In 2004, Rebecca Solnit released Hope in the Dark, a series of extended essays in response to the war in Iraq. Drawing on the resilience she saw after Hurricane Katrina, she offered a vision of solidarity and tenacity. The book experienced a sharp surge in popularity after the 2016 election of Donald Trump, selling out in short order. Returning to Hope in the Dark 10 years later, I remembered why it was so lauded. It is a slim, steady book full of sensible reminders about the limits of the intellect and the dangers of becoming poisoned by pessimism. “Hope is not a door, but a sense that there might be a door at some point, some way out of the problems of the present moment even before that way is found or followed,” Solnit wrote. Humility requires us to acknowledge that no matter how damningly certain the future may seem, it remains fundamentally unknowable. That’s where hope begins.
Her timely new book picks up this thread: “You do not have to picture the destination to reach it or at least draw closer to it, you just need to choose a direction and keep on walking,” she tells us. Solnit has written more than a dozen books since 2004, but in format, design, and theme, The Beginning Comes After the End feels like the direct successor to Hope in the Dark: a novella-length essay broken into short but wide-ranging chapters that cite history, philosophy and contemporary writing, paying special note to moments of reparation and progress.
Solnit argues that it’s important not to lose sight of the enormous gains that have been made in recent decades in women’s rights, racial justice, environmental protections, and countless other arenas. In sum: “Our world has changed more than almost anyone imagined, in ways both wonderful and terrible, often in ways no one anticipated, and the sheer profundity of change in the past guarantees that this change will continue, that stability is not an option, but participating in directing change might be, if we recognise it.”
She writes at length about successes achieved by Indigenous movements in California in recent years, and weaves together lessons from the work of Rachel Carson, Jane Goodall, Suzanne Simard, James Baldwin, Martin Luther King Jr and others. Such is her commitment to the narrative of forward-motion that she avoids directly mentioning the bad actors of modern times – tidily lumped together as “destructive forces” – until chapter 6. “I suspect by now a lot of readers are thinking that the world … is rife with white supremacy, misogyny, authoritarianism, transphobia, savage hypercapitalism, tragic consumerism, ecocide, and climate denial, and they are not wrong,” she notes. No, she concedes, the march of progress isn’t the full story. But in relegating these forces to a single chapter, and treating them as a detour, she insists that they cede terrain to other, more promising stories. One of those is a shift towards a worldview of “interconnectedness and independence” – an idea Solnit threads throughout the book: “whether or not it is true, a lot of us want it to be true, and that desire says a lot about who we are right now”.
Readers looking for policy prescriptions or organising strategies, or even ideas for how to draft a simple, local, civic to-do list of their own may be disappointed. But as a deliberate exercise in reframing – as an open-ended invitation to consciously adopt new paradigms – The Beginning Comes After the End is very effective. Solnit is wise to focus on the nonlinear, and sometimes almost entirely invisible ways that change happens: “so subtly, so slowly, that only a milestone lets you know that it has been taking place all along, lets you see that many small changes add up to a large one”. An old world is dying, she’s certain; we’re in the midst of its violent last gasps. What comes next remains to be seen.
• The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change by Rebecca Solnit is published by Granta (£14.99). To support the Guardian buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
