A Field Guide to Getting Lost is my favorite kind of book to read. Solnit ruminates on living through the lens of the different ways of being lost in the world. History, personal stories, and intellect create a narrative that is engaging and provocative.

Wandering, introspective, expansive, and philosophical. Absolutely stunning.

3.5 stars. Solnit's prose is occasionally insufferable turgid, but she makes up for it with some very beautiful, gently luminous passages. A book to be read and savored slowly.

Parts of the book I found very engaging and thought-provoking and other parts I found my mind wandering while reading because the writing didn't hold my attention. I also had another book of hers from the library, but I didn't start it before returning it because I wasn't sure that I could read it through before it was due back. I was just a little underwhelmed by the writing style in this book and wasn't sure if it would be more of the same or not in the other book (about the wildfires in CA). And I had other books on hold at the library that I wanted to start and so I chose those over hers. :/
I did get some interesting writing prompts from this book that I'd like to explore on my own. Especially thinking about desire as a sensation instead of a problem to solve; the act of metamorphosis and transformation and the violence involved and not only the idealized grace of it; the distance from childhood as we advance in years and how memories of those early years come back in later years more vivid than something that happens in the present.

Book coincidences:- "the girl acrobats atop their brand-backed horses in the circus" (pg. 95) and "Verdi chorus" (pg. 99) like from Queen of the Night- the discussion about punk music, mentioned the Sex Pistols and the Clash (pg. 105) like in The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs- the mention of Hank Williams (pg. 124) and how I've recently been on a Tom Hiddleston obsession and he played Hank Williams in I Saw the Light

"The things we want are transformative, and we don't know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation. Love, wisdom, grace, inspiration--how do you go about finding these things that are in some ways about extending the boundaries of the self into unknown territory, about becoming someone else?" pg. 5

"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. And one does not get lost but loses oneself, with the implication that it is a conscious choice, a chosen surrender, a psychic state achievable through geography." pg. 6 

"The simplest answer nowadays for literal getting lost is that a lot of the people who get lost aren't paying attention when they do so, don't know what to do when they realize they don't know how to return, or don't admit they don't know. There's an art of attending to weather, to the route you take, to the landmarks along the way, to how if you turn around you can see how different the journey back looks from the journey out, to reading the sun and moon and stars to orient yourself, to the direction of running water, to the thousand things that make the wild a text that can be read by the literate. The lost are often illiterate in this language that is the language of earth itself, or don't stop to read it. And there's another art of being at home in the unknown, so that being in its midst isn't cause for panic or suffering, of being at home with being lost." pg. 10

"Explorers, the historian Aaron Sachs wrote me in answer to a question, 'were always lost, because they'd never been to these places before. They never expected to know exactly where they were. Yet, at the same time, many of them knew their instruments pretty well and understood their trajectories within a reasonable degree of accuracy. In my opinion, their most important skill was simply a sense of optimism about surviving and finding their way.' Lost, these people I talked to helped me understand, was mostly a state of mind, and this applies as much to all the metaphysical and metaphorical states of being lost as to blundering around in the backcountry." pg. 14

"Socrates says you can know the unknown because you remember it. You already know what seems unknown; you have been here before, but only when you were someone else. This only shifts the location of the unknown from unknown other to unknown self." pg. 25

"We treat desire as a problem to be solved, address what desire is for and focus on that something and how to acquire it rather than on the nature and the sensation of desire, though often it is the distance between us and the object of desire that fills the space in between with the blue of longing. I wonder sometimes whether with a slight adjustment of perspective it could be cherished as a sensation on its own terms, since it is as inherent to the human condition as blue is to distance? If you can look across the distance without wanting to close it up, if you can own your longing in the same way that you own the beauty of that blue that can never be possessed? For something of this longing will, like the blue of distance, only be relocated, not assuaged, by acquisition and arrival, just as the mountains cease to be blue when you arrive among them and the blue instead tints the next beyond. . .  Something is always far away." pg. 30-31 

"Even when that friend arrives on the doorstep, something remains impossibly remote: when you step forward to embrace them your arms are wrapped around mystery, around the unknowable, around that which cannot be possessed. The far seeps in even to the nearest. After all we hardly know our own depths." pg. 31

"But in this world we actually live in, distance ceases to be distance and to be blue when we arrive in it. The far becomes the near, and they are not the same place." pg. 35

"One day a few years ago my mother took out of her cedar chest the turquoise blouse she bought for me on that trip to Bolivia, a miniature of the native women's outfits. When she unfolded the little garment and gave it to me, the living memory of wearing the garment collided shockingly with the fact that it was so tiny, with arms less than a foot long, with a tiny bodice for a small cricket cage of a ribcage that was no longer mine, and the shock was that my vivid memory included what it felt like to be inside that brocade shirt but not the fact that inside it I had been so diminutive, had been something utterly other than my adult self who remembered. The continuity of memory did not measure the abyss between a toddler's body and a woman's. When I recovered the blouse, I lost the memory, for the two were irreconcilable. It vanished in an instant, and I saw it go." pg. 37-38

