A Field Guide to Getting Lost - by Rebecca Solnit

Transformative, extending the boundaries of the self into unknown territory, about becoming someone else.

Capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.

To be lost is to be fully present.
It is a conscious choice, a chosen surrender, a psychic state.
Being at home in the unknown, so that being in its midst isn’t cause for panic or suffering.

“Lost” comes from the Old Norse los, meaning the disbanding of an army.

Explorers were always lost, because they’d never been to these places before.
They never expected to know exactly where they were.
A Hawaiian biologist discovers new species by getting intentionally lost in the rainforest.

She need not think about anybody.
She could be herself, by herself.
To be silent; to be alone.
A need to become no one and anyone, to shake off the shackles that remind you who you are, who others think you are.

Some questions are more significant than their answers.

Art: Does the work mean what the artist intended it to mean, or is it larger than they intended?

We treat desire as a problem to be solved.
Rather than on the nature and the sensation of desire, cherished as a sensation on its own.

Look across the distance without wanting to close it up.
Love this distance.
Distance ceases when we arrive in it.
The far becomes the near, and they are not the same place.

Adults scan the landscape for picturesque panoramas.
Kids on their hands and knees, engaged with what was immediately before them.
Adults travel by abstraction.
There is no distance in childhood.
Distance comes with time, with the discovery of melancholy, of loss, the texture of longing,

A desire to be lost, to be far away, a desire for that melancholy wonder that is the blue of distance.

Yiddish insults can describe defects of character with the precision that Inuit describes ice.

The place they were exiled from no longer existed, and they were no longer the people who had left it.

A man galloping by a monk who asks, “Where are you going?”
“Ask my horse”, says the man.

The ethnic past was regarded as unnecessary baggage.
The old longings had become little more than habit.
Some people receive as birthright a sense of self that those who set out to reinvent themselves, for survival or for satisfaction, travel far.

Some people inherit values and practices as a house they inhabit.
Some of us have to burn down that house, and build from scratch.

Vacant lots like missing teeth gave a rough grin to the streets.

Places gave punk part of its aesthetic.
Like most aesthetics this one contained an ethic, a worldview with a mandate on how to act, how to live.

Nature is allowed to take over when maintenance is withdrawn.

Solitude in the city is about the distance of other people.
But in remote places solitude seems natural.

Writing is an opening statement in a conversation that takes place long afterward without the author.

Male hermit crabs often drag a female around by her claw, fighting off rival suitors, until she molts.
Only when she is between shells can they mate.

Nonfiction seems photographic, finding form and pattern in the stuff already out there.
Fiction lets you start with a blank canvas.

Romance once meant heroic, adventurous, or mysterious.

A poet so perfectly describes the emperor’s vast and intricate palace.
The palace disappears when the poem replaces it.

To destroy false notions, without even going any further, is one of the ways to advance knowledge.