In Recollections of My Nonexistence, Rebecca Solnit describes her formation as a writer and as a feminist in 1980s San Francisco, in an atmosphere of gender violence on the street and throughout society and the exclusion of women from cultural arenas. She tells of being poor, hopeful, and adrift in the city that became her great teacher; of the small apartment that, when she wa...
In Recollections of My Nonexistence, Rebecca Solnit describes her formation as a writer and as a feminist in 1980s San Francisco, in an atmosphere of gender violence on the street and throughout society and the exclusion of women from cultural arenas. She tells of being poor, hopeful, and adrift in the city that became her great teacher; of the small apartment that, when she was nineteen, became the home in which she transformed herself; of how punk rock gave form and voice to her own fury and explosive energy.
Solnit recounts how she came to recognize the epidemic of violence against women around her, the street harassment that unsettled her, the trauma that changed her, and the authority figures who routinely disdained and disbelieved girls and women, including her. Looking back, she sees all these as consequences of the voicelessness that was and still is the ordinary condition of women, and how she contended with that while becoming a writer and a public voice for women's rights.
She explores the forces that liberated her as a person and as a writer--books themselves, the gay men around her who offered other visions of what gender, family, and joy could be, and her eventual arrival in the spacious landscapes and overlooked conflicts of the American West. These influences taught her how to write in the way she has ever since, and gave her a voice that has resonated with and empowered many others.
作者简介
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Rebecca Solnit is the author of more than twenty books, including A Field Guide to Getting Lost, The Faraway Nearby, A Paradise Built in Hell, River of Shadows, and Wanderlust: A History of Walking. She is also the author of Men Explain Things to Me and many essays on feminism, activism and social change, hope, and the climate crisis. A product of the California public educatio...
Rebecca Solnit is the author of more than twenty books, including A Field Guide to Getting Lost, The Faraway Nearby, A Paradise Built in Hell, River of Shadows, and Wanderlust: A History of Walking. She is also the author of Men Explain Things to Me and many essays on feminism, activism and social change, hope, and the climate crisis. A product of the California public education system from kindergarten to graduate school, she is a regular contributor to the Guardian and Lit Hub.
Change is the measure of time.
The texture of that bygone life seems hard to convey now: the solitude of a wanderer in the city who could wait for a bus or a taxi to come by or find a phone booth to call a taxi or a friend from a memorized number or by asking the operator or by looking it up in the ruffled tissue-thin pages of the phone book if there was one there, dangling in its black case from the metal cord; who'd look for what she wanted in many stores before the internet meant that you could pinpoint things without getting out of bed, back when there were fewer chain stores and more variety. We were subject to the wonders and frustrations of unpredictability and better able to withstand them because time moved at what would only later seem a gentle flow, like a river across a prairi... (查看原文)
But there were some I craved. When I read, I ceased to be myself, and this nonexistence I pursued and devoured like a drug. I faded into an absent witness, someone who was in that world but not anyone in it, or who was every word and road and house and ill omen and forlorn hope. I was a fog, a miasma, a mist, someone who dissolved into the story, got lost in it, learned to lose myself this way as a reprieve from that task of being a child and then a woman and the particular child and woman I was. I hovered about in many times and places, worlds and cosmologies, dispersing and gathering and drifting. A line by T.S. Eliot, the first poet whose work I got to know, comes to mind:"prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet." Alone, immersed in a book, I was faceless, everyone, anyone, unbou... (查看原文)
I felt every word in this grounded, emotionally fulfilling memoir of pain, anger, as well as hopes. Salute to all the brilliant feminist writers and civil rights activists such as Solnit, who use word...I felt every word in this grounded, emotionally fulfilling memoir of pain, anger, as well as hopes. Salute to all the brilliant feminist writers and civil rights activists such as Solnit, who use words to help people relocate their power and value. (展开)
0 有用 a little mark 2021-02-06 12:38:11
I felt every word in this grounded, emotionally fulfilling memoir of pain, anger, as well as hopes. Salute to all the brilliant feminist writers and civil rights activists such as Solnit, who use word... I felt every word in this grounded, emotionally fulfilling memoir of pain, anger, as well as hopes. Salute to all the brilliant feminist writers and civil rights activists such as Solnit, who use words to help people relocate their power and value. (展开)
0 有用 fugue 2021-05-11 12:13:20
睡前阅读 | Rebecca being Rebecca
1 有用 ZZ 2020-08-09 04:02:08
她写的话都写到你心里去了。
0 有用 阅百卡 2023-03-13 04:41:07 美国
大爱
0 有用 许三 2020-05-19 11:03:03
Admire her.