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Rebecca Solnit has gone on my list of authors whose work I’d like to own and read all of. It started off with her newest essay collection Men Explain Things To Me and was cemented by A Field Guide to Getting Lost. Field Guide was on my TBR list for years but I just never got around to it. Why did I take so long? I am a believer that every book has the right time and for whatever reason the right time wasn’t until now.
How to describe the book? Essays? Yes but not really because each one is connected. But it isn’t straight up nonfiction either because there is no real “plot” other than the theme of getting lost. Which makes it very much a long meditation. But yet there is a direction of sorts because four of the chapters/essays are called “The Blue of Distance” and these alternate with chapters called things like “Abandon” and “One-Story House.” The blue chapters all tend to be outward facing, about someone — the artist Yves Kline for instance — or about something — a certain color of blue or country western music. The other chapters tend to be more personally reflective and wide-ranging discussing things like leaving the door open for Elijah during Passover dinner, hiking in the wilderness, and family history. But even the distinction between the blue chapters and the named chapters blurs as Solnit will include personal reflection in the blue chapters and quotes Meno, Simone Weil, and a Tibetan sage in the personal chapters. I found all this intermingling to be satisfying and wanted the book to be longer than it is. A Good sign, right?
A Field Guide to Getting Lost is about many things, but at its core it is about stories:
A story can be a gift like Ariadne’s thread , or the labyrinth, or the labyrinth’s raving Minotaur; we navigate by stories, but sometimes we only escape by abandoning them.
Stories anchor us, tell us who we are or point to who we want to be. We can become lost in our stories. We can also be oppressed by our stories and only find out who we are by giving them up and losing ourselves. Trouble is, we think of being lost as a bad thing, but when we are lost we are more open to possibility than we are when we are sure of ourselves and our stories:
Never to get lost is not to live, not to know how to get lost brings you to destruction, and somewhere in the terra icognita in between lies a life of discovery.
Even when we are sure of our stories, we still change over time and lose the person we used to be. When it happens so slowly we don’t even notice it we are not bothered by it until we are startled into awareness by an old photograph or letter, or a person we haven’t seen in many years. Sometimes, of course, loss happens very fast and unexpectedly and we are thrown for a loop. Not only do we write the story of our past but we write it well into the future and a sudden loss throws us into uncertainty, a place in which we do not feel comfortable spending time. And so we worry:
Worry is a way to pretend that you have knowledge or control over what you don’t — and it surprised me, even in myself, how much we prefer ugly scenarios to the pure unknown. Perhaps fantasy is what you fill up maps with rather than saying they too contain the unknown.
In the last chapter there is a beautiful piece of a lecture Solnit shares that she heard given at the Zen Center in San Francisco. Zen, you may know, is all about mindfulness, paying attention, living in the here and now not dwelling on the past or projecting into the future. And this lecture coming as it does nearly at the end of the final chapter, serves to sum up much of the whole book. It is such a wonderful story it is hard to pick out an exact sort of summary quote, but this might give you and idea:
‘Maybe if I really paid attention I’d notice that I don’t know what’s going to happen this afternoon and I can’t be fully confident that I am competent to deal with it. Maybe we’re willing to let in that thought. It has some reasonableness to it, I can’t exactly know, but chances are, possibilities are, it’s not going to be much different than what I’ve usually experienced and I’ll do just fine, so we close up that unsettling possibility with a reasonable response. The practice of awareness takes us below the reasonableness that we’d like to think we live with and then we start to see something quite fascinating, which is the drama of our inner dialogue, of the stories that go through our minds and the feelings that go through our heart, and we start to see in this territory it isn’t so neat and orderly and, dare I say it, safe or reasonable.’
The story goes on to remind us that it is okay to not know; okay to be uncertain; okay to run into a barrier and ask for help. It is okay to be lost. Because we can only really find what we need if we are lost:
That thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you is usually what you need to find, and finding it is a matter of getting lost.
I think it is okay to be lost, but not okay to give up the search, not okay to be content with uncertainty. One uncertainty leads to another, that is what the search is all about, the questioning, the answers, tentative though they they be and the search to clarify. “To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield,” said the poet.
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Richard, of course no one should give up the searching in favor of simply being lost. There is a danger in extremes on both ends, isn’t there? Neither being always certain or always lost is good. Solnit isn’t advocating perpetual lostness, only the importance of allowing ourselves to be lost sometimes.
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I have heard of this book and have requested it at the library. I also have her Wanderlust, a history of Walking, on order. Both look so very interesting. I like the idea of getting lost, though it gets more frightening as I get older. And yet, it’s only when we are lost that we can find something new out. I have a journal I’ve bought for Christmas that is entitled “All Who Wander are Not Lost”. Does Rebecca talk much about wandering? I wonder if that is covered in the walking book….. I keep forgetting that A Field Guide to getting Lost is about stories, so thanks for the review and the reminder. Does she say what happens when our story changes and we don’t know what it is, do people struggle with this? You can tell I am anxious to read this book myself now! lol Glad you enjoyed it.
