Status Updates From A Field Guide to Getting Lost

very hard to get through but very rewarding as well

162

Another pick by Life's Library and one I would not have picked out myself out of the white noise of all the other books out there in the world.
It may be because I spend a short 4 day holiday doing what I love best: wander about in a city, travelling alone and meeting people where ever you go, that this book is hitting home. Some people in the reading group seem overwhelmed by it, I think it's very accessible.

The Blue of Distance is making me so nostalgic for my art history classes and learning about the intricacies of color and light in paintings created centuries ago.

This last chapter was difficult to get through. I'm not much of a art lover, but Yves Klein is the antithesis of what I consider art. Post-modern crap on a stick. And what does this have to do with being lost?! Klein was obsessed with finding the perfect color blue. And once he "found" it, he put it on everything. Like an absurd child with ketchup. Now this is better cause it's monochromatic Klein-blue. Whatever.

"It was the Vastness that I loved and an austerity that was also voluptuous" This quote is about the desert but I totally relatet to loving the vastness of a landscape there aren't many landscapes that you can just love for their emptiness.

Meh.

One chapter left!

This last chapter has me thinking that Solnit is pretty judgmental. She's female, immigrant, and has always lived in liberal places so I need to listen to her and her artsy-fartsy views.

I think it's at least likely that she created an argument just so she could connect Blues music to her theme on the "blue of distance".

"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 only have 18 % of this book to go and I am still so incredibly ready to abandon it. I just find this weird rambling narrative to be so annoying and I'm not sure where she is going with this half of the time.

I find myself in a very strange quantum state of love and not-Love for this book. On one hand, the writing is beautiful and the points on loss and being lost are very thought provoking and beautiful. On the other hand, the romanticization of certain concepts, topics, and historical narratives makes me uneasy.

“We fly; we dream in darkness; we devour heaven in bites too small to be measured.”

“We fly; we dream in darkness; we devour heaven in bites too small to be measured.”

"..., but it might instead have been because dead became real" oof that one came in real hard. I can't totally relate cause dead became real earlier to me in life but I know that feeling of it shattering the moment dead becomes real and close and the fear it can also instills in you. Dead might have came different for rebecca and I but it came as a reminder that no one is save from them.

“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.”

So far, a lovely poem of a book.

“Every love has its landscape.”

Dropping. Really finding it a slog to get through, and there are so many other books out there that I could be reading instead. I tried to get through it, I really did. :(

Yet another heartbreaking chapter, but for different reasons than before.
“But fear of making mistakes can itself become a huge mistake, one that prevents you from living, for life is risky and any fünf less is already loss.”

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 art of not forgetting but letting go

Twenty pages in and have marked like five passages already. 🌳

Oh my what have I gotten myself into? 🤷🏾‍♀️
“The whole point of a book club is to read out of my confort zone” is what I’m constantly repeating to myself but this book is soooo dense.
I’ve read the first two chapters and gotten nothing out of it so I’m starting again today.

Oh my what have I gotten myself into? 🤷🏾‍♀️
“The whole point of a book club is to read out of my confort zone” is what I’m constantly repeating to myself but this book is soooo dense.
I’ve read the first two chapters and gotten nothing out of it so I’m starting again today.

Chapter 4 broke my heart.
“The whites always regarded her as having been rescued, but she seems to have regarded herself as having been imprisoned.”

Chapter 4 broke my heart.
“The whites always regarded her as having been rescued, but she seems to have regarded herself as having been imprisoned.”

The art of not forgetting but letting go

Abandon is strange to me. Solnit seems to suggest that we can abandon that which is safe to us. Her friend was reckless with drugs, ends up dying. Solnit always felt she was happy but she was only happy for others; she was never happy for herself. How this is like an abandoned hospital which Solnit shot a movie at in your late teens....I don't know.

20 pages read in 33 min, via @leioapp (http://leio.co).