A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit

Thus a disaster is a lot like a revolution when it comes to disruption and improvisation, to new roles and an unnerving or exhilarating sense that now anything is possible. But people return to those selves, those ways of self-organizing, as if by instinct when the situation demands it.

testimony … suggested how much we want lives of meaningful engagement, of membership in civil society, and how much societal effort goes into withering us away from these fullest, most powerful selves. Looking back on her earlier inquiry into who we became amid disaster - work drawing on disciplines as varied as sociology, psychology, economics, neurobiology, and political science to subvert the old myths of human nature and redefine it as “something more communal, cooperative, and compassionate” - Solnit adds: Art by Alessandro Sanna from Pinocchio: The Origin Story These people who had lost everything, who were living in rubble or ruins, had found agency, meaning, community, immediacy in their work together with other survivors. What startled me about the response to disaster was not the virtue, since virtue is often the result of diligence and dutifulness, but the passionate joy that shined out from accounts by people who had barely survived. And civilian bombing campaigns generally fail to break the will of the people, making them a waste as well as a crime against humanity. In fact, in most disasters most people are calm, resourceful, altruistic, and creative. The assumption behind much disaster response by the authorities - and the logic of bombing civilians - is that civilization is a brittle façade, and behind it lies our true nature as monstrous, selfish, chaotic, and violent or as timid, fragile, and helpless.

Rebecca Solnit (Photograph: Sallie Dean Shatz) This is what Rebecca Solnit, that mighty anchor of collective memory and champion of the human spirit, reminds us in the preface to the new edition of Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities ( public library) - her timelessly, endlessly elevating manifesto for resisting the defeatism of easy despair. Paradoxically, the noblest and most beautiful of our potentialities of being can come alive under the ugliest and most catastrophic of circumstances - those moments and periods that cannot be described by any other word than “disaster.” The young Borges recognized this in one of his earliest essays. In his diary of moral development, young Tolstoy proclaimed: “This is the entire essence of life: Who are you? What are you?” The part left unspoken, perhaps because it is often unspeakable, is that there is no solid self to give a constant answer - we are many things and many people under different circumstances, situationally awakened into dormant multitudes we may not have suspected resided within us.

A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit