Recipes for hope.

The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear Edited by Paul Rogat Loeb Basic Books. 384 pages. $15.95.

Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities by Rebecca Solnit Nation Books. 150 pages. $12.95.

In the weeks leading up to the November election, I thought I was being clever. Whenever I was giving a speech, I joked that if John Kerry didn't win, then psychiatrists and psychologists better clear their calendars for the walk-ins. It wasn't very funny. People, in their grief, did besiege their counselors after November 2.

That grief, that pang of defeat, was similar to one that overwhelmed people when Bush launched his reckless Iraq War. Just a month before, millions of people the world over protested in the greatest simultaneous peace rally ever held, kindling the possibility that the war could be stopped before it even started.

But when Bush plunged in anyway, many people grew dejected.

And now, as Bush plots even more wars and as he schemes to undermine Social Security and return the United States to an era of primitive capitalism, I hear over and over again the anguished cries of fatigue and defeat.

So I picked up these two books on hope. And I found a lot of wisdom here. The authors don't offer Hallmark cheer or fortune cookie luck. Instead, they serve up homemade nuggets of inspiration and the recipes of hope from some of the best chefs we have.

The writer Rebecca Solnit, winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award for River of Shadows, makes a compelling case in Hope in the Dark. First, she demands some historical perspective and chides those of us who (like Eeyore in Winnie the Pooh, she told me recently) go around complaining about how terrible things are right now.

By dwelling on the negative, people fail to "recognize what a radically transformed world we live in," she writes. She rattles off some of the signposts of social change: the end of Jim Crow, the blooming of the women's movement, gay liberation, ecological awareness, the fall of the Soviet empire, the demise of apartheid, the Zapatista uprising, and the fight for global justice.

She rightly excoriates some radicals who "conceive of the truth as pure bad news, appoint themselves the deliverers of it, and keep telling it over and over." This habit is macho and Puritanical, she writes.

It also distorts reality. Yes, democracy is in trouble in the United States right now, she writes, "but it's also true that it's flourishing in bold new ways in South America and in grassroots movements around the world." And there is a great deal of resistance to Bush's program right here in the United States.

Her second crucial point is that by engaging in nonviolent activism, we can inspire others whom we cannot even imagine. She cites some examples.

Women's Strike for Peace in the early 1960s would protest in front of the White House, demanding an end to nuclear testing. One woman "told of how foolish and futile she had felt standing in the rain one morning protesting at the Kennedy White House," Solnit writes. "Years later she heard Dr. Benjamin Spock ... say that the turning point for him was spotting a small group of women, standing in the rain, protesting at the White House."

In the same vein, she mentions how the writer Sharon Salzberg "put together a collection of teachings by the Buddhist monk U Pandita and consigned the project to the 'minor-good-deed category.' Long afterward, she found out that while Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese democracy movement's leader, was isolated under house arrest by that country's dictators, the book and its instructions in meditation" were a great source of strength for the prisoner.

And she tells of how she herself joined with thousands of others in civil disobedience at the Nevada Test Site in the late 1980s, and how their actions, unbeknownst to them, were inspiring anti-nuclear activists half way around the world in Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan, who called themselves the Nevada-Semipalatinsk Anti-nuclear Movement.

Just as we never know whom we will inspire by our activism, so too we never know at what moment our activism will have an effect, Solnit argues. Echoing Howard Zinn, she writes of the "essential unknowability of the world, of the breaks with the present, the surprises." This, she says, "is grounds to act."

But we need to get over the urge for instamatic progress, those quack diet pills that offer "quick and easy results guaranteed," she cautions. This modern insistence only leads to disappointment and then to "bitterness, cynicism, defeatism." Direct action, she says, is itself a misnomer, since it "seldom works directly." But that's OK, she insists, adding that we need to reorient ourselves away from the idea of achieving some decisive victory and toward the notion of slowly creating groundswells that eventually lead to sea changes.

We need to conceive of politics not as emergency work with a finite end, she says, but as "a part and even a pleasure of everyday life."

Ah, pleasure!

