Solnit on the Self

In the chapter Flight, Rebecca Solnit weaves different stories into her own as she does throughout most of the book. She discusses the Tang artist Wu Daozi, the Road Runner and Coyote cartoon, the people of the past Easter Island, and then the origin story of her own path to writing. This evolves back into a story of her mother, as the book started, and then takes a sharp turn to involve Iceland and the crazy coincidences that led her to being invited there.

All of these stories are twined together expertly by Solnit, so that details that may not make sense at first come back later to solidify a point. The unrelated Wu Daozi becomes a means to talk about doors and escaping into the lives of others. The term dei ex machina is introduced here, which is mentioned in the passage of page 248, and Solnit talks of how events of the gods do occur which can send life spinning into any direction. These events of the gods, these coincidences, culminate to create doors of opportunity that build one's life.

This is true for Rebecca, whose trip to Iceland was due to the dei ex machina that often occurs in real life. Her book was passed between multiple people, one of whom met her in person, which led to her invitation to the new country which is also explained in the chapter Flight. Rebecca also talks of how a person is not just that person, but the combination of every person they've met and experience they've had, and those people's experiences, and so on.