Rebecca Solnit
In June 1961, Rebecca Solnit was born in Bridgeport, beginning a life she would go on to pursue as a writer, journalist, historian, art historian, essayist, activist, and environmentalist in the United States.
Solnit was educated at San Francisco State University and at the University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. Writing in English, she has authored a number of books, among them Savage Dreams: A Journey Into the Hidden Wars of the American West, Wanderlust: A History of Walking, River of Shadows, A Paradise Built in Hell, The Faraway Nearby, and Men Explain Things to Me. Alongside her work as a writer and journalist, she has maintained a parallel commitment to activism and environmental concerns. Her achievements have been recognized with several awards: she received the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
The combination of honors Solnit has received reflects the range of her work across literary and scholarly domains. The National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism and the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award recognize her contributions as a writer and essayist, while the Guggenheim Fellowship acknowledges the depth of her engagement as a historian and art historian. These three awards together mark the scope of a career conducted across multiple disciplines and sustained by her ongoing roles as both writer and activist.
Quotes by Rebecca Solnit
Rebecca Solnit's insights on:
Walking shares with making and working that crucial element of engagement of the body and the mind with the world, of knowing the world through the body and the body through the world
Mountaineering is the art of getting up mountains by foot and occasionally by hand, and though the climbing is usually emphasized, most ascents are mostly a matter of walking and since good climbers climb with their legs as much as possible, climbing could be called the art of taking a vertical walk.
In mountaineering, if we look for private experience rather than public history, even getting to the top becomes an optional narrative rather than the main point, and those who only wander in high places become part of the story.
Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That's where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go.
Disaster doesn’t sort us out by preferences; it drags us into emergencies that require we act, and act altruistically, bravely, and with initiative in order to survive or save the neighbors, no matter how we vote or what we do for a living.
Women have routinely been punished and intimidated for attempting that most simple of freedoms, taking a walk, because their walking and indeed their very beings have been construed as inevitably, continually sexual in those societies concerned with controlling women’s sexuality.
In fact, what is sometimes regarded as an inconsistency in the contemporary right-wing platform – the desire to regulate women’s reproductive activity in particular, and sexuality in general, while deregulating everything else – is only inconsistent if you regard women as people. If you regard women as an undifferentiated part of nature, their bodies are just another place a man has every right to go.
The word “lost” comes from the Old Norse “los,” meaning the disbanding of an army, and this origin suggests soldiers falling out of formation to go home, a truce with the wide world. I worry now that many people never disband their armies, never go beyond what they know.
Society’s recipes for fulfillment seem to cause a great deal of unhappiness, both in those who are stigmatized for being unable or unwilling to carry them out and in those who obey but don’t find happiness.