| Title | : | A Field Guide to Getting Lost |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0143037242 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780143037248 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 209 |
| Publication | : | First published July 7, 2005 |
A Field Guide to Getting Lost Reviews
-
Say you're a coin.
You're resting quietly in somebody's palm.
Someone says "heads" or "tails" and suddenly you are thrown high up in the air, as high as you can go.
As you twirl, you meet Walter Benjamin and his illuminations, you meet Daniel Boone and his adventures in the wilderness, you meet Robert Hass and Simone Weil, you meet the color blue and all its meanings, you meet Cabeza de Vaca, Eunice Williams, Mary Jemison and Cynthia Ann Parker, you meet the Clash and Isak Dinesen, you meet Alfred Hitchcock and his vertigo, you meet Yves Klein and the blue of distance, you meet the desert and rattlesnakes, you meet lovers and friends and houses and maps and cartographers.
And then you land flat on the ground.
Is it heads? Is it tails?
It doesn't matter. You've had a glimpse of the world.
One of the most elegant and arresting intellectual digressions that I have ever read.
I could have lived inside Rebecca Solnit's head forever, following the trails of thoughts that spread and separated and merged like weeds at the edges of a river.
Historian, poet, philosopher, thinker, this woman can write about anything and writes looking up at the stars, her feet firmly rooted in the dirt.
Bewitching. -
Introspective, while still attentive to the world outside herself, Solnit meanders in this slow-moving collection centered on the concept of "getting lost." The essays read as mosaics of cultural history, autobiography, nature writing, and aesthetic criticism: the depth of Solnit's insight, as well as the vivid contrasts between each essay's parts, rewards careful reading. Those familiar with Solnit through her recent fast-paced political work—typically published first online, later organized into a book—will find a much different kind of writing here. A few of the early essays read as a bit dated, out of step with the ways in which America has changed since the collection's original publication in 2006, but that problem fades as Solnit goes on.
-
The opening chapter of this book can be misleading.
Solnit delineates the uneven skyline of the many uncertainties that shape our expectations with surgeon’s precision, employing the perfect choice of words and metaphors, so that the reader falls under the false impression of being handed a map that will eventually lead him to the steady inner balance that will help him navigate the unpredictability of life.
What ensues instead is a vibrant mosaic composed of autobiographical flashbacks, labyrinthine references to art, history and the natural world that confuses and dazzles the reader, who can’t help but grope in the dark of Solnit’s dislocated meanderings.
Solnit’s digressions revolve around questions of identity and consciousness. Under the ubiquitous leitmotiv that in order to find our way, we need first to get lost and submit to the wilderness of chance, Solnit weaves a complex tapestry that tangentially explores the recollections of her early twenties while commenting on iconic films, painters and writers that became determinant for her emerging worldviews.
And so the reader gets to associate Hitchcock’s film “Vertigo” and its love story with San Francisco Bay to Solnit’s affair with a native American in the Mojave desert, or the existential journey of the Spanish conquistador Cabeza de Vaca, who got lost in the wilderness to emerge a new individual, with snippets of Solnit’s family history, drifting along with dreams, ideals and the disorientation that comes with the brutality of reality and impending loss.
Solnit gives us a map and then invites us to ignore it so we can learn to live in uncertainty, to embrace the blue of distance without trying to discern the exact shapes in the remote horizon.
Being lost or feeling lost generally implies a negative connotation that urges us to plan in advance, to anticipate, to control life events at all costs, which makes us forget the thrill of improvization, of succumbing to whatever is in store for us, accepting it, making it part of ourselves in the ongoing metamorphosing of the self. Embracing emptiness is sometimes the only means towards fulfillment.
Leaping into the void doesn’t have to imply freefalling; maybe it’s the required step to touch the sky.
Leap into the void by Yves Klein -
The Blue of Distance
I’m feeling somewhat lost of late
Perhaps I need to embrace that
To lose myself in a book
A book about getting lost
To find myself in the unknown
I’m intermittently blue, too
Drawn to “the colour of distance”
Seeking happiness and wholeness
A different hue
Maybe a different “who”
Image: Voyage, by Lee Jungho (
Source.)
I yield to the languid beauty of distant hues of blue
“The most submissive abandonment…
the dissolving of one’s being in a lake whose surface is infinitely tactile” (
Calvino)
Lost…
And maybe found
Profound
This was
Awe-inspiring
Inspiring
A metaphysical breath of fresh air
A nudge along a path to…
I know not where
Will I find
Or be found?
Perhaps they’re the same
Perhaps I will know when I’m there
Image: Forget-me-nots (
Source.)
See also: The above is primarily a response to the first “The Blue of Distance” essay.
I’ve written a more conventional review of all the pieces in the book
HERE. -
Profound and erudite essays about distance; introspective but painted on a multi-dimensional canvas. They focus on place (deserts, forests, mountains, cities) and loss (abandonment, separation), all mediated through culture (literature, music, and art) and relationships.
