Status Updates From A Field Guide to Getting Lost

Brought this book to read while camping. Not quite sure I like it, but want to keep reading and see if it might come full circle.

Abandoned

"you already know what seems unknown; you have been here before, but only when you were someone else. [...] Mystery. That much is certain. It can be a kind of compass." — dialogue between Socrates & Meno.

love how reading this book makes me want to expand my reading list, & of course, as a big fan of intertextuality, i think i'm going to love my first Solnit!

"A city is built to resemble a conscious mind, a network that can calculate, administrate, manufacture. Ruins become the unconscious of a city, its memory, unknown, darkness, lost lands, and in this truly bring it to life. With ruins a city springs free of its plans into something as intricate as life, something that can be explored but perhaps not mapped."

"But the changes in a butterfly's life are not always so dramatic. The strange resonant word instar describes the stage between two successive molts - it remains a caterpillar, but no longer one in the same skin. 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."

"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...

The things we want are transformative, and we don't know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation. Love, wisdom, grace, inspiration - in some ways about extending the boundaries of the self into unknown territory..."

Really enjoyed the chapter ‘Two Arrowheads’

About time I picked this up again! (Can't believe I stopped reading it last year despite loving what I had read thus far!)
Thanks to Jenny Odell for reminding me of Rebecca Solnit in her book How To Do Nothing.

"lost really has two disparate meanings. losing things is about the familiar falling away, getting lost is about the unfamiliar appearing."

Part memoir, part generalising, forcibly poetic drivel ("blue is the distance of longing, a gap to the other that can never be closed, and that kind of Levinasian BS). Why am I still reading this? I must be a masochist.

A happy love's a single story,a disintegrating one is 2 or more competing,conflicting versions,& a disintegrated one lies @ your feet like a shattered mirror,each shard reflecting a different story,that it's wonderful,that it's terrible,if only this had,if only that hadn't.The stories don't fit back together,& it's the end of stories,those devices we carry like shells& shields& blinkers& occassionally maps& compasses

Solitude in a city is about the lack of other people or rather their distance beyond a door or wall, but in the remote places it isn't an absence but the presence of something else, a kind of humming silence in which solitude as natural to your species as the to any other, words strange rocks you may or may not turn over.

Caustic, literary, radical, she was the keeper of the family stories and photographs, though they served lesser as buttresses of a stable sense of the past than phantasms and fictions that metamorphose continually in accordance with the needs of the present. But all histories and photographs do that, public as well as private.

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

Let's love this distance, which is thoroughly woven with friendship, since those who do not love each other are not separated.
~ Simone Weil

The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go. For the blue is not in the place those miles away at the horizon,but in the atmospheric distance between you and the mountains.

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.

'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.' 💭💭

It's that part of her books where she starts to sound incredibly wanky, full of quotable sentences that sound very lofty in isolation, but read, in paragraph, like incoherent verbiage. The oscillating imagery and unstable subject focus, initially charming, starts to grate like a party trick done once too often.

"Lost really has two disparate meanings. Losing things is about the
familiar falling away, getting lost is about the unfamiliar appearing."

Solnit's prose is hypnotic and wistfully beautiful.

This book is terrible sounds like a ranting later that won’t stop talking

This reminds me a lot of 'How to Do Nothing': it's rooted in California, it's about connecting with nature and your surroundings, and it's socially aware of Indigenous history in the region. However, I'm having a hard time focusing on the writing, I find myself daydreaming, and when I force myself to concentrate it's like I'm reading a different language.

I don't know who this Rebecca Solnit thinks she it, writing so beautifully that she makes me cry in a variety of inappropriate times and places.

"Even when that friend arrives on your 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."

“I wonder sometimes whether with a slight adjustment of perspective [desire] could be cherished as a sensation on its own terms, since it is as inherent to the human condition as blue is to distance?”

skjut mig i ansiktet vad jag älskar detta

14 pages read in 14 min, via @leioapp (http://leio.co).

I’m finding Solnit’s writing hard to parse. The structure of her sentences is very winding — and in a confusing way, not a pleasant one. The actual “story,” too (if I can call it that) is disjointed. She seems to hop from one topic to the next with no real intention.

“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.”

Šī ir tāda daudzdomājamā grāmata, par pagātni, par meklējumiem un ceļiem uz sevi.