Recollections of My Nonexistence A Memoir - Rebecca Solnit Page 0,29

in the chest, as though my heart were encased in lead, as though I were on some planet whose gravity made every step a struggle and the lifting of limbs an onerous exercise and going out among other people an exhausting prospect.

It was a feeling in the present that arose from a vision of a future that was no future, one with no way forward, from a conviction that what is terrible will always be terrible, that now is a flat, featureless plain that goes on forever, with no forests relieving it, no mountains rising from it, no doorways inviting you out of it—the dread that nothing will change that somehow coexists with the dread that something terrible is going to happen, that what is joyous cannot be trusted, and what is feared is lying in wait for you. If there’s a gravity to this feeling, there’s also a geography, that low place in the earth that we call a depression. It seemed to be made out of logic and a real assessment of the situation, but it was weather, and it would disperse like clouds, and gather again like clouds.

If later on I wrote about hope, it was to pass along the ladders of logic and narratives with which I got myself out of these low places I know well.

I had since childhood imagined interrogations in which lacking the right answers was punished, sometimes unto death, interrogations that must have gotten something of their format from quiz shows seen in early childhood as well as the mockery that comes or came with getting something wrong in school or at the dinner table. I set myself exams and races and tests—if I saw a blue car before the bus came, if a bird flew by before I arrived, if I reached the middle of the crosswalk before the first person in the crowd on the other side of the street—like variations on the children’s game of “step on a crack/break your mother’s back.” I set a lot of imaginary parameters that would determine unrelated outcomes; it was an anxious reflex, a distraction, perhaps sometimes a reassurance when the bird flew by, when I got to the far side of the bridge before I let out my breath.

In quiz shows, people are mostly rewarded for knowing obscure things or picking the right thing, but also those who fail are cast into some outer darkness of exile. For this to become a nightmare you just have to imagine that, say, the arbitrary, heavy-handed punitiveness of your parents, or the mockery of your peers, or the violence in the news is attached to these scurries after information that puts you in the safe and rewarding spot of being right.

This seemed, in my mind, to have something to do with Chinese emperors, perhaps from accounts of the old Chinese civil service exams that required extensive memorization. I suppose one of the reasons I squirreled away information was anxiety about this infernal inquisition and the possibility that if you knew the names of the pieces of armor, that if you knew the etymologies of words, the cast of the Wars of the Roses, the routes of pilgrimages, that if you knew which swans are mute and which are black and that eohippus means the dawn horse that is the diminutive ancestor of modern horses—a useless amulet of information I’ve carried around without using since I was a child—that knowledge could protect you from a punitive, incoherent universe.

Perhaps it can, in another way, not by warding off your enemies but by leading to the recognition of patterns and meanings and friends who share your eclectic interests or by making friends of your curiosity and what it finds. After all, Aladdin opens a cave with the right word. And sometimes ideas and sentences and facts are your friends in themselves.

I read, I daydreamed, I wandered the city so ardently in part because it was a means of wandering in my thoughts, and my thoughts were runaways, constantly taking me away in the midst of the conversation, the meal, the class, the work, the play, the dance, the party. They were a place I wanted to be, thinking, musing, analyzing, imagining, hoping, tracing connections, integrating new ideas, but they grabbed me and ran with me from the situations at hand over and over. I disappeared in the