Status Updates From A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“Maybe there’s one thing to say, about the capitalism of the heart, the belief that the essences of life too can be seized & hoarded, that you can corner the market on confidence, stage a hostile takeover of happiness. It’s based on scarcity economics, the notion or perhaps the feeling that there’s not enough to go around, & the belief that these intangible phenomena exist in a fixed quantity to be scrambled for...”

“There is something fearful and mysterious about every body of water, murky water that promises unseen things in unseen depths, clear water that shows you the bottom far below as if you could fall into it, though the water would buoy you up in that strange space neither air nor ground.”

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

“Science is how capitalism knows the world.”

“To imagine that you know, to populate the unknown with projections, is very different from knowing that you don’t... 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. Perhaps fantasy is what you fill up maps with rather than saying that they too contain the unknown.”

“To acknowledge the unknown is part of knowledge, and the unknown is visible as terra incognita but invisible as selection...”

“But the terra incognita spaces on maps say that knowledge also is an island surrounded by oceans of the unknown. They signify that the cartographers knew they did not know, and awareness of ignorance is not just ignorance; it’s awareness of knowledge’s limits.”

“No representation is complete. ... These parables say that representation is always partial, else it would not be representation, but some kind of haunting double.”

“As you step up to the ridgeline, the world to the west suddenly appears before you, a colossal expanse even more wild and remote than the east, a surprise, a gift, a revelation. The world suddenly doubles in size. Something like that happens when you really see someone...”

“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 the same intensity on all the items of the view that close-up person blocked.”

“The stories shatter. Or you wear them out or leave them behind. Over time the story or the memory loses its power. Over time you become someone else. Only when the honey turns to dust are you set free.”

“There isn’t a story to tell, because a relationship is a story you construct together and take up residence in, a story as sheltering as a house. ... It’s a shock to find yourself outdoors and alone again, hard to imagine that you could ever live in another house... hard when you have built it from scratch and called it home, hard to imagine building again. But you lit the fire that burned it down yourself.”

“There are moments of harmony that rise to the level of serendipity, coincidence, & beyond, & certain passages of time that seem dense with such incidents. Summers & deserts seem best for them... Such moments seem to mean that you have surrendered to the story being told & are following the story line rather than trying to tell it yourself, your puny voice interrupting and arguing with fate, nature, the gods.”

“The best writing appears like those animals, sudden, self-possessed, telling everything and nothing, words approaching wordlessness. Maybe writing is its own desert, it’s own wilderness.”

“What is the message that wild animals bring, the message that seems to say everything and nothing? ... that the world is wild, that life is unpredictable in its goodness and its danger, that the world is larger than you’d imagination?”

“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.”

“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 missed a lot of adventures that way early on, but I know that there were many paths I could have taken, and madness and misery lay down some of them...”

“That was what the city offered, a sharp antidote, the possibility of being fully awake, surrounded by all possibilities, some of which we’d learn the hard way were terrible.”

“.. things that had been too perilous to see before surfaced, and so I wrestled with some highly educational demons... I lost a whole life and gradually gained another one, more open and more free.”

“The social I’ve often called a layer of baloney sandwiched between the bread of the physical and the spiritual, but that is only the most reductive form of the social, one that defines human possibility within narrow and predictable terms. ... Like ruins, the social can become a wilderness in which the soul too becomes wild, seeking beyond itself, beyond its imagination.”

“The strange resonant word instar describes the stage between two successive molts, for as it grows, a caterpillar... splits its skin again and again, each stage an instar. ... 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.”

“The process of transformation consists mostly of decay and then of this crisis when emergence from what came before must be total and abrupt.”

“We have not much language to appreciate this phase of decay, this withdrawal, this era of ending that must precede beginning. Nor of the violence of the metamorphosis, which is often spoken of as though it were as graceful as a flower blooming.”

“Without noticing it you have traversed a great distance; the strange has become familiar and the familiar or not strange at least awkward or uncomfortable, an out-grown garment. ... Some people inherit values and practices as a house they inhabit; some of us have to burn down that house, find our own ground, build from scratch, even as a psychological metamorphosis.”

“The real difficulties, the real arts of survival, seem to lie in more subtle realm. There, what’s called for is a kind of resilience of the psyche, a readiness to deal with what comes next... the transitions whereby you cease to be who you were. Seldom is it as dramatic, but nevertheless, something of this journey goes on in every day life.”

“It seems that the captives had in a sense to lose their past to join the present, and this abandonment of memory, of old ties, is the steep cost of adaptation.”

“The terms in which to describe the extraordinary metamorphosis is his soul did not exist, at least for him. He was among the first, and the first to come back and tell the tale, of Europeans lost in the Americas, and like many of them he ceased to be lost not by returning but by turning into something else.”

“I think sometimes that I became a historian because I didn’t have a history, but also because I was interested in telling the truth in a family in which truth was an elusive entity. It could be best served not by claiming an authoritative and disinterested relationship to the facts, but by disclosing your own desires and agendas, for truth lies not only in incidents but in hopes and needs.”

“She was the keep of the family stories and photographs, though they served less 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.”

“The mind too can be imagined as a landscape, but only the minds of sages might resemble the short-grass prairie in which I played with getting lost and vanishing. The rest of us have caverns, glaciers, torrential rivers, heavy fogs, chasms that open up underfoot, even marauding wildlife bearing family names. It’s a landscape in which getting lost is easy and some regions are terrifying to visit.”