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Susan, I’ve got Wanderlust too and am really looking forward to reading it maybe this winter or late spring when I am feeling cooped up. I think you are right, it gets harder and scarier to be lost the older we get. I like the idea of your journal 🙂 Solnit doesn’t talk much about wandering in this book, there are stories about being geographically lost and wandering in the wilderness until being found, but no real consideration of the act of wandering. She does talk about when stories change and how we struggle with that. She has a couple personal ones that are really interesting. I imagine you are going to really like this book.
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Great post Stefanie. This one particularly jumped out at me: “how much we prefer ugly scenarios to the pure unknown”. I was just talking about this very thing with a friend yesterday. “Prefer” is a strong word – I know she’s using it with a particular connotation – but certainly we tend to jump to the ugly/unpleasant/scary possibility when confronted with uncertainty. Self-protection perhaps? If we imagine the worst then we’ll be prepared to cope with it?
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whisperinggums, thanks! I worked hard to be able to get that quote in this post because it really stood out for me in the book. I understand you quibble with “prefer.” In the broader context it softens to mean “we would rather” or even “it is easier.” But it’s true, isn’t it? I’m not a huge worrier but sometimes I do and I suspect you are onto something, that if we can imagine the worst and prepare ourselves for it then maybe we’ll be more equipped to cope should it come to be?
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I’ve been reading your reviews of Solnit’s work with interest and with this review, I finally placed ‘A Field Guide to Getting Lost’ on hold at my library. Judging by the passages you shared, this book would be appropriate for me to read at this time of my personal story. Thanks for the review Stefanie!
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Get lost, Stefanie! This sounds like a good book of essays. Fiction that has someone on the run- and very lost- has a particular haunting power. I can also see that lostness can be a very painful experience that has no consolations Can you ever really know how to get lost?
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Heh, Ian, you made me laugh. It is a good collection. You are right, being lost is a powerful motif in fiction. I think being lost can have consolations, though they come after the fact when you have find or are found. Funny that you should ask whether you can know how to get lost, Solnit talks a little about it in the book and worries that we are losing that ability.
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Vanessa, oh yay! I hope you enjoy the book! I copied out so many passages to to save since I don’t own the book yet but borrowed it from the library. Do let me what you think of it after you read it 🙂
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I loved it Stefanie! She prodded me to very enjoyable contemplation. I especially liked the second portion of The Blue Distance, in which she talked about the American native Indians. I’m currently reading a novel about Mary Jemison and I shivered with delight that she mentioned her in that portion of the book.
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I am so glad you loved it Vanessa! Yes, I remember that second section. I have heard the story before but she tells it really well. What a wonderful serendipitous moment with the novel you are reading 🙂
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I love those quotes – it sounds like my kind of book. Thank you for a great review!
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Marina, glad you liked the quotes and enjoyed the review! 🙂
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What a wonderful review of a fascinating book, Stefanie. I keep coming across references to Rebecca Solnit, but this is the first time I’ve felt I really want to read her work. Every single quote you extracted was thought-provoking in all the right ways. Fiction is full of (usually metaphorical) getting lost, from the forests of fairy tales onwards, isn’t it? And does she mention that Yves Kline used a very particular shade of blue in his work, called (surprise!) Kline Blue?
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Helen, thank you! Solnit is turning out to be a very interesting and thoughtful writer. Fiction is definitely full of getting lost, especially in fairy tales as you point out. She does mention Kline’s special shade of blue. She actually spends quite a lot of time talking about the color blue over different periods of art and different artists. I bet you’d really like that part!
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Such wonderful quotes (love the stories/lbyrinths one especially). It sounds like a great book. I have her book Wanderlust and really must get to it! I know what you mean by having books on your shelves for years and then finally getting around to reading it and wondering why it ever took so long! I, too, think good books come along just when you need them!
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Danielle, isn’t that a good one? I like it too. A really good book I thought. I have Wanderlust too. Maybe we could read it together in the deep of winter when we’d most like to be elsewhere?
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I’m so glad you liked this book! I loved it when I read it fairly recently. But I REALLY loved Wanderlust, so I hope you enjoy that one too!
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Rebecca, it’s such a wonderful book and I really love Solnit’s voice. I think I will read Wanderlust over the winter. I’m sure I will love that one too!
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Why is it I think of you as someone who’s read loads of Solnit books? Am I seeing the future?? I have this to read (story of my particular life) and am looking forward to it, though I have to confess that this sentence:
‘I don’t know what’s going to happen this afternoon and I can’t be fully confident that I am competent to deal with it.’
is the one that is loudest in my brain CONSTANTLY. I must try to neutralise it with that zen thing that it’s okay not to know….
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Litlove, nope, only one other Solnit I’ve read. Maybe you are seeing into the future! Do you think you can catch a glimpse of the lottery jackpot numbers for me? I share the wealth! 🙂 How hard to have that going through your brain all the time. I hope you find a way to neutralize it or at least turn it into a barely discernible whisper.
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