For me, the heart of Rebecca Solnit’s book Hope in the Dark is a metaphor that appears partway through the slim volume.
In the run-up to what is sure to be a rollercoaster of an election, I have taken a lot of comfort in this masterful metaphor.
“Imagine the world as a theater. The acts of the powerful and the offical occupy center stage. The traditional versions of history, the conventional sources of news, encourage us to fix our gaze on that stage. The limelights there are so bright that they blind you to the shadowy spaces around you, make it hard to meet the gaze of the other people in the seats, to see the way out of the audience, into the aisles, backstage, outside, in the dark, where other powers are at work.
“No matter the details or the outcome, what is onstage is a tragedy, the tragedy of the inequitable distribution of power, the tragedy of the too common silence of those who settle for being audience and who pay the price of the drama. The idea behind representative democracy is that the audience is supposed to choose the actors, and the actors are quite literally supposed to speak for us. In practice, various reasons keep many from participating in the choice, other forces—like money—subvert that choice, and onstage too many of the actors find other reasons—lobbyists, self-interest, conformity—to fail to represent their constituents.
Pay attention to the inventive arenas that exert political power outside that stage or change the contents of the drama onstage.
There’s tremendous power in a good metaphor.
A good metaphor “clicks”—puzzle pieces fall into place.
Solnit’s masterful theater metaphor—riffing off Shakespeare’s indelible “All the world’s a stage”—provides a clear-eyed take on what our political situation as humans amounts to.
The past few years have been fraught for everyone. The Trump era, COVID, and now this heightened moment of political polarization and mistrust, and have left me feeling uncertain and a little hopeless.
What is there for me to do?
The answer I see a lot: you can donate to important causes.
The recommendation cuts against what I see as the most important and hopeful aspect of Solnit’s metaphor:
Pay attention to the inventive arenas that exert political power outside that stage or change the contents of the drama onstage.
Money is the province of the powerful on the stage—if you ask the players how to participate (in the US, anyway), they will tell you two things: to vote and to give your money.
But giving money doesn’t feel like the “inventive arenas” that Solnit is referring to. Elsewhere in the book, she says, “Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope.” Action is critical to her formulation of hope.
What are we to do?
We are to keep looking—away from the stage and into the dark. There are no easy answers, as her book makes clear. Nor necessarily are the answers the same for every one of us.
Taylor Coe 