The Faraway
Nearby
Rebecca
Solnit (2013, Penguin Books)
A friend
recently described me a nonfiction snob. My inner ten-year-old lawyer
rises to object. On the one hand, of course, it's true that I don't
like novels as well as essays, history, biography, or memoirs of
travel, illness, and grief; but I don't think I regard that taste as
anything to feel superior about, any more than liking choral music
better than symphonies, or football better than soccer. My
excessively literal turn of mind seems like just one of the coves and
inlets that make up the coastline of my personality. So I trust that
you take all these musings with due allowances.
The
Faraway Nearby, Rebecca Solnit's book of essays, hits all the
high spots of the reasons I like non-fiction. It's storytelling based
in the real world, seen in lives beginning and ending; in connections
across time and space, from Burmese monks to South American lepers to
Arctic explorers; in actions as mundane as preserving fruit and as
challenging as rafting down the Grand Canyon. They are stories that
haven't necessarily ended, yet we can make sense out of how far they
have come.
Some years
ago, Solnit had one of those ghastly years: as she watched over the
unravelling of her mother's mind in senile dementia, she had her own
breast cancer scare, and her boyfriend ended their relationship. By
way of recovery and escape, she accepted an opportunity to spend a
summer in Iceland, near the Arctic Circle, where she read and
contemplated older stories of the frozen North. The environment
reminds her of Mary Shelley, who set the framing story of
Frankenstein on an ice-bound exploration vessel. In fact, her
mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, had also written a book about traveling
in Scandinavia – the best stories extend into the past as well as
the future.
Solnit
spins tales out of abiding and evolving metaphors. One of these is
spinning itself, taking short strands of fiber and turning them, by
hand, into a long, continuous strand. Is that not what writing is,
and indeed reading? Think of all the myths and fairy tales about
spinning: it is a task of perseverance, usually under some
compulsion. "Scheherazade forestalls her death by telling a
story that is like a thread that cannot be cut; she keeps spinning
and spinning, incorporating new fragments, characters, incidents,
into her unbroken, unbreakable narrative thread." The strand may
serve healing, as did the sutures after Solnit's breast biopsy. It
may connect, literally, as in the cognate 'sutra', the word for the
thread that bound Buddhist wisdom into books of palm leaves; as well
as metaphorically, as in the transmission of Buddhist wisdom itself.
Having
spun a thread, you may take it into a labyrinth, which is not a maze;
you can't truly get lost, but you can journey into the unknown, and
come back to where you started, changed by the journey. Solnit seeks
relief from all the light in Iceland by visiting a labyrinth, a piece
of art experienced in the dark like a high-concept fun-house. "It
was easy to believe that what was dark was solid, what was light was
spaciousness into which you could move, but reality as you bumped
into it was often the other way around, with open blackness and hard
pale surfaces." This recalls what she said of her mother, even
before Alzheimers: "It was as though she travelled by a map of
the wrong place, hitting walls, driving into ditches, missing her
destination, but never stopping or throwing out the map."
Like light
and dark, heat and cold are more complex than we sometimes imagine.
In the far North, "Nothing decays, and so time stops for the
dead, if not the living. Cold is stability and warmth can be
treacherous." This is a thread that connects the ancient
Europeans found intact in glaciers to cryogenically preserved people,
and to Snow White. On her retreat in Iceland, Solnit looked into the
books of a Danish explorer called Peter Freuchen. He told a story
from 1905 about a lethally sudden thaw. A party of Inuit travelers
had their sleds, which were made of frozen meat and hide, eaten by
their dogs when the temperature rose; they made shelters and ate the
dogs, and one woman eventually survived by eating the bodies of her
companions as well, including her husband.
Freuchen
recorded the story three times, with varying details; did his memory
get better or worse? The survivor, Atagutaluk, went on to marry
again, and become a matriarch of her village. Surely her telling of
it was altered over time, and different people heard it differently.
Solnit says, "Freuchen saw only a corner of the picture. The
picture always gets bigger; there is always more to tell; one thread
is tangled up with all the others; even when it stops, other threads
carry the story onward, beyond the horizon."
The
Faraway Nearby gives us story on story, image on image, laid out
in a beautifully labyrinthine structure. Solnit's mother doesn't get
better, but she does become happier. "She forgot the stories
that fueled her wrath, and when they were gone, everything was
different. ...She had achieved something of the state people strive
for through spiritual practice: a lack of attachment to the past and
future and a wholehearted participation in the present. It had come
as part of a catastrophic terminal illness, not a devotional pursuit,
but it came."
What saved
Solnit in the darkest times was to face outward, to seek the
perspective of oceans, and of centuries. This is advice most grief
memoirs could use more of: "To dig deeper into the self, to go
underground, is sometimes necessary, but so is the other route of
getting out of yourself, into the larger world, into the openness in
which you need not clutch your story and your troubles so tightly to
your chest."
New Years
blessings on all your stories - may they go on and on.
Any Good
Books – January 2016
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