I've been around a lot of major illness in the last decade - this is what being middle-aged is all about. People are really good at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, you could say. But defeatism and that kind of holier-than-thou perfectionism or the 'You're doing it wrong' brigade makes people give up. I don't think celebration makes people give up. So we see great victories - like the one at Standing Rock last fall- and too many are eager to point out that this is not the second coming of the Lord and everything isn't perfect for everyone yet. Part of what's challenging about my beloved comrades of the left is that many of them believe that if we celebrate something, then we'll stop fighting. Read more: The Women's March Is a Good Thing A lot of people who've never been active before are trying to be active a lot of groups that have done great stuff all along - from Planned Parenthood, to the Center for Constitutional Rights to 350.org - are doing extraordinary things. I see a lot of remarkable things happening right now. This was a book written during the Bush era and it's really about habits of mind - what stories do we tell ourselves, what histories do we remember, what strategies and tactics do we take. In your book, you write, 'Hope locates itself in the premises that we don't know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act.' What gives you hope on Trump's inauguration day? This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. We talked on Trump's inauguration day about the benefits of living in a 'wildly destabilized' time and why she recommends staring at some tranquil paintings in between fighting for the soul of your democracy. And because we don't know what kind of earth-altering activism will emerge during the Trump years, despair is premature.

Neither Polyanna-esque nor naive, the hope she champions comes from the idea that we simply don't yet know what will happen in the future. In Solnit's view, hope is a necessary component to this kind of revolution.

Hope in the dark by rebecca solnit