Recollections of My Nonexistence A Memoir - Rebecca Solnit Page 0,82

of bones, cartilage, tendons and other connective tissues. Collagen binds our wounds, but that binding is replaced continually throughout our lives. Thus in advanced scurvy, old wounds long thought healed will magically, painfully reappear.”

You can read that as an insistence that we never get over anything, though it might make more sense as a reminder that though damage is not necessarily permanent, neither is repair. What is won or changed or fixed has to be maintained and protected or it can be lost. What goes forward can go backward. Efficiency says that grief should follow a road map and things should be gotten over and that then there should be that word that applies to wounds and minds both: closure. But time and pain are a more fluid, unpredictable business, expanding and contracting, closing and opening and changing.

You move toward or away from or around something that harmed you, or something or someone brings you back; that slippage in time, as though the stairs you exit on have become a waterfall, is the disorderliness of trauma and of trauma’s sense of time. But sometimes you revisit the past, as I have in this book, to map the distance covered. There is closure and reopening and sometimes something reopens because you can bring something new to it, repair it in a new way, by understanding it a new way. Sometimes the meaning of the beginning of the story has changed as new chapters are added.

Damage begets a different destiny than one you might have had otherwise, but it does not preclude having a life or making things that matter. Sometimes it’s not despite but because of something terrible that you become who you are meant to be and set to the work you’re meant to do. I heard “meant to be” not as though there was no damage but that it had not prevented me from doing what I was here to do. And some of my work was about that damage as it applied to so many of us. I’ve often wondered what people whose work is for justice and rights would’ve been in a world without the injustices, the lack of rights. Who would Martin Luther King Jr. have been in a nonracist society, Rachel Carson in an unpoisoned America? Unless you imagine them in a world without pain and harm, they might have found other wounds to try to heal. Paradise is often described as a place with nothing to do, nothing required of its inhabitants. I don’t desire a paradise that demands nothing of us, and I see paradise as not a destination to arrive in, but a pole star by which to navigate.

The fortune-teller was a woman, and perhaps as women often do, as I often do, she only wanted to give me something to make me feel good, to make that microscopic utopia that is a moment of kindness, though even that a stranger wanted to give me a gift signifies. A few years ago, a man ran after me at the farmers’ market and handed me a little hexagonal jar of honey from his stand; he had recognized me, though I’d never seen him before. To become a person that, occasionally, strangers want to reward because they felt I’ve given them something is an amazement. Once a young woman passing by an outdoor booth where I was signing books burst into a spontaneous jig at the sight of me, and that might be the pinnacle of my career, to be somehow an occasion for someone else’s exuberance. We’d never set eyes on each other before, but that’s the work that books do, reaching out further than their writers.

There’s another story about wounds and repair that has captured a lot of imaginations in recent years. It’s about the Japanese art of kintsugi, which literally means golden repair. It’s a method of mending broken ceramic vessels with a bond made of powdered gold mixed with lacquer. The result turns the breaks into veins and channels of gold, emphasizing rather than hiding that the vessel has been broken and making it precious in another way than it was before. It’s a way to accept that things will never be what they were but that they can become something else with a different kind of beauty and value. They are exquisite objects, these cups and bowls with their channels of gold like magical scars, like oracular patterns, road maps, hieroglyphs. They make me love gold.

My friend Roshi Joan Halifax, a feminist Buddhist leader, an anthropologist, and a constant traveler, has on several visits to Japan held these repaired vessels in her hands, and a few years ago, she explored them as a metaphor: “I am not suggesting that we should seek brokenness as a way of gaining strength, although some cultures do pursue crisis in their rites of passage as a way to strengthen character and open the heart,” she wrote. “Rather, I am proposing that the wounds and harms that arise from falling over the edge into moral suffering can . . . be the means for the ‘golden repair,’ for developing a greater capacity to stand firm in our integrity without being swayed by the wind.” And then my friend who had given me the desk sent me a letter to approve what I’d written about her that ended with a line from William Stafford: “I have woven a parachute out of everything broken.”

People aren’t really meant to be anything, because we’re not made; we’re born, with some innate tendencies, and thereafter molded, thwarted, scalded, encouraged by events and encounters. Despite everything suggests the forces that try to stop a person or change her nature and purpose, and who you were meant to be suggests that those forces did not altogether succeed. It was a lovely fortune to be handed by a stranger, and I took it, and with it the sense that who I was meant to be was a breaker of some stories and a maker of others, a tracer of the cracks and sometimes a repairwoman, and sometimes a porter or even a vessel for the most precious cargo you can carry, the stories waiting to be told, and the stories that set us free.