Rebecca Solnit on Hope in Dark Times
For Ju Summerhayes
Resisting the Defeatism of Easy Despair, and What Victory Really Means for Movements of Social Change
“There is no love of life without despair of life,” wrote Albert Camus - a man who in the midst of World War II,
perhaps the darkest period in human history, saw grounds for luminous hope and issued a remarkable clarion call for
humanity to rise to its highest potential on those grounds.
Illustration by Isabelle Arsenault from Mr. Gauguin’s Heart by Marie-Danielle Croteau, the story of how Paul Gauguin
used the grief of his childhood as a catalyst for a lifetime of art..
When thinking about walking, we end up floating in thoughts...
It's Raining Mushrooms!
The notoriously short-sighted view of foreshortening, a mycological metaphor for its inception from the imperceptible, to a slow
and incremental buildup of influence and momentum... is a vitalizing exploration of how we can withstand the marketable temptations
of false hope and easy despair. Sometimes it’s as complex as chaos theory and as slow as evolution. Even things that seem to happen
suddenly arise from deep roots in the past or from long-dormant seeds.
One of Beatrix Potter’s little-known scientific studies and illustrations of mushrooms
After a rain mushrooms appear on the surface of the earth as if from nowhere. Many do so from a sometimes vast underground fungus that remains invisible and largely unknown. Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act.
Existential psychiatrist Irvin D. Yalom’s conception of meaning: “The search for meaning, much like the search for pleasure,” he wrote, “must be conducted obliquely.” That is, it must take place in the thrilling and terrifying terra incognita that lies between where we are and where we wish to go, ultimately shaping where we do go.
Rebecca Solnit on Hope in Dark Times, Resisting the Defeatism of Easy Despair, and What Victory Really Means for Movements of Social Change :
https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/03/16/rebecca-solnit-hope-in-the-dark-2/
“I suspect that the mind, like the feet, works at about three miles an hour. If this is so, then modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought, or thoughtfulness.”
- Rebecca Solnit on Walking
In 1861, Thoreau penned his timeless treatise on walking and the spirit of sauntering. Half a century later, Swiss modernist writer Robert Walser captured this spirit in his short story “The Walk,” which includes this exquisite line:
“With the utmost love and attention the man who walks must study and observe every smallest living thing, be it a child, a dog, a fly, a butterfly, a sparrow, a worm, a flower, a man, a house, a tree, a hedge, a snail, a mouse, a cloud, a hill, a leaf, or no more than a poor discarded scrap of paper on which, perhaps, a dear good child at school has written his first clumsy letters.”
Wanderlust: Rebecca Solnit on How Walking Vitalizes the Meanderings of the Mind
https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/06/03/wanderlust-rebecca-solnit-walking/
To make walking into an investigation, a ritual, a meditation, is a special subset of walking, physiologically,
and philosophically unlike the way experience brings a thing into view, a thought eventually reaches the brain...
Like eating or breathing, walking can be invested with wildly different cultural meanings, from the erotic to
the spiritual, from the revolutionary to the artistic. Thinking is generally thought of as doing nothing in a
production-oriented culture, and doing nothing is hard to do. It’s best done by disguising it as doing something,
and the something closest to doing nothing is walking. - Rebecca Solnit on Walking
Floating Julee Cruise (1990)
Performed by Julee Cruise /Written by Angelo Badalimenti and David Lynch /From the album "Into the Night" 1990
dr. π (pi)
.
Resisting the Defeatism of Easy Despair, and What Victory Really Means for Movements of Social Change
“There is no love of life without despair of life,” wrote Albert Camus - a man who in the midst of World War II,
perhaps the darkest period in human history, saw grounds for luminous hope and issued a remarkable clarion call for
humanity to rise to its highest potential on those grounds.
Illustration by Isabelle Arsenault from Mr. Gauguin’s Heart by Marie-Danielle Croteau, the story of how Paul Gauguin
used the grief of his childhood as a catalyst for a lifetime of art..
When thinking about walking, we end up floating in thoughts...
It's Raining Mushrooms!
The notoriously short-sighted view of foreshortening, a mycological metaphor for its inception from the imperceptible, to a slow
and incremental buildup of influence and momentum... is a vitalizing exploration of how we can withstand the marketable temptations
of false hope and easy despair. Sometimes it’s as complex as chaos theory and as slow as evolution. Even things that seem to happen
suddenly arise from deep roots in the past or from long-dormant seeds.
One of Beatrix Potter’s little-known scientific studies and illustrations of mushrooms
After a rain mushrooms appear on the surface of the earth as if from nowhere. Many do so from a sometimes vast underground fungus that remains invisible and largely unknown. Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act.
Existential psychiatrist Irvin D. Yalom’s conception of meaning: “The search for meaning, much like the search for pleasure,” he wrote, “must be conducted obliquely.” That is, it must take place in the thrilling and terrifying terra incognita that lies between where we are and where we wish to go, ultimately shaping where we do go.
Rebecca Solnit on Hope in Dark Times, Resisting the Defeatism of Easy Despair, and What Victory Really Means for Movements of Social Change :
https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/03/16/rebecca-solnit-hope-in-the-dark-2/
“I suspect that the mind, like the feet, works at about three miles an hour. If this is so, then modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought, or thoughtfulness.”
- Rebecca Solnit on Walking
In 1861, Thoreau penned his timeless treatise on walking and the spirit of sauntering. Half a century later, Swiss modernist writer Robert Walser captured this spirit in his short story “The Walk,” which includes this exquisite line:
“With the utmost love and attention the man who walks must study and observe every smallest living thing, be it a child, a dog, a fly, a butterfly, a sparrow, a worm, a flower, a man, a house, a tree, a hedge, a snail, a mouse, a cloud, a hill, a leaf, or no more than a poor discarded scrap of paper on which, perhaps, a dear good child at school has written his first clumsy letters.”
Wanderlust: Rebecca Solnit on How Walking Vitalizes the Meanderings of the Mind
https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/06/03/wanderlust-rebecca-solnit-walking/
To make walking into an investigation, a ritual, a meditation, is a special subset of walking, physiologically,
and philosophically unlike the way experience brings a thing into view, a thought eventually reaches the brain...
Like eating or breathing, walking can be invested with wildly different cultural meanings, from the erotic to
the spiritual, from the revolutionary to the artistic. Thinking is generally thought of as doing nothing in a
production-oriented culture, and doing nothing is hard to do. It’s best done by disguising it as doing something,
and the something closest to doing nothing is walking. - Rebecca Solnit on Walking
Floating Julee Cruise (1990)
Click to viewPerformed by Julee Cruise /Written by Angelo Badalimenti and David Lynch /From the album "Into the Night" 1990
dr. π (pi)
.