A Field Guide To Getting Lost (2006) - Plot & Excerpts
“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.
She does rambling right; lots of great quotes and ancedotes. For instance, this one by Virginia Woolf from "To the Lighthouse":"For now she need not think about anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of-to think; well, not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others. Although she continued to knit, and sat upright, it was thus that she felt herself; and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures. When life sank down for a moment, the range of experience seemed limitless...Beneath it is all dark, it is all spreading, it is unfathomably deep; but now and again we rise to the surface and that is what you see us by. Her horizon seemed to her limitless."Solnit has given being lost a lot of thought. This book- part memoir, part research, part life philosophy-would be perfect for anyone taking a trip to a foreign place. But also to anyone spending sometime wandering around our their familiar place.
What do You think about A Field Guide To Getting Lost (2006)?
Had high hopes. Solnit seems tight, intellectually curious and selective, too organized in her attempt even as she tries hard to lose ground beneath her. She almost gets gone and then...mmm, nah. In the middle of the book were really great lines about music, mix tapes, sonic pathways tracing histories and that felt really genuine, even vulnerable. Overall she's well schooled but not visceral or in the dirt enough, for me anyway. I don't know——Annie Dillard really does it for me but that's a helluva fence to run.
—Wendy Lewis
For starters, thanks Jacob, you were right. Solnit takes the historian's, as well as the environmentalist's approach to an analysis of loss, or what it means to be lost. Many of the essays here are personal explorations of mystery and human uncertainty, which eventually branch out into seemingly random connections that Mrs. Solnit has ostensibly pulled from research on many of her other books. Field Guide certainly does a fair share of wandering in itself, but the book's philosophical musings never stray too far away from coherence, or profound insight. It's remarkable how she can take such an ambiguous premise, speculate on why losing oneself is such a relevant issue for the human mind and, in the end, avoid a lot of metaphysical gibberish about the soul. All expressed in prose that is dense without sounding too pedantic or alienating. Solnit seems like a wonderful paradox; environmental concern mixed with philosophical analysis that is the furthest thing from heavy-handed idealism.
—Jimmy
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.
—Melanie
