Long-Distance Relationships
Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby
Granta, 272pp, £16.99, ISBN 9781847085115
reviewed by David Anderson
Early on in Rebecca Solnit’s The Faraway Nearby a discussion of Alzeimer's disease, which runs through the book, is introduced. As I sat reading this in the back garden of a café on Walworth road, my attention was frequently arrested by the faltering exchanges of three women sitting across from me, and a curious overlap took place. I couldn’t help but notice that these other customers must be related — they were neatly divided into generations. As Solnit’s description of her mother’s slow descent into forgetfulness continued, it was punctuated by the voice of the middle-aged woman, who seemed dedicated to keeping the conversation going at all costs. Occasionally the older lady would interject, while the youngest did little apart from, at one point, yawning luxuriously. And though this might have been received as indifference, or effrontery, the act was instantly transformed into a clearly valued discussion on the subject of yawning, a refreshing departure from the conventional topics of supermarket points cards, the mugginess of the weather and the difficulties of parking one's car.
The younger two women obviously struggled to find common ground with their older relation. But why? Are not the most interesting points of discussion precisely those that are roughly the same from one generation to the next? Love, betrayal, fear, loneliness, joy — why do the wandering of a neighbour’s cat or the slow growth of tomatoes shoulder aside these perennial topics? It was as if these women were occupying utterly different spaces, miles from one another, rather than sandwiched around a side-table in a grimy café in South East London.
The Faraway Nearby, a meditation on art and writing, focuses on exactly this problematic process of connecting with others, of being a consciousness out there amid all the other consciousnesses. 'The self ... is a creation,' Solnit declares, 'the principal work of your life, the crafting of which makes everyone an artist.' Though Solnit is a prolific writer on art, she is better known as an environmental campaigner: her most successful book to date, Wanderlust, drew these two poles together in a general history of walking, lacing up literature, landscape and polemic. The Faraway Nearby sticks with this theme, and shares its predecessor's curious affectation of printing a continuous banner of text along the bottom of each page, but the book as a whole functions rather differently. It develops the hybrid form of essayistic memoir; it is a quiet exposition of the mutual languages of distance, both temporal and physical.
The title itself comes from the way Georgia O'Keefe signed her letters – 'from the faraway nearby.' This becomes the basis of Solnit's argument that stories act as threads of empathic understanding, wrapping the world like a pen-and-ink cobweb. They are, she insists, at the root of all human relation. 'Empathy means you travel out of yourself a little or expand,' she writes, and though the word's Greek derivation means that it is only a coincidence that ‘empathy is built from a homonym for the Old English path, as in a trail', the coincidence is strong enough to bear the weight of Solnit’s extractions.
The connectedness under discussion often relies on contingency, and this book is in many ways a manifesto for seizing opportunities, expected or otherwise. Solnit reflects on an invitation to join a rafting party on the Grand Canyon, and the decision to say 'yes' rather than to withdraw (even though it led to nothing) 'was a huge landmark in my life, a dividing point.' Partly an escape from 'some internalized version of my mother,' it was mostly a turn towards letting the world in. It is in this way that, later, her books became doors – not unlike the wardrobe leading to Narnia – that bring about such far-flung engagements as a residency at Reykjavik's Library of Water, wrought via an encounter at an Olafur Eliasson exhibition.
As she writes about her development from 'the child I once was [who] read constantly and hardly spoke', the process of writing is described as
‘an intimacy with the faraway and distance from the near at hand. Like digging a hole to China and actually coming out the other side, the depth of that solitude of reading and then writing took me all the way through to connect with people again in an unexpected way.’
Solnit's figuration of the human coming-into-being is one that involves a creative restructuring of threads and stories, and her obvious affection for fairy-tales recalls the sketch 'Where the stork brings babies from' in Adorno's Minima Moralia:
'for every person there is an original in a fairy-tale, one need only look long enough.' Solnit refers to Snow White in this regard – she uses the figure of the mirror to develop her mother's relation to her, an only daughter amidst three sons.
Her trip to Iceland — undertaken as an escape from her mother's ever-greater amnesia — is rendered as both success and failure, for distance doesn’t work like she expects it to. Here I was reminded of the repeated line in Pound's cantos: 'How is it far if you think about it?' Somehow, real space collapses in on itself as the mind wanders back and forth. The Faraway Nearby plays this up through the gentle arc of its chapter titles, typographically laid out in a bow-shape on the contents page, enclosing a reflection around 'Knot' in the middle. This 'Knot' coincides with Solnit's recollection of going under the knife for cancer surgery, which makes the chapter titles on either side ('Wound' and 'Unwound') read in a moving double sense.
