A Field Guide to Getting Lost

Rebecca Solnit, A Field  Guide to Getting Lost, (Edinburgh: Canon Gate, 2006.}

Rebecca Solnits' previous book, Wanderlust, A History of Walking, follows at least some of the conventions that you might expect from a history book, it traces the development of the subject in a broadly chronological fashion, it draws on a range of sources - historical, philosophical and literary; nevertheless, in its use of anecdote and personal reflection it is very much an idiosyncratic, personal history, and much the better book because of it.

The current book to a large extent dispenses with ;the history' and is much more a personal reflection on the nature of loss. The opening chapter makes the case for regarding loss and uncertainty as a positive - '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' (p. 4)

As you might expect from Solnit, her reflections on this point are wide ranging. A chapter on 'the Blue of Distances' - equates her love of 'blue horizons' to various attempts by renaissance painters to render distance through atmospheric perspective; this is followed immediately by a chapter on 'lost' identity, which concerns the fate of the writer's grandmother, who was unable to adjust to American life after emigrating from Russia, and was incarcerated in an asylum.

Solnit recalls lost friendships and lost loves. 'Abandoned' recounts the tragic fate of Solnit's friend, Marine, who died of a drug overdose in her mid-twenties, a case of a punk-styled bohemian lifestyle tipping over the edge - 'getting lost' is not without its risks. In what is perhaps the most  affecting part of the book, the writer's relationship with desert landscape and a particular man is evoked in cool, poetic prose; the opening sentence gives a foretaste of the chapter as a whole: Once I loved a man who was a lot like the desert...

A  Field  Guide to Getting Lost is by turns, soulful, evocative, uplifting and tragic - here are a few choice quotes:

"I wonder now about Demeter and Persephone. Maybe Persephone was glad to run off with the king of death to his underground realm (...) Maybe Persephone thought Hades was the infinitely cool older man who held the knowledge she sought, maybe she loved the darkness, the six months of winter, the sharp taste of pomegranites, the freedom from her mother, maybe she knew that to be truly alive death has to be part of the picture just as winter must." (p. 91)

"A man omce told me that much of my writing was about loss, that that was how I imagined the world, and I thought about that comment for a long time. In that sense of loss two streams mingled. One was the historian's yearning to hang onto everything, write everything down, to try to keep everything from slipping away, and the historians joy in retrieving out of archives and interviews what was almost forgotten, almost out of reach forever. But the other stream is the common experience that too many things are vanishing without replacement in our time. At any given moment the sun is setting someplace on earth, and another day is slipping away largely undocumented as people slide into dreams that will seldom be remembered when they awaken. Only the continuation of abundance makes loss sustainable.There are more sunrises coming, but even reams could be empied out" (p. 188)