Rebecca Solnit

'An old world is dying; a new world is being born; now is the time of monsters' Antonio Gramschi Solnit maps the extraordinary revolution of ideas and rights that we've experienced over the last fifty years, which has profoundly changed our world. In recognising the interdependent and symbiotic relationships in nature and among humans, this revolution is beginning to overturn capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy and the human domination of nature - despite the best efforts of the old world to fight back. From one of the most significant thinkers of our day, The Beginning Comes After the End is a culmination of years of activism and offers a unique perspective on our politics and our humanity, to give hope in difficult times and to urgently remind us that the power to change the world is within our reach.

Notes on a World of Change

The Beginning Comes After the End

Karolina

A hero is herself part of a system, or rather the system makes her a hero, a catalyst for something bigger than herself.

Perhaps cruelty is nothing more and nothing less than the exercise of inequality as the entitlement to commit harm and the lack of empathy that allows it. 

If you must imagine yourself as an island, you are a diversely populated island, a place of circulations and comings and goings, host to a party full of guests you cannot see but need.

Your life is sustained by lives; you devour them daily as plants, fungi, and maybe animals, and those beings likewise fed on life. You yourself are not a single garment of destiny but a thread or a stitch in the tapestry.

The radical uncertainty of the future arises from how we're making the future in the present by how we show up, how new ideas amplify and become realities. But it's the past that shows us the possibilities, how the world was changed, how power can appear in places and among peoples assumed to be powerless and irrelevant, how the most foundational things can be transformed, how ideas and arts matter in making the world.

We face the past to remember, we face the future to dream. And we know we live in the dreams, some realized, some defeated, some on their way, of those who came before.

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