Scan barcode
A review by zoereads88
Hope in the Dark by Rebecca Solnit
4.0
Without fail, when I do presentations about the environmental crisis, I am asked the question, "Where do I find hope?" As a Christian, I naturally go to the bible, and theological works to answer this question. But recently I've become more curious about hope as a philosophical/political concept. I turned to Solnit's book to see what she might have to say, and I was not disappointed. While it was originally written in 2004, and focuses mainly on the US context, Solnit's main ideas about hope, despair, and movement building remain relevant. (My only complaint is that the book is a bit repetitive. You could probably pick out a couple main chapters and get her main concepts.)
Here are a few of my favourite quotes from the book:
"Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act.”
“Hope is the embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists take the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting.”
“I have noticed: wars will break out, the planet will heat up, species will die out, but how many, how hot, and what survives depends on whether we act. The future is dark, with a darkness as much of the womb as the grave.”
“An extraordinary imaginative power to reinvent ourselves is at large in the world, though it is hard to say how it will counteract the dead weight of neoliberalism, fundamentalisms, environmental destructions, and well-marketed mindlessness. But hope is not about what we expect. It is an embrace of the essential unknowability of the world, of the breaks with the present, the surprises. Or perhaps studying the record more carefully leads us to expect miracles–not when and where we expect them, but to expect to be astonished, to expect that we don’t know. And this is grounds to act. I believe in hope as an act of defiance, or rather as the foundation for an ongoing series of acts of defiance, those acts necessary to bring about some of what we hope for while we live by principle, in the meantime. There is no alternative, except surrender. And surrender not only abandons the future, it abandons the soul.”
Here are a few of my favourite quotes from the book:
"Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act.”
“Hope is the embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists take the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting.”
“I have noticed: wars will break out, the planet will heat up, species will die out, but how many, how hot, and what survives depends on whether we act. The future is dark, with a darkness as much of the womb as the grave.”
“An extraordinary imaginative power to reinvent ourselves is at large in the world, though it is hard to say how it will counteract the dead weight of neoliberalism, fundamentalisms, environmental destructions, and well-marketed mindlessness. But hope is not about what we expect. It is an embrace of the essential unknowability of the world, of the breaks with the present, the surprises. Or perhaps studying the record more carefully leads us to expect miracles–not when and where we expect them, but to expect to be astonished, to expect that we don’t know. And this is grounds to act. I believe in hope as an act of defiance, or rather as the foundation for an ongoing series of acts of defiance, those acts necessary to bring about some of what we hope for while we live by principle, in the meantime. There is no alternative, except surrender. And surrender not only abandons the future, it abandons the soul.”