rebecca solnit a field guide to getting lost

In four clearheaded essays, all titled 'The Blue of Distance,' she contemplates the color blue. Solnit carries the question around for years, and from it she fashions her own, inquiring into 'expanding the boundaries of the self into unknown territory.' How do we go about becoming someone else? she wonders.īut her interests are not always this opaque. 'How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?' he asks. Meno confronts Socrates in one of Plato's dialogues with the kind of philosophical puzzle that encourages eye-rolling on the reader's part. She ventures from an observation on the vanishing language of the Wintu of north-central California to an obscure story about a junkie who loses his arm as a consequence of his addiction.Īlso, Solnit muses over the densely packed ideas of Virginia Woolf, Walter Benjamin, John Keats and the ancient sophist Meno. She begins it with a memory of being drunk at a Passover dinner when she is 8 and heads from there into the serious business of becoming intentionally lost. And though knowledgeable about many subjects, too often she draws connections among them that are difficult for the reader to follow.Ĭonsider the first essay, 'Open Door,' as a test of whether you are on her wavelength. One thing we learn about Solnit from her personal essays is that being lost often involves the act of leaving: leaving home, leaving lovers, leaving 'the conversation, the obligation.' Attentive to physical detail, she creates evocative imagery throughout the book. From her own history she recalls childhood wounds, missing grandmothers and failed love affairs. She sweeps through topics as disparate as endangered species, Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, punk rock, butterflies and ruined buildings. In nine loosely related essays Solnit draws metaphorical maps of deserts and of some urban spaces as well.

Rebecca solnit a field guide to getting lost