Hope in a Time of Darkness: An interview with author Rebecca Solnit.

AuthorNichols, John

Rebecca Solnit distinguishes between optimism and hope.

"I use the term 'hope' because it navigates a way forward between the false certainties of optimism and of pessimism, and the complacency or passivity that goes with both," the consistently ingenious writer and essayist explained in her 2017 essay, "Protest and Persist." "Optimism assumes that all will go well without our effort; pessimism assumes it's all irredeemable; both let us stay home and do nothing. Hope for me has meant a sense that the future is unpredictable, and that we don't actually know what will happen, but know we may be able to write it ourselves."

Solnit is the author of more than twenty books, on topics ranging from protest to politics, feminism to the environment, art, and walking. Her latest, released last fall by Viking (see review in The Progressive), is Orwell's Roses, which begins as an exploration of the efforts of another great essayist, George Orwell, to cultivate roses but blossoms into a consideration of the demand for bread and roses that has historically animated the visionary left. While Orwell's name is frequently associated with the miserable work of revealing and challenging authoritarianism, he was also, like any serious gardener, hopeful. Here's some of our recent discussion about the book and about hope in a time of darkness.

Q: The remarkable thing about Orwell's Roses is how it transforms our impression of George Orwell by examining his penchant for planting rose bushes. By focusing on this very human, and I dare say very hopeful, side of him, you give a much deeper sense of the man and his writing. You also give us a deeper sense of how people who are focused on vital issues--war and peace, poverty and injustice, democracy and totalitarianism--sustain and nurture themselves.

Rebecca Solnit: I'd never really thought about what it meant that our great prophet of totalitarianism, the man famous for facing unpleasant facts, was planting roses. I'd been thinking for years of writing a book looking for a great encounter, but I had thought it might be between two people or two groups or something, not between a man and a rose bush.

Writing this book let me talk about all these things I wanted to talk about: how we lead our lives, about what it looks like to lead a sustainable life. But it was really after I met the rose bushes and I started reading Orwell's domestic diaries and letters that I realized that I, like most people, had a misapprehension...

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