A Field Guide to Getting Lost
Reviews
At times, I forgot what I was reading about – and maybe that's the point. Rebecca Solnit's writing style is so beautiful it's hard to even describe this book's intent. I loved every twist and turn. My favorite part is Solnit's recount of a talk given by Abbot Paul Heller at the San Francisco Zen Center, which included this: "... it's okay to sometimes experience not knowing what to do next, to run into a barrier. It's okay to realize that life has a mysterious quality to it, it has an element of uncertainty, it's okay to realize that we do need help, that calling out for help is a very generous act because it allows others to help us and it allows us to be helped. Sometimes we're calling out for help. Sometimes we're offering help, and then this hostile world becomes a very different place. It is a world where there is help being received and help being given, and in such a world this compelling determined world according to me loses some of its urgency and desperation. It's not so necessary in a generous world, in a world where help is available, to be so adamant about the world according to me."
I don’t know if people in positions of privilege understand the heavy bearing of “being lost.” It is a very real thing happening to underprivileged people: not knowing what to do next, what to expect in the morrows to come, the fickle fate of life, it’s all real. The cost of being capricious, of leaving everything to chance, cannot be afforded by people like me. Everything has to fit within a schedule, within a budget, within my capacity – everything has to be calculated. The sad thing is, I don’t really know what to do with my life, but I intend to make meaning out of it, and I guess this book came to me at a divine time. But even in its perfect arrival, I remained guarded about its thesis, more so because it romanticizes the idea of being “lost.”
I first read Solnit in 2022 with her meditations on walking called “Wanderlust.” It was my first introduction to her prose, to her style, and to her window of thinking. I expected that this one would be more didactic than personal, but it veered on the latter. I think that inclination divided us in a sad distance. Solnit spoke about her interiority, experiences that were huge to her life that I cannot latch on to. Her talk about “Vertigo,” punk rock, the majestic desert, and her many artistic influences provide peripheral musings that made her “being lost” sound like a champagne problem. Nonetheless, she made tasteful attempts to connect her introspections to the bigger reality of our world. Her piece about lost heritage ties to the familiar crises most immigrants face; also, her piece about conquistadors and captivity tales mull over the possibility of transformation in a space/culture considered “alien;” and at her most political, her piece about lost species asserts how greedy corporations have endangered rich wildlife. All these pieces are sequenced randomly to resemble a feeling akin to being lost through forests of pages.
Being lost is a critical matter because it seeks return, and Solnit answers this by not returning, but by advancing; to go beyond the known, to tread unfamiliar waters. Solnit assures us, “It’s okay to sometimes experience not knowing what to do next, to run into a barrier.” Growth is possible in unknown borders, and that’s where I am right now, in constant liminality of the person that I am and who I am becoming. My frustrations that stem from my impoverished background pressure me to go back, find the trail, and be comforted by the familiar. This book, with all its dislocated pieces, consoles me to not return but to move forward even with uncertainty abound.
Maybe it gets better with time? It gained a star on this second reading- I appreciated the personal narrative more. Perhaps it's easier when you don't read it right before bed, but instead earlier in the day when your mind isn't so sleepy.
Solnit's writing, a mix of memoir, philosophy, theory, art and cultural history, reminds me of the best of Jan Morris' traveling writing — experiential, insightful, and curious. Here, she explores the ideas of lost: in thought, between cultures, between times; lost in not knowing who you are, where you come from, or where you are. Lost in the sense of memories, once cherished, then lost, or recovered; lost in the sense of abandoned; lost in the sense of the distance that can be approached but never achieved. And, in being lost, the opportunities — what's learned, discovered, and made present; what's expressed, revealed, remembered. Her writing is clear, concise, and evocative.
There are people I wish I could try on. I want to be as soft and articulate as Rebecca Solnit. I want to be able to see with her eyes and understand with her mind.
This is and continues to be one of my favorite books of all time. I first read it in 2013 and this was my second reread. Each time a new piece strikes me.
