A Field Guide to Getting Lost

"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."

Rebecca Solnit

A Field Guide to Getting Lost

It is often that we speak of things in terms of lost and found: we are lost in our minds, we have found our soulmate, we can or cannot find what we are looking for in life. Not knowing our location is not the only way we can be lost in the woods. In A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit explores the concept of "getting lost" in a collection of essays, trying to find answers to the question "How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you," that was asked by Meno several millennium ago.

Solnit does this in her wonderful way, mixing personal narration with examinations of external sources. She examines the characters in the movie Vertigo and how they relate to each other and how they relate to spacial forces like gravity and height. She looks at how maps evolved and how they way they have represented the "Terra Incognita" has changed over time, and how we use these maps to place ourselves in the world. She examines art, color, and language; she delves into the histories of the disappeared, looking at what Everett Ruess, Amelia Earhart, and Antione de Saint-Exupury had in common. 

There is a certain romance in being lost, in existing in a space that is not being somewhere and not being nowhere. Solnit captures this beautifully. Each chapter is well thought out, the language beautiful, and the composition of the entire book exquisite. I loved this book.