Hope in a Time of Darkness

An interview with author Rebecca Solnit.

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Rebecca Solnit distinguishes between optimism and hope.

“I use the term ‘hope’ because it navigates a way forward between the false certainties of optimism and of pessimism, and the complacency or passivity that goes with both,” the consistently ingenious writer and essayist explained in her 2017 essay, “Protest and Persist.” “Optimism assumes that all will go well without our effort; pessimism assumes it’s all irredeemable; both let us stay home and do nothing. Hope for me has meant a sense that the future is unpredictable, and that we don’t actually know what will happen, but know we may be able to write it ourselves.”

Orwell suggested some of what it looks like to remain committed to the work without getting embittered by it, without losing your sense of what you were for.

Solnit is the author of more than twenty books, on topics ranging from protest to politics, feminism to the environment, art, and walking. Her latest, released last fall by Viking (see review in The Progressive), is Orwell’s Roses, which begins as an exploration of the efforts of another great essayist, George Orwell, to cultivate roses but blossoms into a consideration of the demand for bread and roses that has historically animated the visionary left. While Orwell’s name is frequently associated with the miserable work of revealing and challenging authoritarianism, he was also, like any serious gardener, hopeful. Here’s some of our recent discussion about the book and about hope in a time of darkness.

Q: The remarkable thing about Orwell’s Roses is how it transforms our impression of George Orwell by examining his penchant for planting rose bushes. By focusing on this very human, and I dare say very hopeful, side of him, you give a much deeper sense of the man and his writing. You also give us a deeper sense of how people who are focused on vital issues—war and peace, poverty and injustice, democracy and totalitarianism—sustain and nurture themselves.

Rebecca Solnit: I’d never really thought about what it meant that our great prophet of totalitarianism, the man famous for facing unpleasant facts, was planting roses. I’d been thinking for years of writing a book looking for a great encounter, but I had thought it might be between two people or two groups or something, not between a man and a rose bush.

Writing this book let me talk about all these things I wanted to talk about: how we lead our lives, about what it looks like to lead a sustainable life. But it was really after I met the rose bushes and I started reading Orwell’s domestic diaries and letters that I realized that I, like most people, had a misapprehension of him as this very grim, pessimistic figure, when he actually took immense pleasure in a lot of everyday things, and that’s what kept him going.

Orwell is fun because nobody can dismiss him as anything other than a deeply committed person who had major impact and major insight. So it felt like, well, if Orwell can be a great anti-fascist who also really loves flowers, then you can make the argument about [the historic radical plea for] bread and roses.

We all know what bread is, and food, clothing, and shelter; the bodily necessities can be more or less homogenized and administered from above. But “roses” was this radical cry in a way for individualism, for private life, for freedom of choice because my roses and your roses won’t be the same roses, you know?

It’s saying that people are subtle, complex, subjective creatures who need culture, need nature, need beauty, need leisure. This is not something the left has always been good at defending or even recognizing.

Q: And you concluded that we could use some of this insight just now.

Solnit: We’re in a really difficult time, and it’s not going to stop being difficult for the foreseeable future, with the climate chaos and the new authoritarianism, et cetera. We all have a lot of work to do. As somebody who’s been around the left most of my adult life, I’m seeing bitterness and burnout and what I was just calling “disorganizers.”

It also felt like Orwell suggested some of what it looks like to remain committed to the work without getting embittered by it, without losing your sense of what you were for.

Part of what I saw in how Orwell lived his life is that what he wanted for himself and what he wanted for everybody never really disappeared. It was just really shocking to find out what a joyful person he was, how much pleasure he took in things, and how consciously he made the time and space for those pleasures.

Q: It’s a self-help book for our times.

Solnit: I was thinking the other day of that How Proust Can Change Your Life book. I have deeply mixed feelings about the phrase “self care” and self-help books. I’ve avoided them. Orwell’s Roses is certainly not written as, “You should do this, and don’t do that.” But it was written to raise those questions about how do we orient ourselves: How do we sustain ourselves, how do we not lose sight of what we’re for, how do we defend the roses and then claim the roses for ourselves as well as the bread?

Q: One of the things that strikes me about Orwell as a cultural icon is that he’s been trapped in the Nineteen Eighty-Four box. He is so associated with that one book that people lose sight of his broader lexicon, and of the remarkable insights he provided not just on authoritarianism but on how to live a life on the left. You use his essays to take him out of that box and show us a fuller picture of the man and his writing.

