Recollections of My Nonexistence A Memoir - Rebecca Solnit Page 0,77

of art that had an impact in their time sometimes look dated or obvious because what was fresh and even insurrectionary about them has become the ordinary way things are, how we edit films or see history or nature or sexuality or understand rights and their violations. Thus the vision of one or of a few becomes the perspective of many. They have been rendered obsolete by their success—which makes the relevance of even much nineteenth-century feminist writing a grim reminder that though we’ve come far, it’s not far enough.

I’ve sometimes thought immortality is a desert idea, from the monotheistic fanaticisms of the desert, where a scar or a treasure can last for thousands of years, where some Bedouin shepherds can take the Dead Sea Scrolls out of a jar in a cave about twenty-two hundred years after they were put there—including the Book of Isaiah reminding us that “all flesh is grass.” In humid places everything decays, and much decays back into the soil, and that soil nurtures new life, and perhaps the best thing creative work can do is to compost into the soil so that, unremembered, it becomes the food of a new era, or rather, devoured, digested, the very consciousness of that era. Marble lasts, but soil feeds.

My life has spanned a revolution against the old authoritarianisms. In response to the late 1950s and early 1960s crises of nuclear fallout and pesticides, ordinary people questioned the authority of the scientists in service of the military and the chemical companies, and then the nascent environmental movement asked broader questions about anthropocentrism, capitalism, consumerism, and ideas of progress and the domination of nature. Racial justice movements questioned the centrality of whiteness, gay and lesbian liberation movements questioned the centrality of heterosexuality, and feminism questioned patriarchy (and when we were lucky, these boulevards intersected). Though they were more than questions; they were demands for change and for the redistribution of power and value.

Change is the measure of time, and these movements were often regarded as having failed to realize short-term or specific goals, but in the long term they often changed the very premises by which decisions were made and facts were interpreted, and how people imagined themselves, each other, their possibilities, their rights, and society. And who decided, who interpreted, what was visible and audible, whose voice and vision mattered.

Feminism was in a lull in 2008, when I wrote that essay. Many things progress the way feminism has in recent years, with an unpredictable pattern of gradual change, or stagnation, or regression, punctuated by sudden crises in which the situation and collective imagination change rapidly. For feminism these eruptions have often been around a dramatic event in the news. In 2012 campus antirape activists in the USA were becoming more visible and audible and effective, and then two crimes got a lot of media coverage—the Steubenville, Ohio, gang sexual assault on an incapacitated sixteen-year-old in August and the New Delhi rape-disembowelment-murder of Jhoti Singh on a public bus that December—and something changed.

Or something had already changed, because these were ordinary horrible stories that got an extraordinary amount of coverage, perhaps because who decides what is news and from whose perspective it will be told had already changed. For what seemed to me the first time, these stories were presented as emblematic of an epidemic rather than, as such crimes almost always had been before, as isolated anomalous incidents that didn’t raise questions about how common such violence is and how it affects women in general. When the long tolerated is suddenly seen as intolerable, someone has become audible and someone else has begun listening for the first time.

At the beginning of 2013 a dam broke. Behind it were millions of women’s stories about sexual violence, violence made possible by their inaudibility and lack of credibility and the inconsequentiality of their stories. Torrents of stories poured forth. In response to the misogyny-driven Isla Vista massacre of 2014 by a young man who hated women and wanted to punish them for not delivering the sex he thought he was entitled to. In response to a sports star beating his fiancée, in response to women being discredited and attacked for speaking up about a celebrity who’d assaulted them. In response to the 2017 revelations about sexual abuse first in the film industry and then in every industry from the restaurant business to the