Solnit’s connecting theme is the need to be lost before you can find yourself. It sounds like the opposite of Matthew 7:7, "
seek and you will find”, but it’s not: being lost is part of seeking, and you can’t be found until you’ve been lost. For Christians, that’s also true in a spiritual sense: you have to acknowledge and repent of your sins before you can be saved. (Her parents are Jewish and Roman Catholic.)
Our arrogant ignorance of the natural world keeps park rangers and coastguards busy, but Earth is mapped, so we always know roughly what’s beyond the hill on the horizon. Thus, we are simultaneously more and less able to be lost than early explorers were.
Open Door
“Stories that make the familiar strange again… Conversations that make everything around them disappear. Dreams that I forget until I realized the have colored everything… Getting lost like that seems like the beginning of finding your way or finding another way.”
This gives rationale for the essays that follow. The title refers to the Jewish tradition of leaving the door open overnight at Passover, for Elijah, “a thrilling violation of ordinary practice”.
Solnit explores the idea that “it’s the job of artists to open doors”, with examples including Poe, Keats, Woolf, Thoreau, Meno, and Old Norse. She compares being metaphorically lost with being literally lost in unfamiliar wilderness. Modern people are illiterate in the language of the natural world: even if we notice plants, animals, tracks, weather, and geology, we don’t know or understand the significance of particular ones.
“How do you find what you can’t even conceive of?”
The Blue of Distance
“The world is blue at its edges and in its depths. This blue is the light that got lost… The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not.”
Image: Georgia O’Keeffe. Light Coming on the Plains, I, II and III, 1917 (
Source.)
“Distance ceases to be distance and to be blue when we arrive in it. The far becomes near and they are not the same place.”
Searing brilliance: the standout piece. I’ve written a tribute-cum-response
HERE.
“Some things we have only as long as they remain lost, some things are not lost only so long as they are distant.”
Daisy Chain
“Things in my family have a way of disappearing… Truth was not a fixed quantity.”
Solnit was thus inspired to study history, but this is personal: examining the experiences of her forebears who immigrated to the US: leaving country, culture, and language, forging new identities in an alien land. A daisy chain of people and conflicting stories - and also a specific memory of making daisy chains with her grandmother.
“Summer breezes caressed me, my legs stepped forward as thought possessed of their own appetites, and the mountains kept promising.”
The Blue of Distance
A history lesson, mourning the fact that we can never be as truly lost in the landscape as the conquistadors in a continent they knew nothing about.
Slave narratives teach that sometimes acceptance is the answer! Like early white captives who embraced tribal life, and resisted “rescue”. Like
Cabeza de Vaca, who, after ten years, “ceased to be lost not by returning but by turning into something else”.
We need to find new ways to be lost, with rituals to mark transitions - and that might mean losing the past to join the present.
Abandon
“One of the allures of ruins in the city is that of wilderness… a place full of the promise of the unknown.”
Image: Abandoned Building, Caven Point NJ, by Peter Hujar, who is mentioned in this essay (
Source.)
In contrast to natural wilderness, suburbs are like tranquilizers: architecture and topography as drugs. And there’s a sadder story here, about a friend from Solnit’s youth who lived with abandon, but ultimately abandoned her life because of drugs. Her death changed Solnit’s life forever.
The Blue of Distance
“Every love has its landscape… Thus place… possesses you in its absence.”
Musing on music and place, landscape and memory. Country and western songs are about learning from the aftermath of disaster. The blues are “captivity narratives” about “perpetual internal exile” - a contrast to the slave narratives referenced in the preceding Blue essay.
Two Arrowheads
“It wasn’t particular things but the space between them, that abundance of absence, that is the desert’s invitation.”
There is life in the desert, as well as emotion, mystery, and extremes of light and temperature. It’s “alive with the primal forces”. You might even find the odd arrowhead. And tortoises and snakes.
“It was the vastness that I loved and an austerity that was also voluptuous… Solitude in the city is about the lack of other people or rather their distance beyond a door or wall, but in remote places it isn’t an absence but the presence of something else, a kind of humming silence in which solitude seems as natural to your species as any other.”
The Blue of Distance
“Movies are made out of darkness as well as light.”
Sometimes people disappear:
Amelia Earheart,
Antoine de Saint-Exupery, and in some senses,
Yves Klein, among others.
Klein, an artist, patented
International Klein Blue in 1960. He was also a Rosicrucian mystic and a fourth dan blackbelt in judo.
The other aspect of this essay is cartography and what’s not included: the difference between what we know we don’t know (terra incognita) and what we imagine we do know (Shangri-La).
Knowledge has many limits, including our understanding of it. She notes Donald Rumsfeld’s famous saying about
known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns, including the context of his being “one of the vultures making the case for bombing Baghdad’s civilians”. She also highlights what he omitted: “unknown knowns” - our unconscious, or disavowed beliefs.
Maps are keys, but do they give us freedom to explore, or lock us into the known?
One-Story House
“The weight of a dream is not in proportion to its size. Some dreams are made of fog, some of lace, some of lead.”