Disclaimer: this is not a review. Zadaćnica kao najdraži žanr. The surveyist pointed out my affinity towards books about places (and/or their unatainability). hmm, really? I usually easily don't know where I am. Physical spaces and being lost in them. Space, when I think about Laban's theory, was my least favourite of the aspects of movement to think about. Or is it. I chuckled when I realized I am literally reading a book called A Field Guide to Getting Lost at the moment. What does space want from me?
"“Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go.” I'll be reading Solnit's The Faraway Nearby later on in the summer. I'm looking forward to see more of what she has to offer. Honourable mentions - Daisy Chains, The Blue Distance II and Abandon.
It felt like an ethnographic meander into my brain. Maybe a field guide to feeling okay when you are perpetually lost. Or something like that.
The one thing I have missed most over the past few weeks, as I have been healing from my herniated disc, is the ability to stroll. While previously I would spend hours a day on my feet, journeying on sidewalks and in parks, never moving in a direct line to get from A to B, but instead wandering in indefinite directions and on undefined pathways to eventually find myself somewhere, now I am rarely a pedestrian. When I must go to a certain place, I take transit and taxis; my strolling has been replaced with purposeful walking, a maximum of five minutes at a time, when my destination is close enough and I can quickly sit down when I arrive. My propensity to walk everywhere, before my injury, meant that I was always discovering somewhere and something new. I made an effort to rarely duplicate my routes, and to allow serendipity guide me towards new locations and experiences. On these rambling strolls, I would rarely be lost in place — my impeccable sense of direction emerges even in foreign and strange cities that I have never before visited, but can navigate within minutes — but I would be lost in time and mind. I may have always known where I was, but I never really knew how I got there and where I was going next. It’s that feeling of being lost in mind and in time that resonated most with me upon reading Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost. The stories of being lost in place were more illustrative of the meditative power of ambling, while the stories of being lost in time and mind were resonant of my favorite kind of exploration: of discovering something new in places that are familiar, of being lost in experience and not necessarily in location. As if illustrating its commitment to the idea of aimless ambling, A Field Guide to Getting Lost does not present a tight, cohesive narrative, but is instead constructed more loosely, a collection of stories and illuminations that are held together more by a sense of wonder than any commitment to structure. It is a book that allows you to get lost in it, and to subsequently find yourself, dozens of times. This ambling and rambling narrative, and Ms. Solnit’s incredible ability to craft poetry in every paragraph, is what makes A Field Guid to Getting Lost so meditatively appealing. It is a book that can be devoured in one sitting, and then re-read in bits in pieces, in highlighted passages that evoke some kind of emotion, whether it be nostalgia or excitement. There are few authors that can manipulate prose the way Ms. Solnit can, and she does so deftly in this book. The lyricism of each paragraph reminds us of just how beautiful it is to get lost — each word I read, and re-read, reminds me just how anxious I am for my back to heal, so that I can begin my strolls, my aimless ambling, again. (Review originally published on Flashing Palely in the Margins.)
Highlights
“Not till we are completely lost, or turned round,—for a man needs only to be turned round once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost,—do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of nature. Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.”
Children, Landon said, are good at getting lost, because “the key in survival is knowing you’re lost”: they don’t stray far, they curl up in some sheltered place at night, they know they need help.
In Benjamin’s terms, to be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery. And one does not get lost but loses oneself, with the implication that it is a conscious choice, a chosen surrender, a psychic state achievable through geography.
Certainly for artists of all stripes, the unknown, the idea or the form or the tale that has not yet arrived, is what must be found. It is the job of artists to open doors and invite in prophesies, the unknown, the unfamiliar; it’s where their work comes from, although its arrival signals the beginning of the long disciplined process of making it their own. Scientists too, as J. Robert Oppenheimer once remarked, “live always at the ‘edge of mystery’—the boundary of the unknown.” But they transform the unknown into the known, haul it in like fishermen; artists get you out into that dark sea.
