A Field Guide to Getting Lost

by Rebecca Solnit

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.

These nameless places awaken a desire to be lost, to be far away, a desire for that melancholy wonder that is the blue of distance.

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

What is a ruin, after all? It is a human construction abandoned to nature, and one of the allures of ruins in the city is that of wilderness: a place full of the promise of the unknown with all its epiphanies and dangers.

Ruins become the unconscious of a city, its memory, unknown, darkness, lost lands, and in this truly bring it to life.

I was fifteen, and when I picture myself then, I see flames shooting up, see myself falling off the edge of the world, and am amazed I survived not the outside world but the inside one.

at the Catholic church I used to linger at as a child, yearning for ritual and belonging.

People wanted to capture her, like a wild thing, and take care of her, like a child.

Writing is the most disembodied art, and reading and writing are largely private and solitary experiences,

I don’t know if stability and security bored her, if her plunges into chaos were part of the recklessness of the desultorily self-destructive, or if the dangers were simply accoutrements of the alluring—of drugs, adventures,

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

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.

There is a voluptuous pleasure in all that sadness, and I wonder where it comes from, because as we usually construe the world, sadness and pleasure should be far apart.

The emotion stirred by the landscape is piercing, a joy close to pain when the blue is deepest on the horizon or the clouds are doing those spectacular fleeting things so much easier to recall than to describe.

a confusion of being desired with being hunted

The landscape in which identity is supposed to be grounded is not solid stuff; it’s made out of memory and desire, rather than rock and soil, as are the songs.

But the best writing appears like those animals, sudden, self-possessed, telling everything and nothing, words approaching wordlessness. Maybe writing is its own desert, its own wilderness.

how who you think you are becomes a factor of who you think he is and who he thinks you are,

The people close to you become mirrors and journals in which you record your history, the instruments that help you know yourself and remember yourself, and you do the same for them.

Heartbreak is a little like falling in love, in the way it charges everything with a kind of incandescence, as though the beloved has stepped away and your gaze now rests with all the same intensity on all the items of the view that close-up person blocked.

It’s in the way cream curls down into ice coffee and cigarette smoke coils up and the ice cubes in this drink are melting.

though I couldn’t bring myself to write one word down, not wanting to start unless I could finish.

Worry is a way to pretend that you have knowledge or control over what you don’t—and it surprises me, even in myself, how much we prefer ugly scenarios to the pure unknown.

we navigate by stories, but sometimes we only escape by abandoning them.

In dreams, nothing is lost. Childhood homes, the dead, lost toys all appear with a vividness your waking mind could not achieve. Nothing is lost but you yourself, wanderer in a terrain where even the most familiar places aren’t quite themselves and open onto the impossible.