This year’s One City One Book is about disasters. If there ever was an apt choice for a book to recommend to the Bay Area, Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell is probably it.
After all, it’s surprisingly easy to fall into a spiral of anxiety when it comes to disasters. When I first moved to California, my idea of researching and preparing for disaster sent me into the wee hours in a caffeinated/sleepless state where $400 for an Emergency Preparedness Kit seemed not only sensible but necessary. It had provisions for four people (we are only two in my household, but I wanted to provide for others) and my cat got a separate kit of her own (cat food, water, and first aid kit). It only made sense to add four emergency sleeping bags because they were tested and developed by NASA. I think my mouse hovered over emergency shelter and portable toilet at check-out for a full five minutes before I was able to muster enough presence of mind to decline those items. We don’t hear too much about the findings of anthropologists and sociologists regarding our behavior during disasters. This book changes that. I promise this book will help you weather it all.
“Who are you? Who are we?” Thus opens A Paradise Built in Hell. The thesis of the book sounds a little bit like the setup of a physics problem: does society in the absence of authority implode? Does it degenerate into monstrosity (as Hobbes believed), driven by selfish desires to secure food and shelter and by personal gain (looting, raping, and plundering)? Or does society in that vacuum undergo an altruistic transformation?
To Solnit, disaster is such a vacuum, a “rupture of everyday life” providing a moment where we find ourselves both physically uprooted and psychologically unmoored. The catalyst for this book is Solnit’s personal experience of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, of being thrown into an “intensely absorbing present. I was more surprised,” she writes, “to realize that most people I knew and met in the Bay Area were also enjoying immensely the disaster […]–if enjoyment is the right word for that sense of immersion in the moment and solidarity with others […] an emotion graver than happiness but deeply positive.”