**5. Falling Together**

Jamail's (somewhat Buddhist-sounding) reflections on loss, grief, and hope share certain a ffinities with Rebecca Solnit's discussion of what she calls "hope in the dark," the title of a book originally published in 2004, and reissued with updated material after the election of Donald Trump (Solnit 2016). Among the many topics her work has canvassed over the years, Solnit has a particular interest in the meanings to be found in disasters like Hurricane Katrina or the Fukushima nuclear accident. Her work does not radiate the searing grief of Dahr Jamail—in fact, some might deem it not nearly dark enough for our times—but the parallels are instructive, and they sugges<sup>t</sup> how we might orient ourselves toward the future without forgetting where we have been. She points us to the many astonishing and unanticipated events that have unfolded in recent years: the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and more recently, the arrival of Brexit and Donald Trump. Echoing Jamail, she describes the "proximity of death in shared calamity" that nevertheless creates a sense of purpose, joy, and vitality (Solnit 2020a). Solnit recognizes that "there is meaning as well as pain in sadness, mourning and grief, the emotions born of empathy and solidarity" (Solnit 2020a). Recently, in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, Solnit was a reassuring voice to many, as she turned to reading fairytales in nightly online sessions that attracted enormous (virtual) crowds of listeners completely rattled by an indefinite lockdown. Fairytales—a genre of never-ending stories—"felt like the right kind of narrative" in a sustained period of "not knowing" (Solnit 2020b).

While some of the developments Solnit reflects upon are shocking in ways that appear decidedly negative, they nevertheless underscore her point about the fundamental unpredictability, the *sheer nonlinearity*, of life and what we call history. Uncertainty is what makes hope possible. Novel forms of protest and resistance have arisen around the world, and with them counter-resistances and counter-protests, in ways no one anticipated. Hope, Solnit writes, "locates itself in the premise that we don't know what will happen, and in the spaciousness of uncertainty is the room to act" (Solnit 2016, p. xiv).

In particular, Solnit is fascinated by the way people actually behave during crises, and she is particularly drawn to a certain mysterious emotion, a peculiar joy, that often lights up the faces of those who experience disaster. The stories we have been told about so-called human nature lead us to expect that in the midst of crisis, humans devolve into crass social Darwinists and savage Hobbesians. But disasters can often rivet people to the present moment in the best possible way. Solnit, like Jamail, sees crisis as giving rise to a "super-saturated immediacy" and a deep sense of connection. The "violent gift" of such experiences, Solnit writes, "is that you feel more alive." So do others around you—there is a shared experience, not of falling *apart*, but what Solnit calls "falling together" (Tippett 2016). A rejection of this joyful but grieving solidarity—an outright refusal of falling together—characterizes the investment bankers Rushko ff describes, and the elites Latour depicts as abandoning a shared world. As Rushko ff's account suggests, some of us *do* devolve into barbaric Hobbesians defending only our immediate territory and interests—or hoarders of face masks in the midst of a pandemic. And often it appears that the more secure and insulated we are—in plainest terms, the wealthier we are—the greater the resistance to acknowledging vulnerability. As Solnit observes, "one of the primary uses of wealth has always been to buy your way out of the common fate" (Solnit 2020a). The idea that we and other humans, and that humans and nonhuman life share a common fate is understood only as an infringement on freedom. Thus, as with Rushko ff's investment bankers, technology becomes a vehicle not of collective flourishing but of individual, material survival. For these men, there is simply nothing to grieve.

An absence of grief is, oddly enough, symptomatic of an underlying certainty, whether it is the certainty of optimism or that of despair—certainty that the future will simply be a continuation of the status quo or will decline from it. Both optimism and despair can serve as grounds for doing nothing, or simply doing more of the same. Hope, therefore, is distinct from optimism. Solnit explains that the title of her work "hope in the dark" is an e ffort to reclaim darkness from its negative, and especially racist, associations. Disaster rivets us to the present moment, but the future is veiled in darkness. This is the darkness not of the tomb, but of the womb—a place of mystery where something novel may spring to life. Significantly, she argues that hope has been misunderstood as singularly oriented toward the *future*. In truth, hope is often grounded in the past, for it is a function of memory. For this insight, she credits the work of theologian Walter Brueggemann, who understood that the past, and our memory of it, confirms that we did not know what was going to happen, before it happened. "Memory produces hope in the same way that amnesia produces despair," Brueggeman writes (Solnit 2016, p. xix). It may sound obvious or even trite to point out that we do not know what will happen before it happens. And ye<sup>t</sup> the way we routinely narrate history—how we tell stories generally—makes it appear as if events were inevitable, as if they unspooled, unerringly, according to some inner logic. "We pretend that life like art has plots and we know how the story ends, whether it's an election or a cultural shift or the outcome of any major event," Solnit writes, "and we often err not on the side of caution but on the side of conventionality: the future will look like the presen<sup>t</sup>"(Solnit 2020b). But in its complexity and its unforeseen shifts, history is more like weather than like checkers (Solnit 2016, p. 61). The forward-looking energy that we rightly associate with hope springs in part, then, from our clear-eyed recollection of having been *surprised* by events in the past. By grounding ourselves in the past, recalling the unexpected twists and turns history has previously taken, we can better navigate the dark of the future.

Solnit's commentary on shadow and light, history and the future, may sugges<sup>t</sup> a di fferent reading of common narratives, both old and new, through which we seek to understand the present moment. On this account, the darkness of the future—not a sinister gloom but the hiddenness of generative uncertainty and possibility—contrasts with the daylight of the present and the past. It is this daylight, she insists, that is carried forward into the dark of the future. It is this light that illuminates the faces of people falling together in the joy-bearing grief—the *penthos*—of crisis. Our anchoring in the past—its surprises as well as its mistakes—illuminates an uncertain path, and creates a sense of purpose in the present moment. Maybe, then, the Orphean myth gets it wrong. To advance, to move forward, is not to transition in linear fashion from darkness to light. Perhaps the past is not a trap but a repository of memory and insight that can provide stable footing in times of uncertainty and loss. Danger lies not in looking back, but in believing that release from a shadowy past can and should be granted through perpetual, but often "false," forms of motion. The story of the funerary procession on Okjökull, on the other hand, seems to ge<sup>t</sup> something fundamentally right, despite the admonition against looking back—a message, perhaps, about being present while confronting the future as the di fficult work of grief. A mother's story of moving forward, her hand reaching tentatively behind her, seeking connection with the person in her wake—a person who may or may not be her own child, who may or may not accept the extended hand—*this* story seems an improvement on the myths we have inherited. The narrative's commingling of grief, hope, solemn action, and sudden unexpected joy is more powerful than "Age of Human" stories of techno-optimism and their disavowal of death, memory, and solidarity. And just as hope, tethered to the past, makes forward motion imaginable, so the young daughter who grasps her mother's outstretched hand embodies what the future may ye<sup>t</sup> become, in all its veiled possibility.

**Funding:** This research received no external funding.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The author declares no conflict of interest.
