A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit Read Free Book Online Page B

face creams and soap and dresses,” and then decided against the purchases. Had she bought the goods, she explained, she would have had to buy a trunk to put them in, to buy a trunk would entail hiring someone to carry it, and that “meant a return to at least a partial degree of the old permanency.” That permanency for her included class divides, becoming an employer, owning something while others owned nothing. “And I slipped my money back in my purse. All too soon would return the halo encircling exclusiveness. All too short would be this reign of inclusiveness. There was plenty of time for petty possessions, plenty of time for the supercilious snubbing of the man or woman not clad according to the canons of the fashionable dressmaker or tailor. In the meantime how nice to feel that no one would take it sadly amiss were you to embrace the scavenger man in an excess of joy at seeing him among the living, or to walk the main street with the Chinese cook. Have you noticed with your merest acquaintance of ten days back how you wring his hand when you encounter him these days, how you hang onto it like grim death as if he were some dearly beloved relative you are afraid the bowels of the earth will swallow up again? It is like a glad gay good holiday—all this reunioning.”
    For those who had been maimed or lost family members, the earthquake was not so positive—though Jacobson describes being shaken and disturbed, as well as feeling fond of even the merest acquaintance. The truly destitute had no such ready opportunity to choose or reject expanding their possessions or hiring an expressman to carry them. It’s also hard to say how happy the scavenger man was to be embraced or the Chinese cook to promenade with a white newspaperwoman. The joys of disaster are not ubiquitous. But they are often widespread, and they are profound, and they may well have been embraced by these working men. And Jacobson gets at something essential when she talks about walking through the ruins at dusk when a man asked, “May I walk with you? It’s lonesome walking alone.” She says, “We smiled and nodded and took him in as if we had known him all our lives,” a bold welcome in those days of strict boundaries for women. When a soldier said that “ladies” could walk on the sidewalk but men must stick to the street, Jacobson and her friends chose to walk through the burned bricks and fallen telegraph wires in the middle of the street with their newfound acquaintance. “Everbody talks to everybody else,” a young woman wrote a friend. “I’ve added hundreds to my acquaintance without introductions.” Women who had been bound by Victorian conventions about whom they might speak to or know felt liberated by the lifting of all those rules, as do people in most disasters when the boundaries fall away, and every stranger can be spoken to and all share the experience. This was behind the joy that shone out of my guide’s face in Halifax, of many of the tales of San Francisco in 1989 and of other disasters I heard directly from glowing people.
    Jacobson believed that something in that joy was lasting. She concludes, “Most of us since then have run the whole gamut of human emotions from glad to sad and back again, but underneath it all a new note is struck, a quiet bubbling joy is felt. It is that note that makes all our loss worth the while. It is the note of a millennial good fellowship. . . . In all the grand exodus . . . everybody was your friend and you in turn everybody’s friend. The individual, the isolated self was dead. The social self was regnant. Never even when the four walls of one’s own room in a new city shall close around us again shall we sense the old lonesomeness shutting us off from our neighbors. Never again shall we feel singled out by fate for the hardships and ill luck that’s going. And that is the sweetness and the gladness of the earthquake and the fire. Not of bravery, nor of strength, nor of a new