The Faraway Nearby

This is the second book by Rebecca Solnit that I’ve read and now I’m certain I need to read everything else she’s written and whatever else she publishes in my lifetime. Much like A Field Guide to Getting Lost (and every bit as soulful and beautifully written), The Faraway Nearby is not about one thing, but many things – personal stories, the tales of others, history, art, fairytales and folklore – and it’s both Solnit’s perspective and the way she weaves all these threads together that has me hooked on her writing. This time Solnit explores interconnectedness and stories, the stories that shape and map our own lives, how we are woven into each others stories and, in turn, form even greater, more complex charts of the geography of self, life and death, memory and perception, illness and injury, treatment and healing, discovery, growth and change. It’s both a memoir and exploration of distance – the physical, the interpersonal, and the internal. One of my favorite aspects of this book is that, in addition to the myriad stories interwoven on its pages, a separate winding essay about science as poetic narrative and myth is simultaneously told in a single line along the bottom of each page running the length of the book. I started out trying to read both at once but quickly decided to leave this second piece for after I finished the main book. And I’m so glad I did, because it was an achingly beautiful essay that both stood on its own and contained the threads of everything explored in the book itself:

“Moths drink the tears of sleeping birds. The birds sleep on, inadvertent givers. The moths fly on, enriched. We feed on sorrow, on stories, on the spaciousness they open up when they let us travel in our imaginations beyond our own limits, when they dissolve the boundaries that confine us and urge us to extend the potentialities of our imperfect, broken, incomplete selves.”