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e333mily's reviews
213 reviews
Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit
3.0
Disappointed with the feminist essays in this one, they were quite lukewarm — not what I was expecting from Solnit. Even the titular essay, while probably groundbreaking at the time, seemed to backpedal into “not all men” territory.
3 stars purely for the essay on Virginia Woolf and hope.
“To me, the grounds for hope are simply that we don't know what will happen next, and that the unlikely and the unimaginable transpire quite regularly.”
“Despair is a form of certainty, certainty that the future will be a lot like the present or will decline from it; despair is a confident memory of the future…Optimism is similarly confident about what will happen. Both are grounds for not acting. Hope can be the knowledge that we don't have that memory and that reality doesn't necessarily match our plans.”
3 stars purely for the essay on Virginia Woolf and hope.
“To me, the grounds for hope are simply that we don't know what will happen next, and that the unlikely and the unimaginable transpire quite regularly.”
“Despair is a form of certainty, certainty that the future will be a lot like the present or will decline from it; despair is a confident memory of the future…Optimism is similarly confident about what will happen. Both are grounds for not acting. Hope can be the knowledge that we don't have that memory and that reality doesn't necessarily match our plans.”