I have begun to think of Café Books as more of an apothecary than a bookstore. You can send them a prescription for almost any kind of moral dilemma, philosophical contradiction, scientific ambiguity, urgent mental uplifting or any other ailment of spirit that you want to overcome and they will provide the literary medicine you need. On their shelves are medications that you can buy over the counter to help relieve the high blood pressure of our unravelling times, stabilize atrial fibrillation to avoid heartbreak, and reduce the risk of moral stroke by preventing authoritarians from the thickening the blood that flows through the human heart, all with the goal of sustaining hope and belief in the future. Rebecca Solnit’s new book, The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change is one such medication now available at Café Books.
It is a book that aims to walk the reader back from the abyss of hopelessness. Her book aims to spiritually buoy the reader up so they don’t go down for the third time into the despair that increasingly marks the era in which we live. It doesn’t save the reader, but it keeps them afloat in sight of the possibility of the coming safety of a potentially far different future.
The point Solnit makes over and over again is that we need to imagine a new civilization now, and work step-by-step toward realizing it, “making the road by walking it” so to speak.
To that end Solnit cites some very good examples of the progress that we collectively made in creating a fairer more just world prior to the second coming of Trump. She also provides compelling metaphors for how to frame future possibility once the world we live in now comes to an end as it will and humanity faces the possibility of a new beginning. Solnit starts the book on page 4 with the most compelling of these:
The beginning comes after the end. A chrysalis is the beginning of a butterfly, but in that chrysalis is no elegant transition, The caterpillar falls apart – it turns to goo, and something profoundly different reconstitutes from it, guided by the hitherto dormant imaginal cells. In that slurry, the dissolving caterpillar’s immune system perceives the imaginal cells as alien and attacks them. But they survive, multiply, and set in motion the instructions to become a butterfly. A many-legged creature, an animal that devours leaves becomes a six-legged winged creature that sips nectar from flowers. In recent years, as we’ve paid closer attention to the natural world and learned more about it from scientists, this metamorphosis has become a metaphor for the transformation of society, often with the sense that we are at the stage of dissolution, imaginal cells under attack. A butterfly is the end of a caterpillar. The beginning – the next era – comes after the end of the last one and in between comes a lot of falling apart.
This is one way Solnit suggests to tell the story of who we were and where we were when Trump was elected to his second term and what is coming next. It is a disheartening story.
Solnit bravely offers an entire chapter on the disconnectors, those who support and abet Trump and what one No Kings protester last week, called his “Turd Reich” in his attempt to turn the United States into what we’re seeing it become now. In that she wrote the book before Trump fully corrupted the government, further gutted democratic process, and undermined the global economy by starting an unnecessary war in the Middle East to distract Americans and the world from his sex crimes and his fascist agenda, Solnit’s naivete about the extent of the damage that is being done and can be done during the rest of Trump‘s term can be forgiven. (She is hardly alone. With each passing day, much of the world is astonished and sickened by how quickly evil in power can unravel the world.) Still, Solnit predicts Trump will implode under the weight of his own arrogance and hypocrisy and a more cooperative, symbiotic world will emerge out of the ruins. One can only hope she’s right.
Solnit goes on to offer a second compelling metaphor to suggest why the world we are in now will come to an end and how humanity will undergo a historic transformation and, through internal metamorphosis, remake the world.
I don’t want to minimize the impact and significance of what I’m describing as a backlash, and I’m against prophesies when they pretend that the future has already been decided or is already knowable. But I wonder if this backlash is a supernova. When some stars die, they don’t dwindle at first; they explode in size and release staggering amounts of light and energy. Astrobiologist David Grinspoon remarked to me, “If you didn’t know about the inner hidden or less obvious workings of these aging stars, they’d appear to us as if they were gaining strength and becoming something larger or more powerful.” Instead, it happens because the star is dying, because it is collapsing under its own gravitational weight. After the supernova, it morphs into a neutron star, a black hole, or cosmic dust. As a science publication puts it, “But this destructive force is also a creator. From the ashes of a dying star are born the building blocks of life: the heavy elements that make up the planets, oceans and even us.”
The problem here is the precious time that it will take to recover from what Trump, and though she doesn’t mention him, Netanyahu, who together are clearly the greatest evils of this young century, have done to set the world back in time. The question not addressed is whether existential threats like biodiversity loss and global climate breakdown will make the transformation we want and need more difficult or perhaps impossible to achieve when and if the smoke clears. The metaphor does, however, speak to sentience – the self-regulating power of what is referred to as Gaia – in the larger world that can be revived and restored and will persist long after the terrible star that is the chaos of our times bursts as it most certainly will and must.
Clearly, in my view at least, we can’t go on like this indefinitely without inevitable societal collapse from which remaking our civilization will be necessary and hopefully possible.
Solnit offers that what will save us from total collapse will be the realization of our connectedness with one another, and to the natural world. And that that reliance on connection will be the foundation of the New World we create.
Other inspiring quotes later in the book are medicine for the head, the heart and the soul:
We have stories. They are seeds with which to plant forests of possibility.
This coincides with the publication of Suzanne Simard’s new book When The Forest Breathes: Renewal and Resilience in the Natural World, which is the sequel to her inspiring and groundbreaking Finding the Mother Tree.
A forest is a community, a symbiosis, a society, almost a symphony of life.
We can think of an ecosystem of wolves, caribou, trees, and fungi creating biodiversity just as an orchestra of woodwind, brass, percussion, and string musicians assemble into a symphony.
Then there is this one about this one on the unique nature of Indigenous inclusion:
Native peoples in the Americas understand the universe as alive and sentient. All phenomena in it are understood to be a distinct expression of life force, or spirit. Since all persons – human and other-than-human – such as plants, animals, rivers, winds and mountains are expressions of spirit, they are understood to be interconnected and contingent. Relatives.
Then there are these two, the first on de-normalizing the wrongs, divisiveness and growing inequalities of the present, and the second on reviving those qualities humanity possessed in the past to get back on a track to a liveable future:
The climate is just one latest breaking point in this history of breakage, but maybe this time around it is not just a break as in broken, but as in breaking with the past. Or rather breaking with that past to embrace deeper pasts.
What if this is an end to the idea that those worlds ended or must end or otherwise be consigned to the past? What if our best hope reaches for the future by sinking into the past? What futures can we build on these other versions of the past, those other voices with other stories to tell? What beginnings come after such an end?
Those who read as therapy may want to give this book some close attention. It will be especially therapeutic for those, like this reader, who struggle every day with trying not to give into despair about the decline of our hard-won humanity in these desperately uncertain times.
The Takeaways
An old world is dying and as it does so we should not be surprised that we live in a time of monsters.
You can cut down the flowers, but you can’t stop the spring.
We are living through a revolt against the future; the future will prevail.
And it will.
The takeaway is that this book in good medicine at a time of widespread moral plague. It is only 131 pages long and brings together many of the ideas that we need to believe in if we are to keep alive the possibility of societal transformation through metamorphosis, and it does so in understandable language that will appeal widely.
Thank you Rebecca Solnit for offering this medicine to all, and thank you Café Books for dispensing it and filling this reader’s urgent prescription for the right medication to stem the hemorrhaging of life-giving and life-saving hope.
R.W. Sandford
Senior Government Relations Liaison
Global Climate Emergency Response
United Nations University
Institute for Water, Environment & Health