Within this fluctuating space of memory and forgetting, the artwork acts as a time capsule: the involvement of the Polar regions, and a luminous excursion into the background of Frankenstein precipitates a consideration of seasonality, as well as linguistic overlaps like 'freeze-frame' and 'glacial' progress. The story of an explorer trapped in the ice, revealed intact years later, recalls the first story of WG Sebald's The Emigrants, and Solnit finds herself in similar territory to the Anglo-German writer's discursive, wandering erudition. In what other stylistic context could Wile E. Coyote and the Tang dynasty artist Wu Daozi appear on the same page?
Such an arrangement also indicates that the book should not be taken as a collection of discrete essays, but as a collective composition. Themes and images recur, and when we return to the apricots of the first page (which arrived fresh from her mother's tree at around the same time the Alzeimer's grew serious), the process of preserving them is thought of as an art of freezing the moment. Making jam is presented (humanely and absurdly) as a dialectical synthesis between 'a historian's urges and a cook's capacities', providing space for the apricots to be gradually re-read as a hook on which events have been hung, the metaphor that made everything cohere, as well as simply a baffling mountain of fruit. Years later,
‘The two jars before me are like stories written down; they preserve something that might otherwise vanish. Some stories are best let go, but the process of writing down and giving stories away fixes a story in its particulars, like the apricots fixed in their sweet syrup, and the tale no longer belongs to the writer but to the readers. And what is left out is left out forever.’
What is left out is, in fact, continuously filled in by a Barthesian jouissance of reading and connecting tales together in big tangled knots. This is a kind of journey in itself, one that might be begun not only by reading a sentence, but by writing a book, going for a drive or looking at some fruit. It is all about threads: the femininity of weaving, of 'spinster' long before it became pejorative; being sewn up on an operating table like some garment; Scherezade's nights; HC Andersen's heroine twining nettles into jackets; a Burmese monk's flowing red robes or the sutra between two palm leaves. And for Solnit, the book or artwork is the knot that must first be tied to be constantly reworked:
‘What if we only wanted openings, the immortality of the unfinished, the uncut thread, the incomplete, the open door, the open sea? What if we liked the brothers to be swans and the nettles not yet woven into shirts, the straw better than the gold, the quest more than the holy grail?’
In the end, weaving is the aptest metaphor for the book itself, which is as intricately spun as any of its subjects. Tracing the warp and weft of such a work, written with a moving flatness and vagrant wisdom, is a pleasure that frequently carries an almost tactile sensation, so brightly does it sparkle.
The younger two women obviously struggled to find common ground with their older relation. But why? Are not the most interesting points of discussion precisely those that are roughly the same from one generation to the next? Love, betrayal, fear, loneliness, joy — why do the wandering of a neighbour’s cat or the slow growth of tomatoes shoulder aside these perennial topics? It was as if these women were occupying utterly different spaces, miles from one another, rather than sandwiched around a side-table in a grimy café in South East London.
The Faraway Nearby, a meditation on art and writing, focuses on exactly this problematic process of connecting with others, of being a consciousness out there amid all the other consciousnesses. 'The self ... is a creation,' Solnit declares, 'the principal work of your life, the crafting of which makes everyone an artist.' Though Solnit is a prolific writer on art, she is better known as an environmental campaigner: her most successful book to date, Wanderlust, drew these two poles together in a general history of walking, lacing up literature, landscape and polemic. The Faraway Nearby sticks with this theme, and shares its predecessor's curious affectation of printing a continuous banner of text along the bottom of each page, but the book as a whole functions rather differently. It develops the hybrid form of essayistic memoir; it is a quiet exposition of the mutual languages of distance, both temporal and physical.
The title itself comes from the way Georgia O'Keefe signed her letters – 'from the faraway nearby.' This becomes the basis of Solnit's argument that stories act as threads of empathic understanding, wrapping the world like a pen-and-ink cobweb. They are, she insists, at the root of all human relation. 'Empathy means you travel out of yourself a little or expand,' she writes, and though the word's Greek derivation means that it is only a coincidence that ‘empathy is built from a homonym for the Old English path, as in a trail', the coincidence is strong enough to bear the weight of Solnit’s extractions.
