A Field Guide to Getting Lost

Solnit, Rebecca. A Field Guide to Getting Lost. New York: Viking, 2005.

I am not sure what suggested this book, but my note in Zotero suggested I follow it with Walden.

[I have to get better about tracing the net that captures these books]

A Field Guide is in part a memoir of the roads travelled and the life lived by the author. It drops hints about her life, her family, her lovers and her misery. This however is not the point of the books. She examines her self and her experience only incidentally as she talks about Lost as a concrete goal, a destination. She is providing a map to being Lost.

If you have lost something it has become distanced from you. If you are lost you are someplace that is unknown to you. If you abandon something you have deliberately lost it.

Solnit says the color of lost is blue. Distance is blue. Dreams, in my opinion, are blue. She intermingles her description of the idea of Lostness with stories of her family, stories that were lost because no one would tell her the truth and because the box with pictures is put away, hidden and denied. Family history is recorded by the survivors/victors. If the spoils of victory are the ability to rewrite the family history, then Truth is lost.

The following quote is about love and a relationship, after it has been Lost

A happy love is a single story, a disintegrating oen is two or more competeing , conflicting versions, and a disintegrated one lies at your feet like a shattered mirror, each shard reflecting a different story, that it was wonderful, that it was terrible, if only this had, if only that hadn't. The stories don't fit back together, and it's the end of stories, those devices we carry like shells and shields and blinkers and occasionally maps and compasses. The people close to you become mirrors and journals in which you record your history, the instruments that helpo you know yourself and remember yourself, and you do the same for them. When they vanish so does the use, the appreciation, the understanding of those small anecdotes, catchphrases, jokes: they become a book slammed shut or burnt. Though I came out of this house transformed, stronger and surer than I had been and carrying with me more knowledge of myself, of men, of love, of deserts and wildernesses.
The stories shatter. Or you wear them out or leave them behind. Over time the story or the memory loses its power. Over time you become someone else...[p.136]

I really liked the language in this book, but at the same time I felt pulled back and forth by Solnits' self absorption. It's not a self help book by any means, nor is it really adequate as a story of her life. I'd still recommend it, just for the way she uses words.