Solnit: That section in Orwell’s Roses, where I find that he wrote a whole cluster of essays about ordinary pleasures and joys in 1946, was really fun to put together. I loved reading the essays in this context, and coming to recognize what they revealed about his thinking. There was one that is often seen by a lot of hardcore austere people as a trivial essay about junk shops (“Just Junk—But Who Could Resist It?”). But it is clearly where Orwell’s zooming in on some of the things he dealt with in Nineteen Eighty-Four. The glass paperweights with a bit of coral in them become a crucial symbol in the book, and therefore writing the most important anti-totalitarian novel so far is achieved partly by wandering aimlessly in junk shops.

Q: Even when it comes to Nineteen Eighty-Four, the book is often used as such a blunt instrument by people who reference it that they miss the whole of what Orwell was exploring.

Solnit: It was just so fun to find out, after recognizing Orwell the rose fancier, that Nineteen Eighty-Four was not the book most of us, including me, think it is. I went back and found that it was so much more dreamy a book and not the realist novel I remembered.

How does Winston Smith resist the regime? Not by successfully toppling it, or even unsuccessfully conspiring to do so, but by being a conscious, sensing being who pursues the roses in bread and roses: a passionate love affair, beauties, pleasures, memories, subjectivities, individual expression, exploration, and love.

It felt like Winston was a very different template than we thought he was, and that he’s modeling what resistance might look like.

Q: Toward the end of Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston observes an aging woman who is hard at work washing. He says she is beautiful, which surprises his companion, Julia. Orwell writes, “The solid, contourless body, like a block of granite, and the rasping red skin, bore the same relation to the body of a girl as the rose-hip to the rose. Why should the fruit be held inferior to the flower?”

Solnit: The fact that a rose metaphor clinches the whole deal for the book, that she’s got the beauty of the rose-hip and not the rose, was amazing. I love that all that time gardening gave him this rose metaphor to describe the beauty of the washerwoman. For me, that was the climax of the book.

Q: That’s what was striking to me, as well. By showing us another side of Orwell, that of the gardener planting and nurturing roses, you gave us a better understanding of Nineteen Eighty-Four. I think you did Orwell a great favor there.

Solnit: I was giving us an Orwell for our time, you know? Somebody grounded in the natural world that is now our most urgent political space, and also somebody who paced himself and took his pleasures on the way to becoming our great anti-fascist writer.

Q: By showing us an Orwell who is less grim, who has a lighter side, you tell us something about how people on the left might approach challenging times with a more hopeful spirit. You have argued, for instance, that the rise of authoritarian violence—like the January 6 coup attempt—can be understood as a sign that the people in power recognize they are losing it.

Solnit: Yeah. I’m with Jonathan Schell and Hannah Arendt in believing that when people resort to violence, it’s because they’re losing power. You can see the coup and a lot of other violence as people who are losing control. They feel they’re losing, and I think they’re right. We’ve changed the way we think about gender violence radically in the last thirty years. Patriarchy isn’t getting away with stuff it always got away with. We’re changing the way we think about race. We’re changing how we tell American history. It’s no longer centered on the “great men of history.” It’s centered on slavery and Native genocide, and the protagonists are going to be different people than they used to be.

So yeah, white supremacist misogynist conservatives wield a lot of power, but it’s waning. It’s kind of in the defendant’s seat in the courtroom of history, not the judge’s seat.

Q: That’s such an empowering perspective—especially when we think about overwhelming issues such as the climate crisis.

Solnit: I’ve been involved with the climate movement for twenty years, and it was so small and meek and polite fifteen years ago when it was all about fucking compact fluorescent bulbs and Priuses with polar bear images.

To see the growth and what we’ve gained is important. This year, it’s no longer just the climate movement; it’s the general public and powerful institutions from the International Energy Agency to all the governments in the Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance. Essentially, the message that we’ve been putting out has been taken up in a way that really matters—this year so much more than every other.

It’s important to tell the story of how many heat records were broken and how many terrible disasters there were. But it’s also important to tell the story of how many gains the climate movement has made. One without the other doesn’t really tell you what you need to know.

I feel like what I’m doing is counterbalancing what’s already out there. People know about all the terrible things happening, and so I’m dropping something on the other side of the set of scales.