Recollections of My Nonexistence A Memoir - Rebecca Solnit Page 0,43

generations before me—hunger, genocide, poverty, the brutalities of emigration, discrimination, and misogyny—still has consequences two generations after me. I’ve written my parents’ obituaries on that little desk from the woman who didn’t die and lived in the peace that came after they were gone. I’m uninterested in the brutalities of childhood in part because that species has been so dwelt upon while some of the brutalities that come after have not.

Threads are usually the wrong metaphor for things that branch and fork and lead in many directions, but maybe the way many fibers are twisted into a thread means that following a thread should mean unraveling it or recognizing the individual strands. For example, after graduate school, I got hired by a little art magazine as an editorial assistant and I quickly became the assistant editor, by title, and more or less the managing editor in terms of what I actually did. I learned a lot of things there, from the rules of copyediting to how to direct a staff older than me to how to put together a publication to quite a lot about contemporary art, particularly California art. I wrote obituaries, reviews, some features, and a few investigative reports, and endless bits of filler, and with the magazine’s owner coedited the dozen or so often abysmally written pieces we received each Monday until they were ready to send to the printer on Thursday afternoons. It was an all-woman office in downtown Oakland I worked at for three and a half years after I graduated from Berkeley, and it was a haven of calm and routine, and a place where even though the magazine was not a great magazine I learned great things.

I am endlessly thankful that my path to writing detoured through visual art. It was an arena in which artists were asking questions that went down to the very foundations and reached in all directions. Art could be almost anything, which meant that every premise was open to question, every problem to exploration, every situation to intervention, and I came to understand visual art as a kind of philosophical inquiry by other means. I learned from paying attention to the work of some artists, from conversations with others, and from collaborations with yet others, and from wandering through the texts often then referenced in the art world, the French philosophers and feminists, the postmodernists, and other dense things from which useful ideas could be gathered.

When I was a couple of years out of graduate school, still working at the magazine, I went to a slide talk by the photographer Linda Connor about landscape and gender. She had collected a lot of amusing images of men pissing and teeing off golf balls from high places, and she postulated, with this evidence and a lot of more serious contemporary photography, that men photographed space, but women photographed place. It was a funny, tough, insightful talk about how we represent place and what our place is supposed to be. I’m not sure either of us would now agree with the neatness of categories she sorted the world into then, but she stood there as someone with a key to a door I wanted to unlock and pass through.

I cooked up a couple of assignments to write about her so I could learn more. She was sixteen years older than me, in her prime, with a great halo of curly hair and a big circle of friends, a house full of curios and objects she’d picked up around the world, and nonchalance about cooking dinner for forty at a time or carrying through deserts and mountains her enormous view camera that made eight-by-ten-inch negatives. Her black-and-white prints were made on printing-out paper, an archaic light-sensitive—but not too sensitive—paper she could just lay under the negatives and leave out for hours to develop in the sun of her back garden, in what felt as domestic an act as hanging out the laundry.

She was traveling while I was on deadline to write about her, so I asked if I could talk to her while coming along on her drive to New Mexico. It was a tutorial in how to go on a road trip, and she was a brilliant guide to diners, campsites, motels, to when to detour and when to cover distance. We pulled into the grand old pile that is the La Fonda Hotel in downtown