Nonfiction has crept closer to fiction in our time in ways that are not flattering to fiction, in part because too many writers cannot come to terms with the ways in which the past, like the future, is dark. Not all of them aspire to do so or succeed. And under the influence of a plan, it’s easy to see what we want to see.” It’s the job of writers and explorers to see more, to travel light when it comes to preconception, to go into the dark with their eyes open. We are by nature optimists, if optimism means that we believe we see the world as it is. Gonzalez adds, “Researchers point out that people tend to take any information as confirmation of their mental models. Afraid of the darkness of the unknown, the spaces in which we see only dimly, we often choose the darkness of closed eyes, of obliviousness. And yet the night in which distinctions and definitions cannot be readily made is the same night in which love is made, in which things merge, change, become enchanted, aroused, impregnated, possessed, released, renewed.Īs I began writing this essay, I picked up a book on wilderness survival by Laurence Gonzalez and found in it this telling sentence: “The plan, a memory of the future, tries on reality to see if it fits.” His point is that when the two seem incompatible we often hang onto the plan, ignore the warnings reality offers us, and so plunge into trouble. Literally when it comes to children, while many adults fear, above all, the darkness that is the unknown, the unseeable, the obscure. It’s an extraordinary declaration, asserting that the unknown need not be turned into the known through false divination, or the projection of grim political or ideological narratives it’s a celebration of darkness, willing-as that “ I think” indicates-to be uncertain even about its own assertion.

The future is dark, which is the best thing the future can be, I think. Until then, in fact, her madness and the war had followed a similar calendar, but Woolf recovered and the war continued its downward plunge for nearly four more bloody years. She was less than six months past a bout of madness or depression that had led to a suicide attempt, and was still being tended or guarded by nurses.

Solnit hope in the dark