A Field Guide to Getting Lost
Rebecca Solnit
Language: English
Pages: 224
ISBN: 0143037242
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Whether she is contemplating the history of walking as a cultural and political experience over the past two hundred years (Wanderlust), or using the life of photographer Eadweard Muybridge as a lens to discuss the transformations of space and time in late nineteenth-century America (River of Shadows), Rebecca Solnit has emerged as an inventive and original writer whose mind is daring in the connections it makes. A Field Guide to Getting Lost draws on emblematic moments and relationships in Solnit's own life to explore issues of wandering, being lost, and the uses of the unknown. The result is a distinctive, stimulating, and poignant voyage of discovery.
Cabeza de Vaca recalls, “I would have welcomed death rather than see so many around me in such a condition.” At dawn, he heard breakers; at daylight, they found the land that was probably Galveston Island in Texas; and the men “began to recover their senses, their locomotion, and their hope.” Natives fed them fish and roots; they embarked again but the barge capsized near shore; and “the survivors escaped as naked as they were born, with the loss of everything we had.” They fell upon the mercy of
surprised and smitten by this response so counter to what most people hope for from snakes: distance. He had a passion for snakes, and on each of our early rendezvous seemed to have another story to tell. One was about driving from the Mojave to the mountains on summer evenings, going slowly so that he could see the snakes who’d come out to bask on the asphalt that held warmth longer into the night than anything else, see them and pick them up and take them to safety. He had seen a gopher snake
surprised and smitten by this response so counter to what most people hope for from snakes: distance. He had a passion for snakes, and on each of our early rendezvous seemed to have another story to tell. One was about driving from the Mojave to the mountains on summer evenings, going slowly so that he could see the snakes who’d come out to bask on the asphalt that held warmth longer into the night than anything else, see them and pick them up and take them to safety. He had seen a gopher snake
warriors’ powers suited him. Perhaps too something about the way judo teaches its practitioners to fly through the air and land without harm and to transport others thus enchanted him. For some years, he conceived of judo as the arena in which he would become supreme, and he dreamed of riding a horse across Asia to Japan to study the art. As it turned out, though he spent three months in Ireland learning to work with and ride horses, he took a ship—paid for by his aunt—for Japan. Funded by Aunt
green traffic lights filled me with no such desire, and besides I was looking forward to going hiking on the mountain’s west slope. We treat desire as a problem to be solved, address what desire is for and focus on that something and how to acquire it rather than on the nature and the sensation of desire, though often it is the distance between us and the object of desire that fills the space in between with the blue of longing. I wonder sometimes whether with a slight adjustment of perspective