“All your life, you’ve never seen
A woman taken by the wind”
Fleetwood Mac, Rhiannon
These evocative lyrics echoed in my mind as I delved into Rebecca Solnit’s thought-provoking collection of essays, A Field Guide to Getting Lost. While Solnit possesses the insightful mind of a philosopher, her strength truly lies in her role as a cultural historian, activist, and journalist. Initially, I approached this book anticipating a companion piece to Frederic Gros’ A Philosophy of Walking, a book that deeply resonated with me. However, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Solnit’s work charted its own unique course, offering an unexpected, yet enriching, exploration of its central theme.
Isn’t it true that the most captivating books often defy our expectations? A world where every book perfectly aligned with our preconceived notions would be undeniably dull. My initial, minor reservation about A Field Guide to Getting Lost stemmed more from my own assumptions than any flaw in Solnit’s writing. This slight misgiving quickly faded, overshadowed by the sheer brilliance of her insights. For the most part, the book delivers precisely what its title promises. There were moments where I felt wonderfully lost within its pages, not in a frustrating or disoriented way, but in a state of intrigued contemplation. I welcomed being adrift in Solnit’s reflections, which range from poignant meditations on loss and grief to the surreal landscapes of dreams and the quiet wisdom of desert tortoises. Solnit’s thoughts flow with an internal coherence, even as they gracefully leap from one subject to another. Transitions may not be her primary focus; immersion is.
Consider, for instance, her insightful dissection of the multifaceted meaning of “lost”:
Lost really has two disparate meanings. Losing things is about the familiar falling away, getting lost is about the unfamiliar appearing. There are objects and people that disappear from your sight or knowledge or possession; you lose a bracelet, a friend, the key. You still know where you are. Everything is familiar except that there is one item less, one missing element. Or you get lost, in which case the world has become larger than your knowledge of it. Either way, there is a loss of control. Imagine yourself streaming through time shedding gloves, umbrellas, wrenches, books, friends, homes, names. This is what the view looks like if you take a rear-facing seat on the train. Looking forward you constantly acquire moments of arrival, moments of realization, moments of discovery. The wind blows your hair back and you are greeted by what you have never seen before. The material falls away in onrushing experience. It peels off like skin from a molting snake. Of course to forget the past is to lose the sense of loss that is also memory of an absent richness and a set of clues to navigate the present by, the art is not one of forgetting but letting go. And when everything else is gone, you can be rich in loss.”
If prose were the sole criterion, A Field Guide to Getting Lost would undoubtedly rank among the literary elite. Solnit’s phrasing is captivating, her metaphors resonate deeply, and her often unconventional perspectives are both illuminating and beautiful. This is evident in her reflections on butterflies and their transformative metamorphosis:
The people thrown into other cultures go through something of the anguish of the butterfly, whose body must disintegrate and reform more than once in its life cycle . . . 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.
This passage resonated deeply with me, largely due to my own nomadic upbringing as an Air Force child. Born in Germany (on technically US soil), my childhood was a tapestry of relocations: Texas, the Philippines, back to Texas, Italy, Minnesota, Nebraska, England for high school, and then adult life spanning Wyoming, Pennsylvania, California, Utah, and now Wisconsin. These weren’t mere travels; they were immersive experiences of living in each place. In the Philippines, we resided in a stilt house. In Italy, we lived amongst Italians for the majority of our stay. From England, I returned with a distinct accent and colorful colloquialisms. The impact of this transient lifestyle has been profound. I left behind a trail of friendships, most of which faded with distance. The concept of “home” became fluid, residing wherever family was present or wherever I happened to be. Wisconsin, perhaps due to its twenty-year tenure, feels the closest to “home.” Yet, a significant part of my “home” exists only in the realm of memory and imagination. The Air Force base in Germany is now a public airport. The base in the Philippines lies buried beneath volcanic ash. San Vito, Italy, has partially transformed into a town, though much of it remains abandoned. RAF Chicksands in England is now a British intelligence base, largely inaccessible to me.
While each move brought new perspectives and experiences, it also carried a subtle undercurrent of loss – the bittersweet ache of friendships left behind, places transformed or vanished.
I still find myself dreaming of these places, these altered landscapes of memory. It’s a universal experience to some degree – buildings are demolished, neighborhoods change, familiar places evolve. But for me, it’s a deeper sense of displacement. Clark Air Base in the Philippines is irretrievable. San Vito bears little resemblance to my adolescent memories. Chicksands remains largely off-limits. In many ways, a sense of being lost has been a constant companion throughout my life, whether looking forward or back. My dreams often return to these places, populated by absent friends in settings both familiar and strangely distorted. I awaken from these dreams with a lingering confusion, searching for an anchor in the present reality.
The places in which any significant event occurred become embedded with some . . . 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. The places inside matter as much as the ones outside. It is as though in the way places stay with you and that you long for them they become deities – a lot of religions have local deities, presiding spirits, geniuses of the place. You could imagine that in those songs Kentucky or the Red River is a spirit to which the singer prays, that they mourn the dreamtime before banishment, when the singer lived among the gods who were not phantasms but geography, matter, earth itself.
Solnit eloquently captures the profound connection between place, memory, and emotion. A Field Guide to Getting Lost is more than just a book; it’s an invitation to embrace the unknown, to find meaning in disorientation, and to recognize the enduring power of place within our personal narratives. It’s a guide not just to accepting being lost, but to understanding how being lost can lead us to discover something profoundly new about ourselves and the world around us.