For Woolf, getting lost was not a matter of geography so much as identity, a passionate desire, even an urgent need, to become no one and anyone, to shake off the shackles that remind you who you are, who others think you are.
maybe those rocks were her final act of reminding herself who she was, a heavy being probably.
in that sense of loss two streams mingled. one was the historian's yearning to hang onto everything, write everything down, to try to keep everything from slipping away, and the historian's joy in retrieving out of archives and interviews what was almost forgotten, almost out of reach forever. but the other stream is the common experience that too many things are vanishing without replacement in our time. at any given moment the sun is setting someplace on earth, and another day is slipping away largely undocumented as people slide into dreams that will seldom be remembered when they awaken. only the continuation of abundance makes loss sustainable, makes it natural. there are more sunrises coming, but even dreams could be emptied out.
@halaabora something to read in sentences, randomly every now and then. on loss and maybe a desperation to preserve.
material objects witness everything and say nothing.
it is as though we make the exception the rule, believe that we should have rather than that we will generally lose. we should be able to find our way back again by the objects we dropped, like hansel and gretel in the forest, the objects reeling us back in time, undoing each loss, a road back from lost eyeglasses to lost toys and baby teeth. instead, most of the objects form the secret constellations of our irrecoverable past, returning only in dreams where nothing but the dreamer is lost. they must still exist somewhere: pocket knives and plastic horses don't exactly compost, but who knows where they go in the great drifts of objects sifting through our world?
the weight of a dream is not in proportion to its size. some dreams are made of fog, some of lace, some of lead. some dreams seem to be made out of less the usual debris of the psyche than bolts of lightning sent from outside.
in dreams, nothing is lost. childhood homes, the dead, lost toys all appear with a vividness your waking mind could not achieve. nothing is lost but you yourself, wanderer in a terrain where even the most familiar places aren't quite themselves and open onto the impossible.
the houses children draw look like faces with upstairs windows for eyes and a door for a mouth. they have a solidity and a centrality that makes them home as the head is home.
the landscape in which identity is supposed to be grounded is not solid stuff; it's made out of memory and desire, rather than rock and soil,
and i have come to long not to see new places but to return and know the old ones more deeply, to see them again. but if this was home, then i was both possessor of an enchanted vastness and profoundly alienated.
i was suspended in the beautiful solitude of the open road, in a kind of introspection that only outdoor space generates, for inside and outside are more intertwined than the usual distinctions allow. the emotion stirred by the landscape is piercing, a joy close to pain when the blue is deepest on the horizon or the clouds are doing those spectacular fleeting things so much easier to recall than to describe.
the far seeps in even to the nearest. after all we hardly know our own depths.
It is as though we make the exception to the rule, believe that we should have rather than that we will generally lose. We should be able to find our way back again by the objects we dropped, like Hansel and Gretel in the forest, the objects reeling us back in time, undoing each loss, a road back from lost eyeglasses to lost toys and baby teeth. Instead, most of the objects from the secret constellations of our irrecoverable past, returning only in dreams where nothing but the dreamer is lost. They must still exist somewhere: pocket knives and plastic horses don't exactly compost, but who knows where they go in the great drifts of objects sifting through our world?
It is in the nature of things to be lost and not otherwise.
Which is to say that a full-length movie consists of half an hour of pure darkness that goes unseen. If you could add up all the darkness, you would find the audience in the teather gazing together at a deep imaginative night.
And his work is a reminder that, however beautiful, with their ships and dragons, those old maps were tools of empire and capital. Science is how capitalism knows the world, a friend remarks to me, and the distinctions and details these maps marked out were first of all for merchants and military expeditions. What was marked "Terra Incognita" was also what remained unvanquished. Painting the world blue made it all terra incognita, indivisible and unconquerable, ferocious act of mysticism.
The blue dye in the cocktails served at Le Vide caused all the drinkers to piss blue for days afterward.
The young live absolutely in the present, but a present of drama and recklessness, of acting on urges and running with the pack. They bring the fearlessness of children to acts with adult consequences, and when something goes wrong they experience the shame or the pain as an eternal present too.