Solnit dreams repeatedly of her single-story childhood home, though the memories are not happy. She pivots to endangered species, and then some success at reversing that in California. It turns out that is partly due to a protection plan her father wrote. By discovering how stressful that job was, she understands and accepts the tensions at home, and thus him.
The one-story house is a place for more than one interpretation, more than one story.
“It is in the nature of things to be lost.”
This was my first Solnit, though it has long been on my radar. I found it in
Tate Modern art gallery. Odd (despite one essay about blue and another about Klein), but fortunate. I will return to her. -
All your life, you've never seen
A woman taken by the wind
Fleetwood Mac, Rhiannon
I simply could not get these lyrics out of my head as I read Rebecca Solnit's remarkable book of essays A Field Guide to Getting Lost. Truth be told, Solnit could be an amazing philosopher if she organized her thoughts a little more tightly. But she is, at heart, a cultural historian, an activist, and a journalist, and not a philosopher. I admit that I went into this book hoping for something to act as a compliment to one of my favorite reading discoveries of recent years, Frederic Gros'
A Philosophy of Walking. So in ways, I was both disconcerted and pleasantly surprised that Solnit's work was not what I was expecting.
Is any book exactly what we were expecting? What a boring world that would be, if that were true of all books.
My "gripe" about the book, as outlined above, has more to do with me than with her. And it is a very minor complaint overshadowed by Solnit's brilliance. Most of the time, I felt that the book delivered on its title. At times, I was lost, but not lost in a panicked or annoyed way. I was glad to be lost in Solnit's reflections on everything from the death of friends to disconcerting dreams to desert tortoises. Solnit's thoughts flow with great ease, internally, though they may seem a little jumpy when bouncing from subject to subject. Transitions aren't her strength. Immersion is.
Take, for instance, the exploration of what "lost" means:
Lost really has two disparate meanings. Losing things is about the familiar falling away, getting lost is about the unfamiliar appearing. There are objects and people that disappear from your sight or knowledge or possession; you lose a bracelet, a friend, the key. You still know where you are. Everything is familiar except that there is one item less, one missing element. Or you get lost, in which case the world has become larger than your knowledge of it. Either way, there is a loss of control. Imagine yourself streaming through time shedding gloves, umbrellas, wrenches, books, friends, homes, names. This is what the view looks like if you take a rear-facing seat on the train. Looking forward you constantly acquire moments of arrival, moments of realization, moments of discovery. The wind blows your hair back and you are greeted by what you have never seen before. The material falls away in onrushing experience. It peels off like skin from a molting snake. Of course to forget the past is to lose the sense of loss that is also memory of an absent richness and a set of clues to navigate the present by, the art is not one of forgetting but letting go. And when everything else is gone, you can be rich in loss."
If I based my assessment of the book on prose alone, I would grade this book among the best. Her turns of phrase are scintillating, her metaphors envelop the heart and mind, and her sometimes strange insights are enlightening and beautiful, as demonstrated in her musings on butterflies and their transformation:
The people thrown into other cultures go through something of the anguish of the butterfly, whose body must disintegrate and reform more than once in its life cycle . . . the butterfly is so fit an emblem of the human soul that its name in Greek is psyche, the word for soul. We have not much language to appreciate this phase of decay, this withdrawal, this era of ending that must precede beginning. Nor of the violence of the metamorphosis, which is often spoken of as though it were as graceful as a flower blooming.
I found this paragraph poignant, mostly because of my background. I was raised as an Air Force brat: Born in Germany (on U.S. soil, literally - when the military builds a hospital overseas, they fly over a dump-truck load of dirt from the States and drop it into the pit that will serve as the hospital's foundation. So, yes, I can be President of the United States, technically), then moved from place to place, Texas, the Philippines, back to Texas, to Italy, Minnesota, Nebraska, England where I graduated high school (barely), then on to adult life in Wyoming, then Pennsylvania, California, Utah, and, now, Wisconsin. And these were "living" situations, not "traveling" or "touristing". I was resident there. I lived there. In the Philippines, we lived in a house on stilts and my dog was eaten by the locals; in Italy, we lived among the Italians for most of our stay, only moving into Base Housing a few months before we left; and I came back from England with an accent - which was great for getting dates, incidentally - and colourful phrases and words like "sod off" and "wanker" - which doesn't get you dates. You can imagine the impact that this had on my life. I left a lot of friends behind, most of whom I've never seen again. I don't have a "home" to go to. Home is wherever my family is (currently my parents are in California, though I don't consider it "home") or wherever I happen to be (Wisconsin feels more like "home" than anyplace else, probably because we've been here 20 years). But part of my "home" exists only in my imagination, in memory. The base we lived at in Germany has been made into a public airport. The base I lived at in the Philippines is literally
buried under volcanic ash.
San Vito, Italy is now, partially, a town - they tore down the barbed-wire-capped fences and let people build residences and stores and markets when the Air Force moved out. Still, about 80% of the property there is simply abandoned. The base I lived at in England, RAF Chicksands, is now a
British spy base - they won't let me back on except for short tours that are very strictly shepherded (my brother went on one a few years back and didn't even get to see our old house, though it was, literally, just down the hill from where the tour guides took him). So while I got to see the world anew every few years, there is some residual pain from the friends I left behind or who sometimes, because of the nature of being Air Force brats, left me behind.
