rebecca solnit a field guide to getting lost

From the emigrations of her own family members to the explorers of America-from the personal to the political, if you will-Solnit covers how people inhabit their world and what happens when their world becomes unfamiliar. Life affirming, thought-provoking and immensely satisfying, these essays are at once relatable and challenging. Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realise where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.”

A friend meanwhile sends her snippets of Thoreau’s Walden: “Not till we are completely lost, or turned round,-for a man needs only to be turned round once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost-do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of nature.

“Never to get lost is not to live, not to know how to get lost brings you to destruction, and somewhere in the terra incognita in between lies a life of discovery,” she writes. Children are more constrained in their explorations, and at what cost to their adult selves? Getting lost has many rewards and unexpected pleasures, and is a worthy goal of itself. It’s harder, these days, to get lost, writes Solnit-and she was writing in the early 2000s, before smartphones were quite as ubiquitous as they are today. In anecdote, after fact, after pondering, after question, Solnit produces something far greater than the sum of the parts she puts together. Solnit launches the collection with an initial essay that includes a quote that has stuck in her mind: 'How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is unknown to you?'Īs only an assured essayist such as she can do, she then bounces across a variety of subjects, with the common thread being the idea of getting lost at times the thread is so thin it would feel tenuous in less competent hands, but Solnit weaves it all into something fragile and wonderful. Though not directly related to travel in Southeast Asia, these essays make an ideal companion to any trip as they explore ideas of distance, dislocation and discovery.

Rebecca solnit a field guide to getting lost