Recollections of My Nonexistence A Memoir - Rebecca Solnit Page 0,31

because of who he was or because of who I imagined he was, or how I filled up what I didn’t know about him with what I needed. I accepted the request with enthusiasm and curiosity about what the years we’d been out of touch had brought and who he might be. He replied that my political views were abhorrent, but that he would like to send me copies of the letters I’d written him. Once I found out he was conservative, things that had seemed mysterious or exotic about him when he was young suddenly made sense. I didn’t find out more about him, but I did find out from him more about me.

A manila envelope came through the mail slot a few weeks later. I had a little queasiness about meeting that teenager directly, and so I waited several years to open it. In the photocopies of letters written on lined yellow legal pads in a small neat handwriting that is no longer mine I met a person who didn’t know how to speak. By that I mean several things. The young writer I met there didn’t know how to speak from the heart, though I could be affectionate. But also, she was a jumble of quotations and allusions and foreign phrases and circumlocutions, of archness and pretense and avoidance and confusion, an attempt to use language that kept her so busy that hardly anything got said, or major events were mentioned in passing in sentences busy doing other things that didn’t matter. She had collected a lot of words, phrases, syntaxes, tones and was trying them out, like someone at the very first stages of playing an instrument, with squawks and clangs. She was speaking in various voices because she didn’t yet know what voice was hers, or rather she had not yet made one.

There was one startling passage in all the verbiage. I’d written about the eighteenth-birthday party I’d thrown my younger brother not quite a year after I’d moved into the apartment. A lot of chocolate frosting had been smeared around on a lot of people, and there was talcum powder on the stereo and towels soaked with champagne in the tub, I mentioned proudly. And then the letter went on to list essays I was trying to write, though it would be a couple of years before I published anything.

I mentioned a “long essay to work it out for myself—about my penchant for long solitary walks at night, the danger involved (I’ve given it up. I was nearly assaulted a few weeks ago) and how it affects my attitude toward feminism—of what value are the advances made in the last decades when one’s physical freedom has become so severely jeopardized. Most urban women, you know, live as though in a war zone. . . . There’s a price to pay either way—a year and a half of living dangerously has warped my mind. This essay is going to be a mammoth prose poem, an analysis of (or at least a hymn to) the nature of the night itself.”

That essay was never quite written, though I often afterward wrote in praise of darkness, sometimes trying to reverse the metaphors in which good is light or white and black and darkness are evil, with their problematic racial overtones, and I eventually wrote a book called Hope in the Dark. Years after this letter, my time in the desert taught me to love shade, shadows, and night as a reprieve from the burning heat and light of day. And four years after that ambitious proposition to write about gender and night, I wrote for the first time about violence against women and the ways that thwarted and limited our access to public space and freedom of movement and equality in any and all arenas and then I wrote about it again and again.

When I wrote my book on walking almost twenty years later, I quoted Sylvia Plath, who declared when she was nineteen, “Being born a woman is my awful tragedy. Yes, my consuming desire to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, barroom regulars—to be part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording—all is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an