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In my office, I keep a quote by D. H. Lawrence. “That she bear children is not a woman’s significance. But that she bear herself, that is her supreme and risky fate.”

The desire to know and understand is perhaps the highest and most humane of all our impulses; it is the desire to open up, to grow, to reach out, to exceed one’s limits, to experience the humanity and truth of others. The pursuit of knowledge is the profession we pursue as lawyers, writers, historians, scientists, teachers, as it is that of anyone who seeks self-awareness and an understanding of the people and world around us.

I wrote an essay this spring called “Nobody Knows” about how those regarded as nobody are treated as people without voices and rights; what those considered to be somebody who matters do to them they do to nobody. Nobody knows what you did, there are no witnesses, because this black person, this poor person, this child, this woman cannot bear witness; their word does not matter; their testimony has no consequences. Too many elites think that what they did to people who are no one is, categorically, nothing. And thus they are justified in claiming they did nothing and indignant w hen told they did something. I am not saying this is the case with Kavanaugh, but I am saying it

Even our laws have enforced the nullity of some of us, not only as lacking rights but lacking the right to witness.

contributing a most valuable and essential piece of evidence for the diagnosis of the ills of our civilization.” Such naming of wrongs, betrayals, and corruptions unweaves the very fabric of the status quo. It is, Solnit argues, “the first step in the process of liberation” and often leads to shifts in the power system itself. In the age of “alternative facts,” when language is used as a weapon of oppression and manipulation, her words reverberate with the irrepressible, unsilenceable urgency of truth: To name something truly is to lay bare what may be brutal or corrupt — or important or possible — and key to the work of changing the world is changing the story.

I think of it as revisionist future — the act of courage and creativity required for changing the terrain of reality by imagining alternative landscapes and new pathways of possibility. “We will not know our own injustice if we cannot imagine justice,” Ursula K. Le Guin observed in her poignant reflection on how imaginative storytelling expands the scope of the possible. “We will not be free if we do not imagine freedom.”

When the president mocked Ford on Tuesday ― so callously, so gleefully, with all the hallmarks of joy, with his white teeth in his little puckered mouth and the crowd roaring ― it felt like a beast was crouched on my chest, heavy, heavy.

When you tell someone you know, there are all the meta-feelings that accompany making any sort of disclosure that has emotional power, a concern that one is being too obvious, too vocal, making people uncomfortable, burdening others with your pain, drawing too much attention. It’s hard to speak your pain and stay demure. I told the entire readership of The Village Voice that I was raped before I told my mother.

While he handled it incredibly supportively, I was struck by, well, how much a surprise it was for him that normal ‘good’ people do things like this.”