Recollections of My Nonexistence A Memoir - Rebecca Solnit Page 0,81

were good at being in the here and now, at being out in public and knowing where they were and celebrating in the streets and connecting with the people around them and at remembering the past that shaped this present. They had a talent for valuing other things more than productivity and efficiency, the miserable virtues that hustle people past each other and everyday attentiveness and pleasure.

That unhurriedness might be why a woman was confident she could hold up the long line to read my palm; I knew New Orleanians could take the delay in stride, and I let her take charge of my hand and override my own sense of obligation to keep things moving. I don’t believe in palmistry or any other form of divination, but I believe in stories that come by any means, and in capacities strangers have to be messengers and mirrors in which you see new possibilities. Her parting words as she released my hand were, “Despite everything, you are who you were meant to be,” and I kept them like a talisman.

Despite everything, she said, which I heard as the obstacles and injuries ordinary in billions of lives. I know how profoundly things have changed for the better, and how many people are nevertheless not who they were meant to be because the distorting mirror of gender gives them damaged senses of self, or because their rights and capacities or even conditions of survival are undermined. I cannot imagine a wholly undamaged human being or that that’s a useful thing to imagine, though I can readily imagine that some of the kinds of damage inflicted on my gender can be reduced and delegitimized. I also think the process is under way, and that even being told that you deserve to be safe and free and equal can fortify you. If I’m both feminist and hopeful it’s because I know how profoundly women’s rights and status have changed, in many ways, in many places, since my birth.

Sylvia Plath at nineteen had mourned that “I want to talk to everybody I can as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night” but she felt unable to because of her gender. I was born thirty years later and I and we have been more fortunate. I had roamed the West, slept in mountain meadows, in deserts, at the bottoms of canyons, on the banks of great rivers in the Southwest and the Arctic, driven vast distances alone, wandered many cities and some rural places at night, had organized with rebels, had blockaded streets, met heroes, written books, encouraged activists, had the friendships and conversations I yearned for when I was younger, had occasionally stood up for what I believed in, had stuck around long enough to see the arc of change across time in ways that were terrifying when it came to climate change and sometimes exhilarating when it came to cultural politics. Also it seems safe to say I’m damaged and a member of a society that damages us all and damages women in particular ways.

There are so many stories that can be told about damage. I ran across one in an essay on photographs of environmental destruction recently. The photographs showed the Carlin Trend, the belt of microscopic gold that runs through the Western Shoshone lands, including Carrie and Mary Dann’s ranchlands, and that would have made Nevada, had it been an independent nation, the fourth or fifth biggest gold-producing country on earth. I’d visited the mines myself, enormous pits that could swallow cities, wounds out of which the water was pumped so that the gigantic equipment could keep going deeper, as whole mountains were pulverized and other heavy metals released, and cyanide-laced water poured through the dust to leach out the gold so that foreign corporations could reap a profit and people far away could ornament their bodies. The precious water of the desert was squandered, poisoned, then dumped into man-made lakes that killed the birds who landed in them. Knowing those mines made me hate gold.

The photographs came with an essay quoting another writer who’d worked for eight seasons in Antarctica. Jason C. Anthony wrote about the nutritional deficiencies common among sailors and polar explorers in the past and of their cause: “Without vitamin C, we cannot produce collagen, an essential component