The connectedness under discussion often relies on contingency, and this book is in many ways a manifesto for seizing opportunities, expected or otherwise. Solnit reflects on an invitation to join a rafting party on the Grand Canyon, and the decision to say 'yes' rather than to withdraw (even though it led to nothing) 'was a huge landmark in my life, a dividing point.' Partly an escape from 'some internalized version of my mother,' it was mostly a turn towards letting the world in. It is in this way that, later, her books became doors – not unlike the wardrobe leading to Narnia – that bring about such far-flung engagements as a residency at Reykjavik's Library of Water, wrought via an encounter at an Olafur Eliasson exhibition.
As she writes about her development from 'the child I once was [who] read constantly and hardly spoke', the process of writing is described as
‘an intimacy with the faraway and distance from the near at hand. Like digging a hole to China and actually coming out the other side, the depth of that solitude of reading and then writing took me all the way through to connect with people again in an unexpected way.’
Solnit's figuration of the human coming-into-being is one that involves a creative restructuring of threads and stories, and her obvious affection for fairy-tales recalls the sketch 'Where the stork brings babies from' in Adorno's Minima Moralia:
'for every person there is an original in a fairy-tale, one need only look long enough.' Solnit refers to Snow White in this regard – she uses the figure of the mirror to develop her mother's relation to her, an only daughter amidst three sons.
Her trip to Iceland — undertaken as an escape from her mother's ever-greater amnesia — is rendered as both success and failure, for distance doesn’t work like she expects it to. Here I was reminded of the repeated line in Pound's cantos: 'How is it far if you think about it?' Somehow, real space collapses in on itself as the mind wanders back and forth. The Faraway Nearby plays this up through the gentle arc of its chapter titles, typographically laid out in a bow-shape on the contents page, enclosing a reflection around 'Knot' in the middle. This 'Knot' coincides with Solnit's recollection of going under the knife for cancer surgery, which makes the chapter titles on either side ('Wound' and 'Unwound') read in a moving double sense.
Within this fluctuating space of memory and forgetting, the artwork acts as a time capsule: the involvement of the Polar regions, and a luminous excursion into the background of Frankenstein precipitates a consideration of seasonality, as well as linguistic overlaps like 'freeze-frame' and 'glacial' progress. The story of an explorer trapped in the ice, revealed intact years later, recalls the first story of WG Sebald's The Emigrants, and Solnit finds herself in similar territory to the Anglo-German writer's discursive, wandering erudition. In what other stylistic context could Wile E. Coyote and the Tang dynasty artist Wu Daozi appear on the same page?
Such an arrangement also indicates that the book should not be taken as a collection of discrete essays, but as a collective composition. Themes and images recur, and when we return to the apricots of the first page (which arrived fresh from her mother's tree at around the same time the Alzeimer's grew serious), the process of preserving them is thought of as an art of freezing the moment. Making jam is presented (humanely and absurdly) as a dialectical synthesis between 'a historian's urges and a cook's capacities', providing space for the apricots to be gradually re-read as a hook on which events have been hung, the metaphor that made everything cohere, as well as simply a baffling mountain of fruit. Years later,
‘The two jars before me are like stories written down; they preserve something that might otherwise vanish. Some stories are best let go, but the process of writing down and giving stories away fixes a story in its particulars, like the apricots fixed in their sweet syrup, and the tale no longer belongs to the writer but to the readers. And what is left out is left out forever.’
What is left out is, in fact, continuously filled in by a Barthesian jouissance of reading and connecting tales together in big tangled knots. This is a kind of journey in itself, one that might be begun not only by reading a sentence, but by writing a book, going for a drive or looking at some fruit. It is all about threads: the femininity of weaving, of 'spinster' long before it became pejorative; being sewn up on an operating table like some garment; Scherezade's nights; HC Andersen's heroine twining nettles into jackets; a Burmese monk's flowing red robes or the sutra between two palm leaves. And for Solnit, the book or artwork is the knot that must first be tied to be constantly reworked:
‘What if we only wanted openings, the immortality of the unfinished, the uncut thread, the incomplete, the open door, the open sea? What if we liked the brothers to be swans and the nettles not yet woven into shirts, the straw better than the gold, the quest more than the holy grail?’
In the end, weaving is the aptest metaphor for the book itself, which is as intricately spun as any of its subjects. Tracing the warp and weft of such a work, written with a moving flatness and vagrant wisdom, is a pleasure that frequently carries an almost tactile sensation, so brightly does it sparkle.