History Larger than Life
November 4 of 8: River of Shadows - Rebecca Solnit - Viking Penguin 2003
If I could read only five writers for the rest of my life, Rebecca Solnit would probably be one of them. On one hand, she’s one of those nerdy, research-obsessed types, always up to her eyebrows in archival material, but she also has an uncommon talent for cutting meaningful trails through the forest of facts. She’s published something like 25 or 30 books over a 35 year career — of which I’ve now read six — each of them harnessing her experience as a researcher in unique ways:
The Faraway Nearby — the least research-heavy of these while still involving plenty of research; this one focuses much more on her personal life: her nearly terminal illness, her relationship with her mother, and reflections on what it means to sustain a creative life (sound familiar?); it has an interesting accordion structure I’ve never seen anywhere else (the last half of the book mirrors the first half, revisiting the same subject matter in a new light so that each of the threads that got started in the first chapters gets tied up in the last chapters)
Men Explain Things to Me — a collection of more conventional argumentative essays that make clear, researched arguments exploring the what and how and why of the violence women experience at the hands of men, particularly focusing on the various forces that work to silence women, from quotidian humiliations like the “mansplaining” in the title to more visibly violent issues like rape, abuse, and harrassment. The most iconic story from this book, and one of the seeds that produced the idea of the book, is about a conversation Solnit had with a man at a dinner party, who tried to tell her all about River of Shadows and wasn’t willing to believe that she was the author
Wanderlust: A History of Walking — maybe one of her first attempts to take on a shockingly broad and simple theme and use it to write what ends up feeling like a theory of everything; the ambitious scope of this kind of project has become one of her trademarks (it shows up again in River of Shadows and in Orwell’s Roses), and it’s the kind of book I most like to read — the kind that can convince you that no topic is better positioned to explain the meaning of life and the course of history than the topic the writer has chosen for this book; other books I think of as being in this category are Lewis Hyde’s The Gift and a lot of (the late, great) David Graeber’s writing.
A Field Guide to Getting Lost — not her best book; essentially (I suspect) just a bunch of passages she didn’t get to include in Wanderlust, paired with some other fragments, so it feels a bit undercooked; to be honest, I still liked it, though, so…
Orwell’s Roses — I wrote about this one here
River of Shadows — read on!
I’ve never been a huge biography guy, but I love what Solnit does with the biography form, in this book and in Orwell’s Roses. It’s a lot like the difference between an autobiography and a memoir — one tries to give a comprehensive overview of the narrator’s life (lame, boring) while the other takes pieces of the narrator’s life and shapes them into a more limited and therefore more entertaining narrative. Solnit does tick some of the conventional boxes. She gives a thorough, fairly linear account of the life of Edweard Muybridge — we know about the time and place and circumstances of his birth and his death, for example. But the book also uses Muybridge’s life the way a filmmaker uses a camera, as an instrument for telling a larger story about the evolution of San Francisco in the second half of the 19th century and how the events converging in that place and time defined American culture forever and set the pace for the future of our planet in more ways than one.
Muybridge was a lot of things in his lifetime — a bookseller, a photographer, a researcher, an inventor, a murderer. He’s most well known for his innovations in photography: he found ways to increase shutter speed enough to be able to capture high-speed motion without the subject blurring. It was a technology that would soon after become the basis for motion picture, so it is in some ways the birth of cinema. But Solnit draws a portrait of a man whose historical significance goes beyond just this one invention.
Many of the most important changes in the US in the 19th century were in some way connected to San Francisco. The US army fought, hunted, and displaced many of the Native American nations in the West during this time. The first national parks were established, and at the same time the transcontinental railroad was completed, which for the first time made it possible for the average American to travel long distances but also ended their relationship to place as it had been. The railroad also set the country on a trajectory for the overconsumption of forests and coal. There’s more: the gold rush, the mass waves of immigration both from the East and from the West across the Pacific. Women in government. Photography gaining greater recognition as an art form rather than just as a technology.
Solnit paints Muybridge as a kind of 19th century Forrest Gump — always in significant places with significant people at significant moments in history. Some of the most famous photographs of that very-photographed-location, Yosemite, are still his. He was the first person to conduct his research on the campus of what eventually became Stanford University. Between Muybridge the pioneering photographer and Muybridge the tech innovator, he set in motion two of the modern era’s most emblematic American industries: Hollywood and Silicon Valley.
I don’t put much stock in the idea of “great men,” and there are plenty of ways Muybridge wasn’t great. But he was significant. His personality and influence and legacy was large. And it made me wonder, what is the deal with all these historical “greats”? Do we still have characters this large in our lives today, or is it only in hindsight, in the hagiographic light that’s cast when you retell their stories, that people become this large?
Click here to read November 5 of 8: How to Blow Up a Pipeline