The Jesuit at Fordham who taught the upper-level course in German philosophy – Fr. Quentin Lauer – explained to us that in German thought and in Western philosophy generally, there are two kinds of thinkers: the both-and thinkers, typified by Hegel, and the either-or thinkers, typified by Kierkegaard, whose philosophy was a strong reaction against Hegel and against both-and thinking in general.

So it is with essayists, and Rebecca Solnit is a both-and essayist.  Her essay-books (or are they long essays with episodes?) are exercises in connectivity.  There’s a spectator’s experience in watching her connect one thing to the next, and in watching her work up her instinct for connectivity into something like a philosophy, a statement not about how her mind works, but about how the world is.

Here’s a passage from The Faraway Nearby that’s at once a statement of this philosophy and a glimpse of it in action.

The innumerable gods have all sorts of machines at their disposal. Illness is one, and a sudden onset of serious illness changes the landscape profoundly, and not because of character or fate, unless that fate includes postclassical details like genetic predisposition or the odysseys of viruses.

As a young man, Saint Francis turned back from a military adventure because of malaria, and while convalescing settled into his spiritual destiny.  A mosquito had spiritual consequence.  The dirty hands of the doctor who attended Mary Wollstonecraft probably imparted the puerperal fever that killed her and left her newborn daughter [Mary Shelley, who wrote Frankenstein] to a cold fate.  The gods in machines are just outside forces, and they are only outside the tight knot of fate and character that classical drama deems its only ingredients.  Pull back, see farther, and they are inside the patterns of which our lives are made.  They are bulls, are turns, are mosquitoes, are germs, among the myriad forms.

That is a very strong piece of writing – and it makes me respond strongly both pro and contra.

On the pro side, it is certainly true: reality is connected, reality is contingent, reality is rich in patterns.  And that expression “the tight knot of fate and character” captures the feel of classical drama more viscerally than any other that comes to mind.

On the con side, it is so true as to be truistic, isn’t it?  So everything is connected, contingent, patterned: Well, are some connections or patterns more consequential than others?  Do those patterns and connections inhere in reality, or just in the mind of the beholder, the author following the many trails through her own life story?  Those “innumerable gods” – is that a bit of literary fancy, or does she mean it, somehow, and if so, in what sense?  And is it so that classical drama “deems” character and fate “its only ingredients”?  There in a fit of connectivity artful expression (“tight knots of character and fate”) is joined to simplistic cliché.

Solnit is a brilliant writer.  (I am eager to see what she has made of Dorothy Day).  But sometimes the Kierkegaardian in me finds all that connecting a notch too regular and insistent.  Sometimes I think she ought to draw a sharp distinction; or let an idea or image sit, singleton-like, anchoritically, without siblings or progeny; or consider the sharp limits and perils of metaphor (“odysseys of viruses,” for example) the way her obvious precursor Susan Sontag did.

Sometimes I want her to be more either-or, that is.  This is how we either-or writers bump up against the both-ands: dialectically, Hegel would say.