A Field Guide to Getting Lost

by Rebecca Solnit

To calculate on the unforeseen is perhaps exactly the paradoxical operation that life most requires of us.

Bolivia, I said to a friend, who heard, Oblivion.

Yiddish can describe defects of character with the precision that Inuit describes ice or Japanese rain.

People look into the future and expect that the forces of the present will unfold in a coherent and predictable way, but any examination of the past reveals that the circuitous routes of change are unimaginably strange.

(In essays, ideas are the protagonists, and they often develop much like characters down to the surprise denouement.)