I still dream of those places that are no longer places. Or no longer the places I know. Yes, everyone goes through that to some extent: buildings are torn down, people move, parking lots are made over old fields. But I'm talking about something more profound here. I cannot go back to Clark Air Base housing in the Philippines. San Vito has little, if any semblance to the place I knew as an adolescent. Chicksands is strictly off-limits to me outside of a guided tour to the place I once delighted in roaming and meandering around at my leisure. In many ways, I was born lost, I grew up lost, and I will always be lost, whether I'm looking forward or backward on my life. I still dream of those places, wandering around, always looking for friends who are not there in places that are strange, alien, twisted. I am often lost in those dreams and awaken confused and grasping for something to ground me, an anchor in the place my body occupies at the time.
The places in which any significant event occurred become embedded with some . . . emotion, and so to recover the memory of the place is to recover the emotion, and sometimes to revisit the place uncovers the emotion. Every love has its landscape. Thus place, which is always spoken of as though it only counts when you're present, possesses you in its absence, takes on another life as a sense of place, a summoning in the imagination with all the atmospheric effect and association of a powerful emotion. The places inside matter as much as the ones outside. It is as though in the way places stay with you and that you long for them they become deities - a lot of religions have local deities, presiding spirits, geniuses of the place. You could imagine that in those songs Kentucky or the Red River is a spirit to which the singer prays, that they mourn the dreamtime before banishment, when the singer lived among the gods who were not phantasms but geography, matter, earth itself.
Amen, Sister. Hallelujah! -
I am obsessed with reading about nomadism. About place, the the experience we have as we move through it, about topography, how it reveals us while simultaneously revealing itself, about wandering, how our thoughts work when we move. Solnit is a fantastic author in this vein.
Remember those rambling conversations that you had late late late into the night at some coffee shop when you were not yet twenty something, or maybe you were just, when you were discovering (inventing!?) philosophy, and you managed to link almost everything in the known universe together with some kindred soul, over endless refills and bad french fries, and then you went home, to bed, with a mixture of melancholy, world weariness, hope and the soft satisfaction of a job well done?
Solnit rambles this way. Her sources are wide and varied, from the accounts of Cabeza de Vaca as he wandered an undiscovered west, to her father's own master plan for Marin County, to a buddhist abbott's sermon, to her own dreams and recollections. Ideas nest in other ideas, and they are all connected, nesting in songs, childhood memories, lost photos, artistic projects, dreams, cultural myths, historical anecdote, and recollections of moments. Sometimes she explains, sometimes jumpcuts. It is the exact pace of walking, the same rhythm of thinking while moving.
Solnit writes about the personal experience of place, and about the layers of memory, memoir, history, and association that places have for each of us. Or maybe better said, what places cause in each of us. It finally occurred to me, in the last pages of the book, what she might be doing. All these disparate elements that she brings into the book
might otherwise be lost. Her dead high school friend, the abbott's sermon, her thoughts about the American West. She is all over the place, but has created a single spot for all of it. By weaving these snippets together and giving them a place, she ensures that they will not be lost.
PS It is fabulous synchronicity that I found and read this book at the same time as Psychogeography; they are utterly different and complementary, two perspectives on the same thing. -
Rebecca Solnit does indeed have a way with words. The prose is exquisite and she has added a new dimension to getting lost, not only when looking for a place, but also within oneself.
I could feel myself accompanying her on her peregrinations and it has indeed taught me a few things about myself that I didn't know.
That's all that needs to be said - buy the book, read it, put your feet up, and lose yourself in this remarkable work. -
به این فکر میکنم که میزان لذت بردن و ستاره دادن ما به جستارهایی که می خوانیم به شدت به این بستگی دارد که تا چه اندازه نحوهی فکر کردن و نوشتن و تحلیل کردن جستار نویس عزیز را بپسندیم. به عبارتی اینکه چقدر موقع خواندن نوشتهها بگوییم :«ا این موضوعی که خیلی وقت بود در سر من بود از ذهن کس دیگر هم گذشته»
البته تمام این شرایط وابسته به جستارنویس قهار بودن نویسنده است که کار چندان راحتی هم نیست، جستار چیزی فراتر از صرفا تجربههای روزمره و خاطرات کودکیمان گفتن است. جستار نوشتن در نظر من آمیختن مجموعی از درک ما نسبت به جهان هستی و تمام چیزهایی که چشم مان را به خود خیره می کنند است.
از همه این حرفها که بگذریم من با خانوم سولنیت اوقات خوبی را س��ری کردم، هرکدام جستارها را مانند میان وعدهای خوش طعم در یک روز می خواندم و خیلی ساده و بی کم و کاست لذت می بردم.
