emergency, and when the phone didn’t ring, I worried about whether she was in such dire straits that she didn’t even have access to a phone or the capacity to use it. I was constantly on edge, waiting for the next crisis. We kept trying to prop her up at home. I put a hook behind the front door to hang her purse on so she’d know where it was, but she wouldn’t use it, and she took my proposal to reduce her nine or so purses to one badly; she liked the big red luggage tag I put on the key to the front door until she lost it, and then a series of highly visible successors, and appreciated the list of essential phone numbers I pinned to the wall, but she called up and cursed me the day I borrowed her address book so I could make a large copy bound in red with a ribbon on it to tether to furniture or dangle out of piles.