A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit. 

3/5 rating. 225 pages.

Book #56 of 2020. Read August 11, 2020.

“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.”

The book starts out with some essays so philosophically bent towards deep and profound thoughts that it is like reading a mix between a bad zen text and the writings of Kant. Luckily enough, after the first few chapters, Rebecca settles into a much better writing style: one that provokes thought and contemplation, but does leave you asking what type of psychedelics she was using when she was writing….and where you can get some.

“But fear of making mistakes can itself become a huge mistake, one that prevents you from living, for life is risky and anything less is already loss. I missed a lot of adventures that way early on, but I know that there were many paths I could have taken, and madness and misery lay down some of them, just as death was down one of Marine’s, closing off the others her talents and passions might have taken her down.”

Overall, there were some good essays in this book which were offset by the first few ones which tried way too hard to be deep and philosophical. This led to the book being okay, but nothing really to write home about. I got some good quotes and thoughts out of it, but unless you’re willing to read this with an incredibly open mind, you probably don’t really need to read it.

Quotes:

“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.”

“As we step out of the house on a fine evening between four and six, we shed the self our friends know us by and become part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers, whose society is so agreeable after the solitude of one’s room.” – Virginia Woolf

“And you experts in law, woe to you, because you load people down with burdens they can hardly carry, and you yourselves will not lift one finger to help them.” – Jesus in the Gospel of Luke

“Sending girls to school leads to greater literacy, higher wages, faster income growth, and more productive farming. It reduces premarital sex, lowers the chance of early marriage, delays first births, and helps mothers plan how many children to have and when. Mothers who have had an education do a better job learning about nutrition, vaccination, and other behaviors necessary for raising healthy children.”

“Half of the gains in child survival in the past two decades can be attributed to gains in mothers having gone to school.”

“[M]aybe she knew that to be truly alive death had to be part of the picture just as winter must.”

“Writing is the most disembodied art, and reading and writing are largely private and solitary experiences, so music and dance have always enchanted me as arts in which the body of the performer communicates directly to the audience, welding a kind of communion writers rarely experience.”

“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. Then I thought of Marine’s death as the end of my youth because it signaled the end of my connection to that underworld, but it might instead have been because death became real.”

“Was I cowardly not to want to explore the farther reaches of consciousness, afraid of getting lost, of being unable to return?”

“Marine plunged into the unknown again and again, but she kept returning home, while I trudged on in a straight line away from where I’d started.”

“Mountaineering is always spoken of as though summiting is conquest, but as you get higher, the world gets bigger, and you feel smaller in proportion to it, overwhelmed and liberated by how much space is around you, how much room to wander, how much unknown.”

“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.”

“It’s okay to realize that life has a mysterious quality to it, it has an element of uncertainty, it’s okay to realize that we do need help, that calling out for help is a very generous act because it allows others to help us and it allows us to be helped.”

“This is the last place.

There is no where else to go,”

– Lew Welch

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