من بهرهی خودم را از این مجموعه جستار بردم. -
[3+] A collection of stories, reflections and meditations on getting lost - both as a state of mind and literally in the natural world. Most of these essays require a level of attentiveness which I could not achieve - my currently sluggish mind drifting and getting lost in my own thoughts. I did appreciate most of these essays - especially those of a personal nature.
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, wandering in a terrain where even the most familiar places aren't quite themselves and open onto the impossible. -
Throughout this book, I couldn't get Picasso's The Blue Room out of my mind. Just like the painting, A Field Guide to Getting Lost holds a deep sense of intimacy; of isolation, the slippage of time and memory; a yearning for and appreciation of the outside.
As with the painting, there is a hidden portrait between the covers of this book, a life composed and painted over with disparate, affective visuals, to be lost and found.
There is something about Solnit's writing here that's quite like the colour blue—the blue of distance—that dominates it; the beauty of her words derives so much from the landscape around them that it seems to disappear and go out of depth when sought out for itself, so that it is nearly impossible to quote from any essay in this volume. It requires presence, and absence, and knowing, and not knowing, to get lost—be it between these pages or otherwise.
The Blue Room (1901), 21 x 24 Oil on Canvas
A Field Guide to Getting Lost presents a rather different side of Solnit than in her more recent political writing: it is unhurried—purposedly slow, even; a tessellation of essays where cultural history, memoir, nature writing, and aesthetic criticism wash into each other, wave building upon wave until they form delicate rosettes of ideas that, like desert selenite, can best be appreciated in the manner of their coming together; it is in their intricacy and otherworldliness that they become precious perspectives on realities that are otherwise relegated to the mundane.
This book has left me with much to think about, and perhaps it will make more—and less—sense in the blue of distance, and out of the blue. I am left thinking that the horizon is made material out of thin air, and that in all our yearning we project our selves onto a lesser an unknown composed of the need for knowing. -
This book is written like a love letter which, in this case, is an insult to its topic.
I found many of the anecdotes and references too personal making parts seem more like an autobiography (or collection of excuses) than a cultural document on the idea of being lost. The writing is also full of misplaced lyrical indulgences that detract from the somewhat sporadic historical references that seemed otherwise well researched and interesting. Maybe Solnit couldn't come up with enough material, maybe the book should have been an article, maybe she was just lonely. -
This is my third try of reading Solnit, and I just have to admit, although I like some of the thoughts she brings, she jumps around too much, and my interest usually starts to wane. I did enjoy some parts of this book, some passing thoughts, but I think she is simply not a writer for me to keep reading.
-
I like Rebecca Solnit a lot. Mostly as a person as the only thing I have read of hers (outside of the occasional Harper's Bazaar essay), the only other book-length writing of hers, has been
Wanderlust: A History of Walking. I liked that one; Solnit is a fellow wanderer, which I can appreciate, and she respects the art and culture of pedestrianism, if that's a thing (which I am now claiming is). I have several of her other books marked as To-Read, I even own a couple. But as a person, she generally says all the things I believe or want to know more about, and she has all sorts of adventures I would love to have myself.
Also, she and I share the same birthday which means we're meant to be together. One day I will have a birthday party with her and Hope Sandoval and it will be the coolest birthday party ever.
I'd be pretty happy to grow up to be Rebecca Solnit. The same way I would be happy to grow up to become Annie Dillard, or Joan Didion, or Susan Sontag. Women essayists have touched me in a way that not a lot of other writers have managed to do, and it's in part due to my patron saints of essays and personal narratives that I decided to return to school 18 years after graduation to get my graduate degree in creative writing (concentrating on creative nonfiction).
Similar to Wanderlust, this collection of writing focuses on the art of wandering and how to, in other words, become lost - there are different ways to "be lost", and they're not always bad. She writes about the different ways she has lost her way, the different ways she has watched others lose their way, and how all of those things that happen to each and every one of us shape and alter each and every one of us. We all lead such strange and amazing lives. Like if you stop to think about it, even if you're living a standard suburban life that feels ridiculously boring or whatever, if you really stop to think about it your life is actually fairly amazing. Think about all the choices you have made, or the choices others have made around you that have shifted the path you were on at one point in your life. It's fucking bananas, is what it is. But it's also sort of beautiful.
Solnit's reading is accessible and somewhat poignant. I think a lot of readers can relate because they can see themselves in Solnit's experiences, or the way she shares her experiences with her readers. She writes about memory in a way that I can really dig, since memory is a theme that usually jumps out to me most in literature and something I spend a shit-ton of time thinking about in my free time because I have a notoriously bad memory. (Actually, it's not bad as much as it's an alternate memory from everyone else.)A city is built to resemble a conscious mind, a network that can calculate, administrate, manufacture. Ruins become the unconscious of a city, its memory unknown, darkness, lost lands, and in this truly bring it to life.
(p89)
I didn't like this book as much as I liked Wanderlust, and in large part that is because I felt there was more of a mental meandering style through this collection than I remember from Wanderlust - or, at least, it didn't work so well here. She started in one place and wound up somewhere else entirely, and I wasn't always convinced the path from A to Z was all that clear. Sometimes it felt Solnit just wanted to put words down, and not really worry about where she wound up.
