Across more than 25 books, the California-based writer Rebecca Solnit has cast her incisive eye over topics as diverse as long-distance walking, feminism, climate change, photography and Indigenous rights. Her latest, The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change, continues this approach, interweaving analysis of the contemporary American political landscape and the rise of the global hard right with meditations on the legacy of protest in the 20th century and on the relationship between the present and the past. 

Rhian Sasseen: There’s a particular urgency to this book’s message. Did that impact your approach to writing it?

Rebecca Solnit: Yes. It was very much a book for this moment, and that meant that I wrote it fast. It feels like we are so embroiled in the horrors of this moment, and that pulling back to see how we got here would be really useful for people—useful to recognize that we live in a world that has been profoundly transformed, and is in the process of being transformed. And that all good things are the result of active engagement, whether intellectual or activist. That, of course, becomes an exhortation to continue participating. People often feel to me like they live in a boundless present. If they feel confident that nothing bad will happen it’s because they think that the world is stable; if they think we’re all doomed, it’s because all the negative things are somehow fixed and eternal. And that sense of a context-
less present is very dangerous to this kind of active engagement.

RHIAN: Do you believe that the internet and digital media have changed our sense of time?