What’s your story? It’s all in the telling. Stories are compasses and architecture; we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice. To love someone is to put yourself in their place, we say, which is to put yourself in their story, or figure out how to tell yourself their story.

Which means that a place is a story, and stories are geography, and empathy is first of all an act of imagination, a storyteller’s art, and then a way of traveling from here to there. What is it like to be the old man silenced by a stroke, the young man facing the executioner, the woman walking across the border, the child on the rollercoaster, the person you’ve only read about or the one next to you in bed?

We tell ourselves stories in order to live, or to justify taking lives, even our own, by violence or by numbness and the failure to live, tell ourselves stories that save us and stories that are the quicksand in which we thrash and the well in which we drown, stories of justification, of accursedness, of luck and star-crossed love, or versions clad in the cynicism that is at times a very elegant garment. Sometimes the story collapses, and it demands that we recognize we’ve been lost, or terrible, or ridiculous, or just stuck; sometimes change arrives like an ambulance or a supply drop. Not a few stories are sinking ships, and many of us go down with these ships even when the lifeboats are bobbing all around us.

In The Thousand and One Nights, known in English as The Arabian Nights, Scheharazade tells stories in order to keep the sultan in suspense from night to night so he will not kill her. The premise of the vast thicket of stories is that the sultan caught his queen in the embrace of a slave and decided to sleep with a virgin every night and slay her every morning so that he could not be cuckolded again. Scheherazade volunteered to try to end the massacre and did so by telling him stories that carried over from one night to the next for nights that stretched into years.

She spun stories around him that kept him in a cocoon of anticipation from which he eventually emerged a less murderous man. In the course of all this telling she bore three sons and delivered a labyrinth of stories within stories, stories of desire and deception and magic, of tranformation and testing, stories in which the action in one freezes as another storyteller opens his mouth, pregnant stories, stories to stop death.

Do you tell your story or does it tell you? Often, too often, stories saddle us, ride us, whip us onward, tell us what to do, and we do it without questioning. The task of learning to be free requires learning to hear them, to question them, to pause and hear silence, to name them and then to become the storyteller. Those ex-virgins who died were inside the sultan’s story; Scheharazade, like a working-class hero, seized control of the means of production, and talked her way out.

--The Faraway Nearby (2012)

[Rebecca Solnit]

Not to know yourself is dangerous, to that self and to others. Those who destroy, who cause great suffering, kill off some portion of themselves first, or hide from the knowledge of their acts and from their own emotion, and their internal landscape fills with partitions, caves, minefields, blank spots, pit traps, and more, a landscape turned against itself, a landscape that does not know itself, a landscape through which they may not travel.

The Faraway Nearby by Rebecca Solnit

The Faraway Nearby

" The bigness of the world is redemption. Despair compresses you into small spaces, and a depression is literally a hollow in the ground . To dig deeper into the self, to go underground, is sometimes necessary, but so is the other route of getting out of yourself, into the larger world, into the openness in which you need not clutch your story and your troubles so tightly to your chest. Being able to travel both ways matters, and sometimes the way back into the heart of the question begins by going outward and beyond. This is the expansiveness that sometimes comes literally in a landscape or that tugs you out of yourself in a story." - The Faraway Nearby by Rebecca Solnit

— The Faraway Nearby by Rebecca Solnit

"I disappeared into books when I was very young, disappeared into them like someone running into the woods."

— Rebecca Solnit, 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘍𝘢𝘳𝘢𝘸𝘢𝘺 𝘕𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘣𝘺: '𝘍𝘭𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵'

“If the boundaries of the self are defined by what we feel, then those who cannot feel even for themselves shrink within their own boundaries, while those who feel for others are enlarged, and those who feel compassion for all beings must be boundless. They are not separate, not alone, not lonely, not vulnerable in the same way as those of us stranded in the islands of ourselves, but they are vulnerable in other ways. Still, that sense of the dangers of feeling for others is so compelling that many withdraw, and develop elaborate stories to justify withdrawal, and then forget that they have shrunk. Most of us do, one way or another.”

-- Rebecca Solnit, from The Faraway Nearby (2013)

“I had returned to the state in which I had spent my childhood, frozen, in suspended animation, waiting to thaw out, to wake up, waiting to live.”

- Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby

The Faraway Nearby - Rebecca Solnit

“Like many others who turned into writers, I disappeared into books when I was very young, disappeared into them like someone running into the woods. What suprised and still suprises me is that there was another side to the forest of stories and the solitude, that I came out that other side and met people there. Writers are solitaries by vocation and necessity. I sometimes think the test is not so much talent, which is not as rare as people think, but purpose or vocation, which manifests in part as the ability to endure a lot of solitude and keep working. Before writers are writers they are readers, living in books, through books,in the lives of others that are also the heads of others, in that act that is so intimate and yet so alone.”

— Rebecca Solnit, from The Faraway Nearby

"The Joy of Living" :: Matisse

* * * *

Many of the great humanitarian and environmental campaigns of our time have been to make the unknown real, the invisible visible, to bring the faraway near, so that the suffering of sweatshop workers, torture victims, beaten children, even the destruction of other species and remote places, impinges on the imagination and perhaps prompts you to act. It’s also a narrative art of explaining the connections between your food or your clothing or your government and this suffering far from sight in which you nonetheless play a role. The suffering before you, in your own home or bed or life, can be harder to see, sometimes, as is the self who is implicated. The self is also a creation, the principal work of your life, the crafting of which makes everyone an artist. This unfinished work of becoming ends only when you do, if then, and the consequences live on. We make ourselves and in so doing are the gods of the small universe of self and the large world of repercussions.

[The Faraway Nearby (ALA Notable Books for Adults) :: by Rebecca Solnit]

Sometimes the sacred and the transgressive are indistinguishable as something you should not look at.

The Faraway Nearby by Rebecca Solnit

...𝓗𝓮 𝓘𝓼 𝓣𝓱𝓮 𝓑𝓮𝓼𝓽 𝓕𝓪𝓽𝓱𝓮𝓻 𝓘𝓷 𝓣𝓱𝓮 𝓦𝓸𝓻𝓵𝓭, 𝓔𝓿𝓮𝓷 𝓐𝓼 𝓘 𝓐𝓶...

— The Faraway Nearby by Rebecca Solnit

Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby

Georgia O’Keeffe - From the Faraway, Nearby - 1937

Georgia O’Keeffe - Summer Days - 1936

crocheted georgia o’keeffe’s ‘from the faraway, nearby’ with a frame made by sticks i found outside & a little raccoon molar for detail :)