I’ve had two books by Rebecca Solnit hanging around my
library for some considerable time now: this one and Wanderlust, a history of
walking. I’ve tried reading Wanderlust once or twice and it’s an interesting
read, but a little dense and difficult to read alongside the kind of fiction I’ve
been reading recently. That being said, I’ve been interested in reading Solnit
for a while, perhaps on account of her excellent journalistic pieces, so it
seemed like the right time to turn my mind to this book. Perhaps, like A Book
of Silence the year before, January is the right time for reading this kind of
intelligence.
Each essay deals with a slightly different subject, with
every other essay being on the subject of ‘The Blue of Distance’, with blue
forming a repeating theme of much of the book (including the cover). As Solnit
explains:
“The world is blue at
its edges and in its depths. This blue is the light that got lost. Light at the
blue end of the spectrum does not travel the whole distance from the sun to us.
It disperses amongst the molecules of the air, it scatters in water. Water is
colourless, shallow water appears to be the colour of whatever lies underneath
it, but deep water is full of this scattered light, the purer the water the
deeper the blue. The sky is blue for the same reason, but the blue of the
horizon, the blue of the land that seems to be dissolving into the sky, is a
deeper, dreamier, melancholy blue, the blue at the farthest reaches of the
places where you see for miles, the blue of distance. This light that does not
touch us, does not travel the whole distance, the light that gets lost, gives
us the beauty of the world, so much of which is the colour blue.”
Throughout the book Solnit explores both the idea of
physical loss – being lost in a wilderness, in an abandoned city or an
abandoned place, being physically withdrawn from your environment by an act of
violence (e.g. kidnap) or choice, loss of environment and species – as well as
the idea of figurative loss which is, in my opinion, the more interesting
concept of the two (though both are interesting). In the figurative sense,
Solnit explores ideas like loss of love, absence of personal or familiar
history, loss of memory or a change in memory, loss of language, absence (or
presence) of faith, loss in art. Onto this broad canvas Solnit brings her
personal story, so that the book never feels entirely abstract, however
abstract its subject matter. Lost, Solnit explains, has two disparate meanings:
“Losing things is about the familiar
falling away, getting lost is about the unfamiliar appearing.”
In every chapter, Solnit asks us to consider loss, being
lost, losing things not as a terrible event (though it can be) but as an
opportunity and perhaps an opportunity we should be actively seeking. As she
explains here:
“The question then is
how to get lost. 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.”
She asks us to consider the transformative power in seeking
out the unknown, the gaps in things: knowledge, maps, ideas, structures. In Solnit’s world a lack of knowledge is not
a terrible event, it is not a failure but an opening. She also demonstrates how
artists the world over – artist like Woolf, Thoreau, Yves Klein – have used the
idea of loss and being lost as a crux for their art, for discovering their art
and themselves. She asks us to consider “Leave[ing]
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.”
A Field Guide to Getting Lost is a book stacked to the brim
with wisdom. There are so many little notation marks in my book, too many to
discuss here. I loved the story of Yves Klein, the artist who embodied the idea
of ‘lost’, and how he sold artwork that offered the buyer access to the ‘Zone
of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility’ which required the artist to throw away
half of the money which he had been paid and the owner to destroy even the
receipt so they had, in the end, exactly
nothing. A fabulous idea that could, perhaps, only exist in the art world
(though some entrepreneurs may prove otherwise). I loved her exploration of
abandoned places, the story of her Aunt and the pictures she saw but then went
missing. It is a book which blends the personal with the abstract, the sublime
with the material. In her chapter about the Turtle Man, which is also about
Buddhism and dreams and Death Valley and tortoises, amongst other things, I
read this following passage which struck me as a profound message I ought to
integrate into my own life:
“It’s okay to realise
that life has a mysterious quality to it, it has an element of uncertainty,
it’s okay to realise that we do need help, that calling out for help is a very
generous act because it allows other to help us and it allows us to be helped.
Sometimes we’re offering help, and then this hostile world becomes a very
different place.”
I think I’m pretty okay with the unknown, but recently,
perhaps, I feel myself becoming more set in my views. Or perhaps I am simply
translating the unknown into a different kind of ‘known’ to make it more
palatable. I’m also not great at asking for help, but trying to see it as a
generous act makes it easier, I think, to swallow. What Solnit has reminded me
is how growth resides in embracing the unknown, in seeking and finding
alternative views and exploring them open-mindedly. It was a timely reminder,
delivered with beauty and vision.
Yes, there is wisdom in this book. There is wisdom and knowledge
and there is also the absence of knowledge, an invitation to allow the unknown
to enter into your life. “How will you go
about finding things the nature of which is unknown to you?” Solnit asks
right at the beginning, channelling (or mis-channelling, as it turns out) a
quote from Meno. Reading this excellent book would be a fine place to start.