But it's Rebecca Solnit, she can basically do whatever the fuck she wants. I also believe we learn a lot about ourselves through our own writing, and in a way perhaps Solnit was working out some things with writing this. It doesn't make it a bad collection, but I hoped for a bit more linearity, or consistency, or something.
Though if her point was to get lost in her writing, then I can say with confidence: NAILED IT.
Her writing is enjoyable as well as it is accessible. She doesn't waste a lot of time being extraneously flowery, but she's in no way dry either. Mostly I just liked being taken on the thought-journey along with Solnit, and then dreaming about the different ways I have been lost throughout life - the good and the bad. It happens to all of us, but Solnit reminds us that this is what it means to life, and what we get out of it is the true measure of success. It's not so much that we get lost from time to time, but it's about how we learn to find ourselves again, and what we learn about ourselves in the process.People look into the future and expect that the forces of the present will unfold in a coherent and predictable way, but any examination of the past reveals that the circuitous routes of change are unimaginably strange. No logic and no prophesy could explain the evolution of the whale from an ancient aquatic creature through eons on land and then back in the sea to become something utterly different from anything that could survive on the surface of the earth.
(p122)
There's a beauty to getting lost. Giving yourself up to the possibility of adventure and experience. A trust in yourself that no matter what happens, you will be alright. It can be a move to another state to start a new chapter in your life. It can be the decision to return to get a masters degree almost 20 years after receiving a bachelors. It can be quitting a job and starting new somewhere else. It can be going for a long walk in the woods and not worrying about sticking to the trail, or taking a different trail for once, without knowing where it will take you.
I love to hear how people have gotten lost. It shows me so much about them, it shows every strength that they embody, whether they think they're strong or not. It's sort of incredible. -
"We fly; we dream in darkness; we devour heaven in bites too small to be measured."
With each day we traverse, do we even know who we truly are, where we come from, where we are going? Getting lost is physical and mental, a state of mind, for "the mind too can be imagined as a landscape." We despair whenever we get lost, but what if getting lost is not a problem to be solved, only a necessary route?
Solnit often employs 'place' within her writing to expound upon universal truths or to encapsulate a state of mind or state of being, so this collection is reflective, meditative, nuanced. Utilizing an uncommon structure, it is a ballad to the natural world but also a celebration of losing oneself in order to truly find one's true self. It is about the human capacity to extend itself into unfamiliar territory in order to become a different or better version. It is about "the blue of distance:"
The blue of distance comes with time, with the discovery of melancholy , of loss, the texture of longing, of the complexity of the terrain we traverse, and with the years of travel.
There is a lot to learn about history (from a historian) and landscapes in these essays.
The Faraway Nearby was my absolute favorite of hers (even the prose in that collection is more opulent), but the blue of this collection I found fascinating. And in those moments when the book's trajectory is surprising, it's like getting lost and finding your way again in an aha moment. -
There's something light about this book. Not light in the manner of an enormous buoyant force, but in a tone of equanimity, of sitting on the floor with one's legs crossed. The lightness that comes with accepting the terrible things that can happen in one's life.
Terrible things happened in that house, though not particularly unusual or or interesting ones; suffice to say there's a reason why therapists receive large hourly sums for listening to that kind of story.
Rebecca Solnit navigates through her life with a lot of the wisdom that one is able to summon when looking far back into the past, after time has healed. Solnit speaks of a question once asked to her, a very important one for those who are longing to find something unknown.How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is unknown to you?
She doesn't know, but she tries to find out. One often forgets that ideas that we dismiss as half baked or trivial, have an essence that can be built upon. It involves the will to live with the unknown and the imperfect. To put the half baked idea back into the oven for a little longer.
My favourite thing about a Field Guide to Getting lost is that it found me at the right time, at a time when I needed it.
17th February 2015
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Just reread much of this. I have no idea why I only gave it four stars the last time around.
25th December 2016
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I did not connect with this book. Too rambling, too random, too breathlessly poetic, too self-absorbed, too... something. Not for me.
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Will review over the weekend. Piecing together my thoughts on this will take a while.
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“To lose yourself: a voluptuous surrender, lost in your arms, lost to the world, utterly immersed in what is present so that its surroundings fade away. 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.”
I think more than anything else it was the fact that I could relate to the author's personal stories so very often that made me love this book so much.
Solnits connects history, art, geography and literature with her personal stories and her family's story wandering and exploring all the layers and so many possible connections between them. Sometimes, it seemed very private to me, other times generalised but there was always a harmony between the chapters and the topics and the occurances she mentioned. It was beautiful. It felt like wandering with the author through her life and her interconnected thoughts and ideas.“...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...”
