Easter Cheer
Sunday Blog 229 - 5th April 2026
You can read the Sunday Blog below, or have a listen/ watch as you prefer.
While still in Denmark for my writing break last week, someone or something I can no longer recall directed my attention to Rebecca Solnit’s latest book, The Beginning Comes After the End. Notes on a World of Change. The reviewer promised that it was a book of positivity in a relentless barrage of negativity that is this world we currently live in. I couldn’t resist this.
For some peculiar reason, I haven’t read any of Solnit’s other books. She is best known for generating the term “mansplaining” after the experience of having a man tell her about her 2003 biography and cultural history of the photographer Eadweard Muybridge.
Some time ago I began to seek perspective on world events by dipping back into history, listening to podcasts on the French Revolution, or the Napoleonic Wars and on and on. What we have survived is reassuring to me. This too, will pass.
Rebecca Solnit’s book brings me back into now, but from an eagle eyed view. The book’s ultimate message is that “these brutal politics are a backlash against the vision of interconnection.” (Chapter 6, The Disconnectors.)
The long list of accomplishments and progression relating to civil rights campaigned for and achieved, the appreciation of first nation’s land management practises are dwelled on. What we have achieved in terms of looking after our environment. Her hypnotic, kind voice points out that there are positive signs in our world, along with the brutal chaos. Everything is happening at once, so there is both regression and progression.
Am I doing this book justice? The immersive experience of listening to it was such a soul balm that I am struggling to articulate its impact clearly. There was even the joyous moment for me where she refers to one of my favourite novels Howard’s End and its epigraph, ‘Only Connect.’ I am so taken with this I’ve had tattooed on my right shoulder a couple of years ago.
So if you feel the need for an Easter reset, listening to the audiobook version of The Beginning Comes After the End may just be the thing.