NO STRAIGHT ROAD TAKES YOU THERE: Essays for Uneven Terrain by REBECCA SOLNIT, Haymarket Press

With an economy of space and words, Rebecca Solnit’s essays often encompass complex issues not easily defined. Her new book, NO STRAIGHT ROAD TAKES YOU THERE: Essays for Uneven Terrain (Haymarket, 5/13) explores the organic process of life and change. The introduction, In Praise of the Indirect, the Unpredictable, the Immeasurable, the Slow, and the Subtle, explains the book’s intended for “anyone considering history, power, change, and possibility.” This is Solnit territory, where you meander through her visions, revisions, and conclusions–which felt “right,” though could be a surprise.

In “Tortoise at the Mayfly Party, she sums up the approach, “I try to see the long trajectory of events leading to the present moment, because it is this time to see change. To understand change is essential to understanding politics and culture, let alone trying to participate in it. The short view generates incomprehension and ineffectuality. Events, like living beings, have genealogies and evolutions, and to know those means knowing who they are, how they got there, and who and what they are connected to. If you follow them in either real time or the historical record, you can often see power that emerges from below and ideas that move from the margins to the center. You can see how it all works.” 

I wonder if in our world of  fast-moving thoughts we can slow down enough for  Solnit’s “meander”?  But she is also not opposed to  “the easy, the immediate, the obvious, the straightforward and the predictable.” Her issue is that “much of what we face, or endeavor requires recognition or embrace of its opposite.” Her essays in No Straight World Takes You There  are intended as “equipment,” a kind of arsenal–a credo for indirection.

Is this intellectual posturing?  I found revelation in A Truce with Trees, how a violin made in 1721, was still used by a member of the Kronos Quartet. Solni said, a point for the trees. Made before the first steam engine, which had lasted three decades, seemed strong enough to go on indefinitely, said Solnit.  “I often think of our frenetic burning of fossil fuels, as a sort of war against the trees. But the sky is full of forests.”  The history of instruments, how they are affected by climate in their making, their incredible beauty and utility continues. Yet the war is not over. She offers a fervent prayer, we turn it back.

Topics explored in her inquiries, such as On Not Meeting Nazis Halfway,  Against Centrism and its Biases, Masculinity as Radical Selfishness, Abortion Is an Economic Issue, Climate of Abundance have a timeless and prophetic sense of  “The long trajectories of change as forgotten events and ideas, leading up to a rupture or breakthrough or a resolution, and often overlooked indirect consequences that come afterward.” 

My favorite, Solnit is a northern California writer, is “In the Shadow of Silicon Valley.” about “seeing cars with no drivers in them moving through San Francisco.” Eerie enough as a pedestrian, but on a bike she saw a steeringwheel turn with no hand. Then there’s the inevitable accident, when such a car “hit a pedestrian, dragged her 20 feet and left her mangled and trapped  under its wheels, unable to detect it was on top of a human.” Solnit’s point is not anti robots, the larger issue:

“Driverless cars are often called autonomous vehicles–but driving isn’t an autonomous activity. It’s a cooperative social activity, in which part of the job of whoever’s behind the wheel is to communicate with others on the road.” she goes to the truth, not the supposed rationales” that corporations which own them can keep income that would otherwise go to a driver’s wages.” 

The bigger issue for humans, Solnit points out, is that all the self check-ins and checkouts, the digital operators means “We humans have lost dozens of points of contact in our daily lives. This takes a toll. Americans face a social pandemic of loneliness and isolation, called a pandemic by the U.S/ surgeon general, who identified the Internet, smart phones and media as causes”.

In my view, we are now facing life beyond the cross roads of mere technological change.  At peril is the loss of individual freedoms and rights critical to our lives and definitions of  ourselves–as thinking, feeling human beings. No Straight Road Takes You There offers a path to meet the territory with depth and wisdom.

S.W.