Maybe this collection of essays explained a bit of myself to me since I feel a bit lost nearly all the time. Lost in the world, in myself, my mind, ideas and concepts. Just lost. And constantly getting somewhere unexpected thanks to this "lost". Apart from that, I enjoyed the concept of "the Blue in the Distance" since I love this colour and all its shades and connecting it to longing to get there, somewhere far away, was a beautiful idea. I have always been enamored with the sky, if you look through the photographs that I take you will discover that over 70% are photos of the sky including the sunset, sunrise, various cloud formations, and especially the nightsky. There has always been a lot of blue in my life and it was nice to get a possible reason for it.“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.”
This is a stunning collection of essays with a variety of intertwined ideas, a bit of rambling which is rather pleasant, and I would say that to a degree it provides priceless advice for writers and artistic people in general.
Highly recommended. -
Reads a bit like Annie Dillard, what with its gentle contemplation of nature and our place in it. Some essays stronger than others. Particularly liked the section on settlers' children taken and adopted by Indians in violent raids along the frontiers. The "lost" become "found" once they fully assimilate to the new culture, to the point where many do not want to return to "civilization" (a word empowered by whomever gets a chance to define it).
Also interesting riffs on life in the desert, tortoises, cartography, and the color blue. Lots of riffs on blue. Off she goes into the wild blue yonder. Lost. Get it? My first Solnit. Sometimes she gets it going and wordsmiths her way to sublime stretches. Other times the narrative is a bit bumpier and less successful. Still, no regrets in reading it and finishing the year on this blue note. -
meh... Am I the only one who doesn't fall in love with Solnit's writing? Maybe this just wasn't the right book for me. I enjoyed the chapter on artist Yves Klein, but otherwise the essays seemed somewhat random and occasionally hard to follow. And, as my father rightly says, there's nothing more boring than listening to a person tell you about their dreams (their actual zzzz dreams, not aspirations). This was true for me in the case of this book, I'm afraid.
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Rebecca Solnit is one of the most interesting cultural-historical writers of the moment. You can be denigrating or praising about her being a leading progressive feminist, and she certainly is, but Solnit really digs deeper, especially in this book. "A Field Guide to Getting Lost" is a collection of essays that stand seemingly separate from each other, but they have a clear thread (in this case a 'blue' thread): Solnit muses about the different forms of "getting lost" in life , and how essential that it is to real life. This has become a very autobiographical book because she draws on her own walking experiences, the migration history of her family, her own punk phase in the 1970s, and so on. But also experiences of ‘confusion’ or ‘wandering’ in other lives, times and cultures are discussed. Once again, the basic message is that wandering, getting lost is inherent to life, is actually the rule rather than the ordered life to which we all cling:
“Reading these stories, it's tempting to think that the arts to be learned are those of tracking, hunting, navigating, skills of survival and escape. Even in the everyday world of the present, an anxiety to survive manifests itself in cars and clothes for far more rugged occasions than those at hand, as though to express some sense of the toughness of things and of readiness to face them. But the real difficulties, the real arts of survival, seem to lie in more subtle realms. There, what's called for is a kind of resilience of the psyche, a readiness to deal with what comes next. These captives lay out in a stark and dramatic way what goes on in every life: the transitions whereby you cease to be who you were. Seldom is it as dramatic, but nevertheless, something of this journey between the near and the far goes on in every life. Sometimes an old photograph, an old friend, an old letter will remind you that you are not who you once were, for the person who dwelt among them, valued this, chose that, wrote thus, no longer exists. Without noticing it you have traversed a great distance; the strange has become familiar and the familiar if not strange at least awkward or uncomfortable, an outgrown garment. And some people travel far more than others. There are those who receive as birthright an adequate or at least unquestioned sense of self and those who set out to reinvent themselves, for survival or for satisfaction, and travel far. Some people inherit values and practices as a house they inhabit; some of us have to burn down that house, find our own ground, build from scratch, even as a psychological metamorphosis.”
Now and then there are beautiful, even brilliant insights like these to be found in this book. But they are often wrapped in a rather rippling retoric (Solnit clearly likes hearing herself speak), in a succession of diverging stories and memories, usually in circumferential movements, such as during a walk without a specific final goal. That is certainly in line with the central theme, but the slightly more impatient reader can be put to the test. At least I know for sure that I will read more about Solnit. -
A Field Guide to Getting Lost is a collection of essays? reminiscences? random but somehow connected thoughts by
Rebecca Solnit. Solnit meditates on how, to paraphrase a quote from Meno that she uses towards the beginning of the book, we can look for that we do not know about. And, ultimately, the only way to discover this unknown unknown is to get lost, in time or space.
Solnit tells many stories in this collection, all of which I enjoyed greatly. She talks about explorers who got lost in the American wilderness who left their European culture behind and adopted the indigenous cultures (she also talks about children captured by Native Americans who, having seen their families murdered, also accept the new culture but where Solnit seems to praise this phenomenon, I wondered it it had more to do with Stockholm Syndrome than some exciting adaptation to being lost-a necessary adjustment but not necessarily one to be celebrated. But that's a small caveat to my general feeling about this book).
Solnit shares personal memories, and stories of artists who embrace the distance ("a distance of blue") and the reality of desire as an essential part of human experience, not just a space that waits to be filled.
