Is it possible to make peace with uncertainty? Rebecca Solnit hopes so, and she’s pleading with us to embrace it. In her latest bouquet of essays from Haymarket Books, No Straight Road Takes You There: Essays for Uneven Terrain, the author elegantly argues that human yearning for assurance is what gets in the way of true progress. Belief in absolutes—whether those absolutes be optimism or an assurance that we’re doomed—is an obstacle to humanistic growth and community. Like a balletic divertissement, each essay in No Straight Road Takes You There is a piquant exploration of human capability.
Solnit’s 20 essays are separated into three thematic movements, “Visions,” “Revisions,” and “More Visions,” and these sections explore both the idea of a path that’s not always clear and “knowing we don’t know” as “an important form of knowledge.” As the author notes, many of these pieces were written in response to landmark cultural events, natural disasters, or pandemic life. In each of them, the author investigates the benefits of the meander, the ramble, and the stroll—the kind of living that prioritizes awareness and the ability to revel in, and hopefully survive, the journey.
As she writes in “In Praise of the Meander,” we do ourselves a disservice by believing that our political or cultural struggles will be solved by a hero taking one direct path. Life is best lived and problems are best solved in the gray areas and by people working together, she suggests. There’s “another kind of depth achieved by moving slow, seeing close-up, lingering, living in detail. You’re not trying to get somewhere else but to know better where you are.” Sometimes, “indirect consequences [matter] as much or more than the original goal.” This is the case Solnit is making in each piece and the belief behind the book’s title: that progressive ideals and meaningful existence are found through meditative awareness and acceptance of slow, indirect routes, the possibility that change might not happen exactly as planned. “I find beauty in complexity,” she says, returning many times to a Keatsian idea of negative capability. It’s our irritable desire for certitudes that undermines us; we’d do better to let go of our desire for immediate solutions.
But don’t be fooled—Solnit isn’t asserting something banal about how we can live blissfully or enjoy our lives more fully. The beauty and the fortitude expressed in these essays come from the author’s belief that life’s tougher battles—those that are set into motion by broken systems like capitalism, colonialism, and political corruption—are also best solved by our ability to believe that we can and must struggle. In the essay “A Truce with the Trees,” which explores the origin and construction of an ancient violin, she writes that the “past tells many stories and always points to one story—that change is constant, for the better, for the worse.” An acute awareness of the past is the other necessary component of progress. To ignore the past is to ignore the idea that change is certain—there is no way to hold on to some ideal or to return to it, and the ideal probably never existed anyway. To advance, we need to understand our history and how the subtle actions of all humans echo across time. Embracing the status quo out of either fear or frustration, “a false certainty that excuses inaction,” as Solnit describes it, is shortsighted and ignorant of our privilege.
The author argues that ours needs to also be a kind of noticing that looks both backward and forward. While “memory is a power,” so too is our ability to look ahead and believe in things yet unseen.
We must have landmarks and dreams ahead of us to orient ourselves, to remember that it has been different and could be different. We must have a vision of what our toil is for and how we will know when we get there.
I fear something I often see in my own amnesiac country, the acceptance of what should be unacceptable, the mistaking for inevitable or eternal those destructive things that are neither.
That is, I fear forgetting.
To refuse possibility—to believe either that things are good enough or that they’re hopeless—is a hindrance. The author posits that tolerance of uncertainty while working toward a goal is essential. It’s the only way we’re going to reverse climate change or evoke greater income equality and a secure democracy. In “On Letting Go of Certainty in a Story That Never Ends,” Solnit argues that even our entertainment has become cut-and-dried, certain, and plain. “Nearly all of us would like to be at the end of the story,” she writes, “because to live in the middle of it is to live in suspense and uncertainty about what will happen.” If we want to pursue human betterment, healing, and the establishment of community, we have to tolerate not knowing how things will change, or when. We have to want to know all of the story.
“You’re not trying to get somewhere else,” she writes, “but to know better where you are.” Solnit is asking us to change the world, but the first step is small. We just have to pay attention.•
NO STRAIGHT ROAD TAKES YOU THERE: ESSAYS FOR UNEVEN TERRAIN, BY REBECCA SOLNIT
Heather Scott Partington is a writer, teacher, and book critic. She is a regular contributor to Alta Journal and a board member of the National Book Critics Circle, where she serves as fiction chair. Her writing has appeared in publications such as the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle. She lives in Elk Grove, California.
