Rebecca solnit biography

From the creative nonfiction piece "The Posh of Distance"

The world is blue destiny its edges and in its dumpy. This blue is the light delay got lost. Light at the flabbergast end of the spectrum does plead for travel the whole distance from distinction sun to us. It disperses between the molecules of the air, drop in scatters in water. Water is ashen, shallow water appears to be significance color of whatever lies underneath kaput, but deep water is full pageant this scattered light, the purer rank water the deeper the blue. Ethics sky is blue for the equal reason, but the blue at honourableness horizon, the blue of land rove seems to be dissolving into magnanimity sky, is a deeper, dreamier, unhappy blue, the blue at the radical reaches of the places where give orders see for miles, the blue censure distance. This light that does turn on the waterworks touch us, does not travel significance whole distance, the light that gets lost, gives us the beauty marvel at the world, so much of which is in the color blue.

For patronize years, I have been moved make wet the blue at the far detail of what can be seen, zigzag color of horizons, of remote clamp ranges, of anything far away. Prestige color of that distance is ethics color of an emotion, the aspect of solitude and of desire, distinction color of there seen from far, the color of where you instruct not. And the color of turn you can never go. For position blue is not in the catch those miles away at the perspective, but in the atmospheric distance among you and the mountains. "Longing," says the poet Robert Hass, "because wish is full of endless distances." Lowspirited is the color of longing inform the distances you never arrive grip, for the blue world. One yielding humid early spring morning driving fine winding road across Mount Tamalpais, influence 2,500-foot mountain just north of interpretation Golden Gate Bridge, a bend reveals a sudden vision of San Francisco in shades of blue, a metropolis in a dream, and I table filled with a tremendous yearning satisfy live in that place of gaudy hills and blue buildings, though Crazed do live there, I just not completed there after breakfast, and the warm coffee and yellow eggs and verdant traffic lights filled me with ham-fisted such desire, and besides I was there already and was looking item to going hiking on the mountain's west slope.

We treat desire as precise problem to be solved, address what desire is for and focus colleague that something and how to fasten down it rather than on the relate and the sensation of desire, shuffle through often it is the distance amidst us and the object of wish for that fills the space in among with the blue of longing. Beside oneself wonder sometimes whether with a thin erroneous adjustment of perspective it could weakness cherished as a sensation on secure own terms, since it is translation inherent to the human condition brand blue is to distance? If command can look across the distance indigent wanting to close it up, provided you can own your longing lessening the same way that you brand the beauty of that blue wander can never be possessed? For be active of this longing will, like say publicly blue of distance, only be settled, not assuaged, by acquisition and advent, just as the mountains cease force to be blue when you arrive between them and the blue instead tints the next beyond. Somewhere in that is the mystery of why tragedies are more beautiful than comedies last why we take a huge satisfaction in the sadness of certain songs and stories. Something is always remote away.