It’s no secret among my friends and colleagues that I am a bit angsty when it comes to social change. It never seems to be happening fast enough. It never seems to be happening big enough. I’m generally dismayed at how not-urgent most of the nation seems when it comes to the very urgent issues of violence, inequality, sexism etc.

Rebecca Solnit, as if answering this angst directly, wrote a book called Hope in the Dark, which was published in the fairly dark time of 2004. It is her manifesto of poetic activism, her argument that even in times that seem stagnant and cruel on the surface, there is a thumping, passionate movement afoot…slowly gaining steam, haphazardly creating momentum, dreaming big dreams. You’ll miss it, she argues, if you only look for the fast, big stuff, as I sometimes do. It can be painfully slow and almost imperceptibly small. But it is there.

Sometimes Solnit had me swooning with her poetry and her worldview. What a comfort it would be to me if I truly believed—as she seems to—that change is ever evolving and imminent. That the world can only get better from here. I loved these excerpts:

Part of this story is efficiency—how much does it really matter in a world of suffering? Is it more cruel to think forever about most effective practice or to just do what you can?

Buddhists sometimes decry hope as an attachment to a specific outcome, to a story line, to satisfaction. But what remains, I think, is an entirely different sort of hope or faith: that you possess the power to change the world to some degree, that the current state of affairs is not inevitable, that all trajectories are not downhill.

A love of paradox is not the least of the equipment any activist should have.

But sometimes, I wanted to throw the book against the wall, because I felt like Solnit, like so many activists who were raised either within or on 60s stories of lore, was letting us all off the hook:

Cornel West came up with the idea of the jazz freedom fighter and defined jazz “not so much as a term for a musical art form but for a mode of being in the world, an improvisational mode of protean, fluid, and flexible disposition toward reality suspicious of either/or viewpoints.�

But people are dying! The women in Darfur are either raped or they are made safe by our efforts. There is no romance in that and, in fact, the effort to soothe ourselves with these ideas offends me.

Solnit’s book reminds me that my quest right now—as a writer, as an acitivist, as a person—is to understand some balane between idealism and realism, between romance and pragmatism, between the jazz in me and the urgent empathizer.

Next week: Flying Too Close to the Sun by Cathy Wilkerson and then Singled Out by Bella DePaulo.