One way to derive it is to find delicious irony all around you, she says, in a chapter whimsically entitled "Viagra for Caribou." Because of those little blue pills, she notes, the demand for the old impotence cures is no longer ravishing wild animals like "green turtles, seahorses, geckos, hooded and harp seals, and the velvet from the half-grown antlers of caribou." So, too, she delights in the Internet, which was designed by the Pentagon but now is a prime tool of the peace and global justice movement.

I disagree with Solnit in only a few places. She insists that we move past what she calls the outdated binary of left and right. This "beyond ideology" claim always bugs me, since the basic views of the progressive left (against corporate power and imperial war and for direct democracy, individual rights, economic justice, and ecological sanity) are so antithetical to those of the right, especially the Republicans in power, that to deny there is a meaningful difference between left and right is to undervalue our cause. Secondly, to my taste, Solnit overemphasizes the importance of cultural power, as opposed to political power.

Still, she has a bountiful supply of profound insights here, including a caution against utopianism. And she gathers the wisdom of many old friends, including June Jordan and Eduardo Galeano, John Keats, Walter Benjamin, and Milan Kundera. Plus, she has a knack for the aphorism: "Hope is an axe you break down doors with"; "activism is not a journey to the corner store, it is a plunge into the unknown"; "history is like weather, not like checkers"; "joy sneaks in anyway, abundance cascades forth uninvited."

That makes this book itself a pleasure.

Paul Rogat Loeb, author of Soul of a Citizen, is plowing the same field in The Impossible Will Take a Little While. He even cites two of Solnit's examples (Benjamin Spock and Aung San Suu Kyi).

Like Solnit, he is trying to comfort those who feel distraught at current events. He quotes a Minnesota student who protested prior to the Iraq War but felt dismissed, "as if all of our efforts were worthless."

Loeb counters that "we're looking at life through too narrow a lens. History shows that the proverbial rock can be rolled, if not to the top of the mountain, then at least to successive plateaus." And he counsels us to "adopt the long view" and to "savor both the journey of engagement itself and the everyday grace that nurtures us during the difficult tasks."

He also provides a bracing reminder for us not to overstate our paralysis. He does this by running an essay by Danusha Veronica Goska, who recounts her own experience being physically paralyzed. "I practically exploded," she writes, when she heard people complaining about their metaphoric paralysis. "The problem is not that we have so little power," she writes. "The problem is that we don't use the power that we have."

This book is a treasure of poetry and essays from the likes of Sherman Alexie, Maya Angelou, Ariel Dorfman, Marian Wright Edelman, Martin Espada, Vaclav Havel, Jim Hightower, Martin Luther King, Jonathan Kozol, Tony Kushner, John Lewis, Nelson Mandela, Pablo Neruda, Marge Piercy, Adrienne Rich, Arundhati Roy, Desmond Tutu, Alice Walker, Jim Wallis, Terry Tempest Williams, Howard Zinn, and many others.

The opening poem is from Seamus Heaney, which includes these lines:

   But then, once in a lifetime
   The longed-for tidal wave
   Of justice can rise up,
   And hope and history rhyme.

As the inclusion of poetry indicates, Loeb understands the need for a well-rounded life that stretches beyond the confines of politics and wanders out into the world of art and nature. He offers us Wendell Berry's poem "The Peace of Wild Things," which begins: "When despair for the world grows in me." And while Zinn's essay, "The Optimism of Uncertainty," sketches out how we "zigzag toward a more decent society," it also recognizes that "political discussion can sour you." Zinn recounts how, at the end of a semester on political theory, he let several talented students play a Mozart quartet. "We needed some music," he writes.

I also appreciated the honesty in the first line from Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch: "OK, maybe running a human rights organization isn't a laugh a minute."

The person who best encapsulates our present moment for me is the writer Susan Griffin: "What is required now is balance. In the paucity of clear promise, one must somehow walk a tightrope, stepping lightly on a thin line drawn between cynicism and escape, planting the feet with awareness but preserving all the while enough playfulness to meet fear."

Both of these books are great antidotes to despair. Share them with your depressed friends and your disconsolate colleagues and the activists burning out in your midst. They need--we all need--the wisdom that is contained here.

Matthew Rothschild is Editor of The Progressive.