Recollections of My Nonexistence A Memoir - Rebecca Solnit Page 0,35

and passed along to me in a stack of magazines. The chapters were, like Jorge Luis Borges’s Labyrinths a few years earlier, revelatory. They gave me a sense of how you could mix things, how the personal and the political could spell each other, how a narrative could be oblique, how prose, like poetry, could jump from subject to subject or take flight. Of how the categories were optional, though it would take me another decade to find my way through their walls.

I wanted urgency, intensity, excess and extremes, prose and narrative bursting against the confines. Except when I wanted reassurances. I found both. I lived so deeply in books that I felt unanchored and adrift, not particularly part of my own time and place, always with one foot or more in other places, medieval or imaginary or Edwardian. I had in that floating world a sense that I might wake up or otherwise find myself in one of those other times and places.

My literary aunt who had given me Nightwood had given me Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird when I was twelve or thirteen, far too young to read about the sexual brutality and genocidal violence of the Polish peasantry as seen by a dark-haired, dark-eyed Jewish child wandering through their world, barely eluding death. It took hold of me, and so did Anne Frank’s diary and other Holocaust literature. One of my recurrent anxious daydreams in my childhood and adolescence was whether I with my fair hair and skin might have been able to pass as a gentile and thereby escape the extermination that had taken all the members of my father’s family who had stayed behind. It was another kind of annihilation that haunted me.

But I also had a vague sense that I might find myself somehow in a less pointedly vicious time and place, where what I had learned from books would at least partially equip me to get by. That I might wander into Georgian England or medieval France or the nineteenth-century West or some of the other places in which I had immersed myself, and some sense of this, ridiculous though it sounds, made me hesitate to cut my long hair, and I found encouragement in archaic ideas of beauty to which I thought I measured up more than I did to modern ones. In those days, it didn’t seem impossible that someday someone else would be in the mirror in the morning, or the world around it would be another world. “I is another” was a phrase of Arthur Rimbaud’s that I also kept handy.

Of course what I had learned from books and from life had hardly equipped me well enough to fit into the time and place I actually lived in. Long after this anxious daydream had passed by, I lived a comic version of it when I read Wordsworth’s book-length autobiographical poem The Prelude twice in order to write a chapter of my book on walking. I was so immersed in his language—unhurried graciousness, elaborate and sometimes inverted syntax, circumlocutory ways of saying things—that my casual remarks to strangers and check-out clerks were met with baffled looks.

There’s a benefit to being untethered from your own time. I think I gained a sense of how differently constituted the idea of being human, the purpose of life, the expectations and desires had been even a generation or two ago, let alone half a millennium before, of how the definitions metamorphosed, and how that meant you could step outside the assumptions of your time, or at least wear them lightly, and at least in theory not let them punish you. That being human can mean many things, in other words. At thirteen, I had read C. S. Lewis’s The Allegory of Love, which describes the social construction, in twelfth-century France, of what would become our ideas of romantic love. That these expectations were the result of a particular time and place gave me a sense of liberation, like someone opening the windows in a stuffy room.

Despite that Lewis book, I soaked up novels’ impossibly dramatic notions of love and romance and their myths of completion and ending. And I got something most women got, an experience of staring at women across a distance or being in worlds in which they barely existed, from Moby-Dick to Lord of the Rings. Being so often required to be someone