Rebecca Solnit doesn`t simply celebrate open-heartedness, she offers a joyful alternative to gloom, doom and despair at the state of the world, discarding, as she says, “the crippling assumptions that keep many from being a voice in the world.” What the book definitely isn`t, is hippy-dippy: all you need is love, it`ll all be fine, head in the sand, fingers in the ears la-la-la.
Anyone who has ever doubted the point of direct action, of marching in the streets, of non-violent protest, who has thought or said or heard other people say “it won`t make any difference” will find in this book all the answers they might need to counteract the temptation to give up - to be in her words “beautiful losers or at least virtuous ones.”
She redefines notions of revolution that replace “bad” with “good”, instead describing a process which rejects “the static utopia in favour of the improvisational journey”. By the same token “hope” then becomes more a way of approaching the world, not an inane, vapid optimism, but an acknowledgement of “wild possibilities”, a form of trust in the unknown. Which means the “dark” is not something to be feared but something to be embraced, a future we cannot know but which is ours to create - a darkness “as much of the womb as the grave”.
It helps to remember that, as Solnit says in one of her other books*, new ideas which are initially dismissed as extreme or unrealistic, often end up as “what everyone ….. thought they had always thought, because it`s convenient to ignore that they……...had thought something completely different, something that now looks like discrimination or cluelessness.”
Hope in the Dark is full of examples where the smallest act has helped new ideas take root, often in unexpected or unanticipated ways. It is a paeaon to the power of imagination, a joyful celebration of the possible and the conceivable. But be warned, it could inspire you to get involved in all sorts of mischief: "hope is not like a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky....Hope is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency."
*Call Them By Their True Names
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