A Field Guide to Getting Lost

by Rebecca Solnit

Leave 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.

Scientists too, as J. Robert Oppenheimer once remarked, “live always at the ‘edge of mystery’—the boundary of the unknown.” But they transform the unknown into the known, haul it in like fishermen; artists get you out into that dark sea.

Love this!

“But to lose oneself in a city—as

as one loses oneself in a forest—that calls for quite a different schooling.” To lose yourself: a voluptuous surrender, lost in your arms, lost to the world, utterly immersed in what is present so that its surroundings fade away. In Benjamin’s terms, to be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery. And one does not get lost but loses oneself, with the implication that it is a conscious choice, a chosen surrender, a psychic state achievable through geography.

Absolutely beautiful, oh how I long to get lost in a city again the way I used to before I had a smartphone ! Don't get me wrong I love my tecnologías but I wouldn't mind stuffing it in my bag sometime somewhere unfamiliar and just being there with the scene and myself. Maybe then I could write again like I used to.