A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit (PDF)

Description

“An intriguing amalgam of personal memoir, philosophical speculation, natural lore, cultural history, and art criticism.” —Los Angeles TimesFrom the award-winning author of Orwell’s Roses, a stimulating exploration of wandering, being lost, and the uses of the unknownWritten as a series of autobiographical essays, A Field Guide to Getting Lost draws on emblematic moments and relationships in Rebecca Solnit’s life to explore issues of uncertainty, trust, loss, memory, desire, and place. Solnit is interested in the stories we use to navigate our way through the world, and the places we traverse, from wilderness to cities, in finding ourselves, or losing ourselves. While deeply personal, her own stories link up to larger stories, from captivity narratives of early Americans to the use of the color blue in Renaissance painting, not to mention encounters with tortoises, monks, punk rockers, mountains, deserts, and the movie Vertigo. The result is a distinctive, stimulating voyage of discovery.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐This could be called “A Field Guide to Slowing Down.” Solnit unpacks life and the world at a walking pace. Her writing forces you go slowly enough to let your spirit catch up to you.

⭐The social perception of loss is denotatively and connotatively negative. It’s a word we associate with the agonies of death, the frustrations of deprivation, and the erosion of what was into what is not.To lose is to succumb to the fate that awaits us all–the diminutive sense of depletion and reduction. Solnit, though, disagrees. In her stunning collection of essays that make up A Field Guide to Getting Lost, for Solnit, loss is a transformative force, rather than a negative one–a powerful impetus for change that moves into the world of the liminal–the spaces between moments rather than the spaces that constitute moments.Relying on notable figures ranging in discipline and trade from Henry Thoreau, Conquistador Cabeza de Vaca, and Parisian performance artist and judo extraordinaire Yves Klein to pull her through from a state of solidity to that of the fluid, that of the blue itself–Solnit walks us through landscapes and worlds that are altogether foreign and exotic, to strangely convey the most familiar landscape of all–change.Solnit alternates between the constant imagery of the solid, the grounded, the ideas that allow us to plant ourselves in the constant–only to transition into that of the “blue”–that of the ethereal and atmospheric, that of the liminal. Every other essay is titled: “The Blue of Distance” allowing for discussion of the philosophical means of the color blue as an aesthetic principle and metaphor of fluidity–the intent of which is to bring us into the space between relinquishment and acquisition–giving and taking.More than a simple collection of essays, where Solnit succeeds is in the connection to the personal. We create ourselves through our association with others, picking and choosing tidbits of cultural ephemera we deem appropriate to absorb into our own lives–to make our own–making Solnit’s viewpoint wholly relatable. She almost takes the form of overt autobiography. Association with Solnit’s points becomes inherent.Although, the collection seems sporadic at times–the essays jump and move and transition like a child hopping from puddle to puddle mid-rain storm–hence the exploratory milieu, making the readability erratic. A singular essay can cover topics ranging in breadth from her own home life, the world of the Conquistador and pre-colonial United States, to the diminishing microbes of our environment, and the death of the desert tortoise. It’s fascinating and intriguing, but at times comes across disjointed.Nevertheless, A Field Guide to Getting Lost is a philosophical treatise on the idea of flux–the essence of the middle, and the spaces between places in which our bodies and psyches transition to worlds and climes that are foreign and beautiful. The book is a success in that it reminds us, yet again, that the only constant in life is change.For more great book reviews, see bookguyreview.com

⭐Little did I know that this book would be the perfect follow up to Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, which I read last month. Together they’d form a beautiful Venn diagram made solely of different shades of blue. This is my first foray into the writing of Rebecca Solnit – poignant and beautiful, and full of appreciation for the natural world and our ephemeral place in it – and I’m now hooked. In this book Solnit explores the different ways in which a person can get lost, both physically and psychologically, the power of wandering and of deliberately shedding or simply losing one’s sense of place, and the inestimable value of the unknown. In addition to overlapping themes regarding the color blue, A Field Guide to Getting Lost and Bluets are poetic kindred in their heady interweaving of history, art, philosophy, and personal memoir. Just as with Bluets, I found frequently myself marking passages so that I might easily find them again later.“There is a voluptuous pleasure in all that sadness, and I wonder where it comes from, because as we usually construe the world, sadness and pleasure should be far apart. Is it that the joy that comes from other people always risks sadness, because even when love doesn’t fail, mortality enters in; is it that there is a place where sadness and joy are not distinct, where all emotion lies together, a sort of ocean into which the tributary streams of distinct emotions go, a faraway deep inside; is it that such sadness is only the side effect of art that describes the depth of our lives, and to see that described in all its potential for loneliness and pain is beautiful?”And one more because I can’t help myself:“The places in which any significant event occurred become embedded with some of that 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.”

⭐I continue to get this as a gift for all of my friends

⭐The root of the word, ‘lost’, is the Old English ‘losian’, to perish. Today, it carries some of that association, but more often means that we simply do not know where we are. Of course, many explorers have died knowing exactly where they were, some in circumstances readily manageable by locals. On the other hand, many pioneers settling in the wilderness and largely ignorant of where they were in the world, lived long and thrived. There is a second sense of the word ‘lost’ as being without direction or guidance–the ‘lost generation.’ I find that Ms. Solnit’s essay bridges these two meanings of the word to bring a brighter context to being lost. Being lost is an opportunity to create new connections to place and people, to expand our existing map beyond its anxious margins. As ignorance is the starting place of learning, being lost is the starting place of finding oneself in the world. I think for those who like to travel, this book may offer reasons and caveats for allowing oneself to get lost, to wander off the tour, and expand their maps of the known world.

⭐I read somewhere once that we are the last generation who will ever get lost, as GPS-equipped phones make that experience a thing of the past. Instead, I believe we may be the last generation who will know where we are, relative to other places, as opposed to being forever simply “here”.Solnit sees getting, and being, lost not as a problem, but as a pleasure, or opportunity for growth, or something to be learned from. In a series of chapters, she explores a variety of ways to get lost – spatially, in our thinking, in our memories – or to lose something or someone. The chapters themselves articulately meander through a variety of ideas, then, just when you wonder if Solnit has herself lost her train of thought, she ties up the topic with insight and wit.

⭐One of my favourite books ever! Rebecca Solnit writes so beautifully about what we so often think is the worst… getting lost … only to discover that it is in fact what we should be striving for… I absolutely loved this book – I got lost in it and loved where I found myself! Thank you Rebecca for writing such a wonderful piece of art!

⭐This is not an easy book to read. It rambles from subject to subject, some interesting, some not so. It is occasionally a great tug on the emotions. The overall concept of the book, the art of getting lost both mentally and physically is fascinating. It is well worth reading but it is not an easy ride.

⭐Somewhat peculiar. However, this contains some stimulating writing about getting lost geographically and metaphorically. I have annotated some pages to return to an ponder upon. Worth devoting a rainy afternoon to.

⭐A loose thread of “lost” is overworked in what is essentially a self focussed morsel. Sure some elegant passages but that isn’t matched by a convincing design. My first and last Solnit….

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