No Straight Road Takes You There: Essays for Uneven Terrain

by Rebecca Solnit

We tell each other stories the way people plant seeds, not sure what will germinate or feed or go to waste, not sure what will be heard or who is listening and what they’ll take from what is offered. I say that like a general principle, but people tell me things, or I read them, and some of them are gifts, a candle to light a corner of the room or a flash of lightning or some warmth of sunlight. Some of them are seeds that grow, slowly, in the dark, surfacing later. You mix your metaphors, and a seed becomes a lantern glowing, or a flashlight, or a firefly hatching. It becomes the tiny phosphorescent organisms that light up the night ocean. You say a thing that takes you someplace and then the next place, and I hope the thought of the ocean was of some value to this man while he was imprisoned, that it took him someplace or shed some light. Somehow, somewhere he gained a compelling awareness of the sea, from a film, a book, a conversation, an image, a song, or all those things compounding, and it awoke a yearning. While yearnings are generally considered to be afflictions, they can sometimes be compass needles pointing somewhere, providing direction. They can orient, and to be oriented is to have some coherence, and maybe also to yearn is to hope, if only for the satisfaction of that yearning, and to make your world bigger in some way, even if it’s big with what you do not have. He must have said to himself that he would never see the ocean with that life sentence. What do...