A Field Guide to Getting Lost

by Rebecca Solnit

often it is the distance between us and the object of desire that fills the space in between with the blue of longing.

If you can look across the distance without wanting to close it up, if you can own your longing in the same way that you own the beauty of that blue that can never be possessed?

Even when that friend arrives on the doorstep, something remains impossibly remote: when you step forward to embrace them your arms are wrapped around mystery, around the unknowable, around that which cannot be possessed. The far seeps in even to the nearest. After all we hardly know our own depths.

with a tiny bodice for a small cricket cage of a ribcage that was no longer mine,

Sometimes gaining and losing are more intimately related than we like to think. And some things cannot be moved or owned.

When I first began to write, I had been a child for most of my life,

though they say at the end of life the beginning returns with renewed vividness, as though you had sailed all the way around the world

Gary Paul Nabhan writes about taking his children to the Grand Canyon, where he realized “how much time adults spend scanning the landscape for picturesque panoramas and scenic overlooks. While the kids were on their hands and knees, engaged with what was immediately before them, we adults traveled by abstraction.”

There is no distance in childhood: for a baby, a mother in the other room is gone forever, for a child the time until a birthday is endless. Whatever is absent is impossible, irretrievable, unreachable. Their mental landscape is like that of medieval paintings: a foreground full of vivid things and then a wall.

The blue of distance comes with time, with the discovery of melancholy, of loss, the texture of longing, of the complexity of the terrain we traverse, and with the years of travel.

Some things we have only as long as they remain lost, some things are not lost only so long as they are distant.

A case could be made that they would have been better off melting into the landscape as no doubt many now forgotten did, adopting native tongues, stories, places to love, ceasing to be exiles by ceasing to remember the country they were exiled from so that they could wholly embrace the country they were in. Only by losing that past would they lose the condition of exile, for the place they were exiled from no longer existed, and they were no longer the people who had left it. Perhaps that willful forgetting, that refusal to tell tales, came from the wish that we could become native to the New World as they never did, never could, to the Old.

I used to imagine all the things that could have happened between the two places, picture her getting off a train somewhere on the prairie, getting lost and staying lost, starting up an unimaginable new life unlike the one allotted to her by her family and her ethnicity,

prizing nothingness is harder than prizing something

Up close she is nearly beautiful, young and somehow tender, but from further away or with a smaller or darker reproduction, you can see the skull in the set face of this emigrant, as though through hunger, exhaustion, fear, she is close to other borders than national ones.

for they seemed utterly urban, shrunk into their bodies as tenements of flesh, not as instruments of adventure in the open space of the New World.

Was she lost only to them because she had found another way, or was she lost to herself as well, bereft of the ability to navigate the world and her own mind? The mind too can be imagined as a landscape, but only the minds of sages might resemble the short-grass prairie in which I played with getting lost and vanishing. The rest of us have caverns, glaciers, torrential rivers, heavy fogs, chasms that open up underfoot, even marauding wildlife bearing family names. It’s a landscape in which getting lost is easy and some regions are terrifying to visit.

There’s a Buddhist story about a man galloping by a monk who asks, Where are you going? Ask my horse, says the man. And this uncontrollable emotion doesn’t let you pick your destination or even see it. It’s the simplest form of madness, one most of us taste some of the time.

Eduardo Galeano notes that America was conquered, but not discovered, that the men who arrived with a religion to impose and dreams of gold never really knew where they were, and that this discovery is still taking place in our time.

lost not in practical terms but in the more profound sense of apprehending where they truly were, of caring what the history of the place was and its nature. Instead, they named it after the places they had left and tried to reconstruct those places through imported plants, animals, and practices, though pumpkin, maple, and other staples would enter their diet as words like Connecticut and Dakota and raccoon would enter their vocabularies.

He had gone about naked, shed his skin like a snake, had lost his greed, his fear, been stripped of almost everything a human being could lose and live, but he had learned several languages, he had become a healer, he had come to admire and identify with the Native nations among whom he lived; he was not who he had been.

he ceased to be lost not by returning but by turning into something else.

Often, initially, these strays and captives felt that they were far from home, distant from their desires, and then at some point, in a stunning reversal, they came to be at home and what they had longed for became remote, alien, unwanted. For some, perhaps there was a moment when they realized that the old longings had become little more than habit and that they were not yearning to go home but had been home for some time; for others the dreams of home must have faded by stages among the increasingly familiar details of their surroundings.

They must have learned their surroundings like a language and one day woken up fluent in them. Somehow, for these castaways the far became near and the near far. They did not reject the unfamiliar but embraced it, in the course of which it became familiar. By the end of his decade of wandering, Cabeza de Vaca was no longer in harmony with his own culture, but he had kept it as a destination, a goal, that kept him purposeful and moving, even though arrival was another trauma. Many others refused to return.

