A Field Guide to Getting Lost
- Dec 17, 2024
- 3 min read
Updated: 4 days ago
★★★★★
After being ever so slightly disappointed by Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust: A History of Walking, which I thoroughly, unequivocally wanted to love (hiking having largely supplanted cycling since my move to the tallgrass prairie), I am pleased to say that A Field Guide to Getting Lost is a subtle masterpiece.
Loss comes to us from the Old English (but of Germanic origin) los, meaning ‘destruction.’ Lost comes from this Old English and losian, meaning ‘perish, destroy’ or ‘become unable to find.’ Lost, of course, is also the past and past participle of lose, so lost and loss, while not interchangeable in the strictest grammatical sense, are intertwined in their meanings and intentions. I go to this trouble because A Field Guide to Getting Lost is as much about getting lost and being lost as it is about loss itself, what it means to be lost, experience loss, navigate our ways through both of those states, and, in the navigating, how we can, and do, find ourselves.
There was a friend once, Nicole, back in college. Actually, she was a friend of my then-girlfriend, who was off in another state for graduate school. Nicole and I would regularly go to the movies together, indie and art films showing at Indiana University’s Fine Arts building, or as part of the Ryder Film Series. In any event, her opinion of a movie was highly correlated with her mood. If she was in a good mood, she’d love the movie. If she was in a bad mood, well, she wouldn’t. I never quite understood that. I understand that we bring to anything where we are, and what we are, then and there. For me, though, a movie or a book or an art exhibit is meant to transport you beyond those feelings, at least to the extent that you can be present while engaging with any of those things. I’ve always done my level best to check myself at the door and surrender to the journey that art, music, and literature can take us on.
I mention this story only because sometimes, just sometimes, a book (or movie or piece of art or anything, I suppose) is perfectly attuned to your current state, where you are right then and there at the time of its reading, that it feels like an extension, a manifestation, a reflection of who you are, how you see yourself, and how you see the world. It doesn’t transport you beyond but deeper into where you already are. Since I chose to read this book at this time of the year when the days are shorter and colder and light and warmth are at a premium, I can’t say what its impact would have been on me had I chosen to read it during, say, the blossoming of spring or the height of summer. But I did read it now when my thoughts, more than at other times of the year, turn to loss. Not just who and what’s been lost but what’s been lost in the losing. That is, there is what was lost and then there are the things that never come to pass as a result of that loss. Think of George Bailey wishing he’d never been born. That is how my mind spirals loss: It’s not the loss, it’s the implications of the loss that get me. Maybe I am not so different from Nicole, after all.
All this talk of loss makes A Field Guide to Getting Lost sound like a downer. I assure you it is not. But it is about embracing lostness, if I can coin a word, how we can find new ways of navigating our inner and outer worlds through it, and, in turn, find ourselves, or at least use it as a tool to learn something new and useful and potentially powerful about ourselves. I wanted to crawl inside this book, inside Rebecca Solnit’s words, inside the stories she weaves—historical, personal, philosophical—and inhabit them forever. Or, perhaps more accurately, I wanted to find a way to ingest this book, not literally like Francis Dolarhyde does with William Blake’s painting The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in Sun in the Thomas Harris novel Red Dragon, but metaphorically, in the way a Buddhist monk internalizes sacred texts in pursuit of enlightenment. These words are me, and me them. How to best put them to use: Isn’t that the challenge of anything that gets to us marrow-deep?
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