"A person in her twenties has been a child for most of her life, but as time goes by that portion that is childhood becomes smaller and smaller, more and more distant, more and more faded, though they say at the end of life the beginning returns with renewed vividness, as though you had sailed all the way around the world and were going back into the darkness from which you came. For the elderly, often the nearby and recent become vague and only the faraway in time and space is vivid." pg. 39

"'Time, the destroyer of every affection, wore away my unpleasant feelings, and I became as contented as before.'" pg. 77

"But the butterfly is so fit an emblem of the human soul that its name in Greek is psyche, the word for soul. We have not much language to appreciate this phase of decay, this withdrawal, this era of ending that must precede beginning. Nor of the violence of the metamorphosis, which is often spoken of as though it were as graceful as a flower blooming." pg. 81

"We are now at the beginning of an era whose constructions are far scarier than ruins. In the time of which I write, the new silicon-based life forms were sneaking into every interstice without setting off alarms that all would be utterly changed in a way far more insidious than nuclear war, that they would bring a new wealth that would erase the ruins. In the 1980s we imagined apocalypse because it was easier than the strange complicated futures that money, power, and technology would impose, intricate futures hard to exit. In the same way, teenagers imagine dying young because death is more imaginable than the person that all the decisions and burdens of adulthood may make of you." pg. 106

"Jorge Luis Borges wrote a parable about some cartographers who eventually created a map that was 1:1 scale and covered much of a nameless empire. Even at 1:1 scale, the two-dimensional map would be inadequate to depict the layers of being of a place, its many versions. Thus the map of languages spoken and the map of soil types canvas the same area differently, just as Freudianism and shamanism describe the same psyche differently. No representation is complete. Borges has a less-well-known story in which a poet so perfectly describes the emperor's vast and intricate palace that the emperor becomes enraged and regards him as a thief." pg. 162

"When someone doesn't show up, the people who wait sometimes tell stories about what might have happened and come to half believe the desertion, the abduction, the accident. Worry is a way to pretend that you have knowledge or control over what you don't--and it surprises me, even in myself, how much we prefer ugly scenarios to the pure unknown. Perhaps fantasy is what you fill up maps with rather than saying that they too contain the unknown." pg. 165

"Movies are made out of darkness as well as light; it is the surpassingly brief intervals of darkness between each luminous still image that make it possible to assemble the many images into one moving picture. Without that darkness, there would only be a blur. Which is to say that a full-length movie consists of half and hour or an hour of pure darkness that goes unseen. If you could add up all the darkness, you would find the audience in the theater gazing together at a deep imaginative night. It is the terra incognita of film, the dark continent on every map. In a similar way, a runner's every step is a leap, so that for a moment he or she is entirely off the ground. For those brief instants, shadows no longer spill out from their feet, like leaks, but hover below them like doubles, as they do with birds, whose shadows crawl below them, caressing the surface of the earth, growing and shrinking as their makers move nearer or farther from that surface. For my friends who run long distances, these tiny fragments of levitation add up to something considerable; by their own power they hover above the earth for many minutes, perhaps some significant portion of an hour or perhaps far more for the hundred-mile races. We fly; we dream in darkness; we devour heaven in bites too small to be measured." pg. 175-176

Book: borrowed from Richmond Branch Library.

I’ve read A Field Guide to Getting Lost a million times, and each time, it feels like a completely different book. I first picked it up in university, drawn to Solnit’s poetic way of thinking about wandering, both physically and emotionally, but I keep coming back to it, finding new meaning in passages I once skimmed over. It’s a book that shifts as you do, revealing new insights depending on where you are in life. Sometimes, it’s about adventure; other times, it’s about loss, memory, or the beauty of uncertainty. But what keeps me returning is the feeling of being understood, like Solnit has put words to things I’ve felt but never quite articulated. It’s a book that keeps me company, reminding me that getting lost is sometimes exactly where I need to be.

Will review over the weekend. Piecing together my thoughts on this will take a while.

Excellent book! It was very introspective. I appreciated the authors views on several philosophical topics

Worry is a way to pretend that you have knowledge or control over what you don't--and it surprises me, even in myself, how much we prefer ugly scenarios to the pure unknown. Perhaps fantasy is what you fill up maps with rather than saying that they too contain the unknown.

While enamored on occasion I found this overall to be self-help for the literate. Glosses on country music and the Shoah appear to be statutory requirements at this point in creative nonfiction. I've gathered that some regard this as nature literature which is interesting. I listened to a podcast recently where the tendency of environmental writing to bend mournful was discussed. I am not sure that's applicable here. I agree with GR friend Andrew that I have low tolerance for suburban realism. The section on the author's friend Marine was compelling if only because it gave form to the understandably abstracted concept of the "blue of distance". The slinking notion that the soul is both explored and strengthened by spatial displacement and disorientation strikes me as rather metaphysical.