Posing a challenge
Rebecca Solnit is a visionary — a visionary who helps us see our world with greater clarity.
Her new essay collection, “The Mother of All Questions,” completes a trilogy with her tours de force “Hope in the Dark” and “Men Explain Things to Me,” and is, in many ways, a synthesis of the two, a sort of “Hope Even When Men Continue to Explain Things to Me in the Dark” — a continuing exploration of patriarchy and feminism, a continuing inquiry into the power of storytelling and deep engagement.
While “The Mother of All Questions” does touch on the question of whether to have children, as the title implies (a question Solnit now answers in public with “Would you ask a man that?”), the book also poses a wider range of queries. The question at its very heart seems to be: How can we break through limiting narratives about gender and race and power — narratives that silence and harm us in so many ways — and create a more just, empathetic and joyful world?
Solnit writes, “One of my goals in life is to become truly rabbinical, to be able to answer closed questions with open questions,” and she achieves that here, exploring everything from online feminist activism to the literary canon to the movie “Giant” with Talmudic rigor and curiosity, not to mention great doses of humor. Perhaps we should call her Reb Solnit.
In one of her essays, Solnit argues for a way of being that is “deft and supple and imaginative or maybe just fully awake in how we imagine and describe the world and our experiences of it,” for speech that “conduct(s) the orchestra of words into something precise and maybe even beautiful.” How lucky we are that she gives us just that.