She was negotiating her emotional and cultural distance carefully, on her terms rather than theirs. On a few further occasions, she revisited her birth family, but she never left the community that had captured her, and in it she died at age ninety-five.

The word lost in this context has many shades. The captive is at first literally lost, taken into terra incognita. And unless that captive is redeemed, he or more frequently she remains lost to the people who were left behind, and thus the language of lostness is often used to describe the person as lost the way that a possession is lost—a lost umbrella, lost keys—without recognizing that he or more commonly she may well have ceased either to be a captive or to be lost. But the word lost has spiritual implications, as in the line of the penitent slave trader’s hymn “I once was lost but now am found”; the person taken among the heathen was commonly imagined to be spiritually lost, estranged from Christianity and civilization.

But they did not always imagine themselves that way, and it seems that the captives had in a sense to lose their past to join the present, and this abandonment of memory, of old ties, is the steep cost of adaptation.

The trauma of captivity, of the murder of family members, and a sudden new life among another culture and another language must have been considerable, but adapting to it all was a matter of survival, and these child captives survived and then flourished in their new lives. The rupture must have been as sudden and violent as birth.

Time, the destroyer of every affection, wore away my unpleasant feelings, and I became as contented as before.

the transitions whereby you cease to be who you were.

Sometimes an old photograph, an old friend, an old letter will remind you that you are not who you once were, for the person who dwelt among them, valued this, chose that, wrote thus, no longer exists. Without noticing it you have traversed a great distance;

Some people inherit values and practices as a house they inhabit; some of us have to burn down that house, find our own ground, build from scratch, even as a psychological metamorphosis. As a cultural metamorphosis the transition is far more dramatic.

the process of transformation consists almost entirely of decay.”

We have not much language to appreciate this phase of decay, this withdrawal, this era of ending that must precede beginning. Nor of the violence of the metamorphosis, which is often spoken of as though it were as graceful as a flower blooming.

The process of transformation consists mostly of decay and then of this crisis when emergence from what came before must be total and abrupt.

The strange resonant word instar describes the stage between two successive molts, for as it grows, a caterpillar, like a snake, like Cabeza de Vaca walking across the Southwest, splits its skin again and again, each stage an instar. It remains a caterpillar as it goes through these molts, but no longer one in the same skin. There are rituals marking such splits, graduations, indoctrinations, ceremonies of change, though most changes proceed without such clear and encouraging recognition. Instar implies something both celestial and ingrown, something heavenly and disastrous, and perhaps change is commonly like that, a buried star, oscillating between near and far.

With ruins a city springs free of its plans into something as intricate as life, something that can be explored but perhaps not mapped.

with ruin a city comes to death, but a generative death like the corpse that feeds flowers.

maybe she knew that to be truly alive death had to be part of the picture just as winter must.

All through childhood you grow toward life and then in adolescence, at the height of life, you begin to grow toward death. This fatality is felt as an enlargement to be welcomed and embraced, for the young in this culture enter adulthood as a prison, and death reassures them that there are exits.

but the words were always sounds first, spoken to the body before the mind.

She had the nonchalance and style that mean so much to adolescents, who are urgently constructing a persona to meet the world, and this achievement is the antithesis of the openness that might make clear to self and others what one wants and needs.

teenagers imagine dying young because death is more imaginable than the person that all the decisions and burdens of adulthood may make of you.

I lost a whole life and gradually gained another one, more open and more free.

That was what the city offered, a sharp antidote, the possibility of being fully awake, surrounded by all possibilities, some of which we’d learn the hard way were terrible.

even a desire for death?

I was never sure anyone would pick up the pieces if I fell apart, and I thought of consequences. The young live absolutely in the present, but a present of drama and recklessness, of acting on urges and running with the pack. They bring the fearlessness of children to acts with adult consequences, and when something goes wrong they experience the shame or the pain as an eternal present too. Adulthood is made up of a prudent anticipation and a philosophical memory that make you navigate more slowly and steadily. 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.

Perhaps it’s that you can’t go back in time, but you can return to the scenes of a love, of a crime, of happiness, and of a fatal decision; the places are what remain, are what you can possess, are what is immortal. They become the tangible landscape of memory, the places that made you, and in some way you too become them. They are what you can possess and what in the end possesses you.

Every love has its landscape.

Thus place, which is always spoken of as though it only counts when you’re present, possesses you in its absence, takes on another life as a sense of place, a summoning in the imagination with all the atmospheric effect and association of a powerful emotion.