I felt like a child listening to Solnit's stories, a position I enjoyed tremendously. But I did feel that the thoughts sometimes felt so random I lost the connecting thread. But I enjoyed the journey of this book and the idea that sometimes getting lost is a necessary experience in order to be transformed into another self that is the valuable next step in the process of becoming fully and deeply alive. -
چطور با ناشناختههای زندگی مواجه میشیم؟ چطور دنبال کشفشون میریم داوطلبانه؟ آیا همیشه بیهدف سرگردانیم؟ منظرهی این سرگردانی چه اهمیتی داره؟
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Solnit is so very quotable. Whenever I read her essays, in this book or elsewhere, I find myself jotting down excerpts every few minutes. This collection is filled with lovely reflections of her many interests, written eloquently. Overall, it was a true pleasure to read.
My only quibble is that during some passages of my reading I found myself thinking that it is possible to overdue metaphors and similes. Much as I like them and understand that creating good ones is an art in itself, I became frustrated and impatient with everything being like some other thing, with each experience representing something grander than itself.
What I learnt though is that the human and artistic urge to make meaning can be carried too far. The graceful integrity of a creature, or a landscape, or another person being simply and uniquely what they are is fundamentally beautiful. I think most artists, including Solnit, would agree with that. Can we simply describe without so much interpretation? Can we sometimes quell the writerly urge to be forever expanding the vision? -
Solnit - A Field Guide to Getting Lost
Admission: I haven't read any Solnit (beside the occasional Orion essay?) in years. I remembered appreciating her tendency toward collage, connecting strings between seemingly disparate worlds, showing us how anything can relate to, well, anything. Here, though, it's clear that she'd one good essay (her introduction) and several good ideas... but that not quite everything is quite so connected as she'd have us believe. Here, her ideas felt overblown, overexposed, overwrought verbosity for the sake of filling enough pages to make a full collection. Which, well - it happens. It also, though, makes me wonder how accurate my memories of Solnit may or may not be.
[2 stars for this ball of string on which we live.] -
I'm convinced Rebecca Solnit could talk about any topic and I'd be keen to listen. She is well-read and sensitive, and has a mind like a bird dog, picking up the scent of one idea, hunting it either into the light or into the underbrush before picking up the trail of the next idea and loping after it. What an intellect.
The book is about all the possible ways of getting lost, especially when getting lost is the only way to find something, or to be found. But I'd characterize the main theme as exploration. Not about questing after something (although you have to get your motivation somewhere), but about loving and respecting the wide-open world and the journey to get wherever it is you're going. If I'm making it all sound esoteric and theoretical, it's because I'm not as limber as Solnit. There is solid history in these pages and personal storytelling, as well as far-reaching theorizing. I appreciated all of it.
My one quibble was that the writing was occasionally denser than it needed to be. I found myself unpacking quite a few sentences. But I suspect this is how Solnit thinks, and if that's true, I wouldn't monkey with it.
A book for folks who believe a window can always be larger. -
نقشه هایی برای گم شدن مجموعه ای از جستار هاست که در آن ها نویسنده نقشه هایی را برای گم شدن، گم بودن و گم کردن و گشت و گذار در سکوتِ حاصل از این گم شدگیِ از روی عمد (نه از روی اتفاق) ارایه می دهد. نقشههای کتاب نه برای پیدا کردن مسیر، که درواقع برای گم کردن خود است و به اصطلاح "گاهی باید گم بشوی تا بتوانی چیزی را پیدا کنی."
در جستار های مختلف کتاب، نویسنده ی به نوعی دست مارا می گیرد و به مکان های مختلفی می برد که افکار یا خاطره ای در پس ذهنش از آن دارد و مارا هم در ا��ن قدم زدن شریک می کند. جستار های با عنوان آبیِ دوردست را خیلی دوست داشتم که اشاره به این داشت که رنگ آبی با دوردست ها گره خورده و زمانی که نزدیک می شویم از هم میپاشد و دیگر آنطور که از دور به نظر می امد، نیست. جایی خواندم که درباره ی سولنیت نوشته بود: "ربکا سولنیت را میتوان کوچنشینی در سرزمین اندیشه نامید که بساطش را از صحراها و کوهستانها و جنگلها تا سرزمینهای هنر و سیاست و تاریخ فرهنگی بر دوش کشیده و عشق به رفتن در واژهواژهی نوشتههایش موج میزند."
ترجمه ی کتاب از نیما اشرفی و بسیار روان بود اما از آنجایی که کتاب حاوی نکات فراوانی بود که باید در آن ها تامل می کردم، خواندنش بسیار زمان بر بود و چندین ماه طول کشید. اما خسته کننده نبود. طوری که باز هم شوق بازگشت به خوانش کتاب را داشتم و دوست داشتم با نویسنده، مکان های بیشتری را کشف کنم. -
Solnit's writing style was painfully pretentious, her thought processes were lofty and disconnected, and the conclusion gave no real delivery of a clear purpose. Though there were a few quotes that stuck out to me, a majority of the book was hard to follow.
