Status Updates From A Field Guide to Getting Lost

"Of course to forget the past is to lose the sense of loss that is also memory of an absent richness and a set of clues to navigate the present by; the art is not one of forgetting but letting go. And when everything else is gone, you can be rich in loss."

"Of course to forget the past is to lose the sense of loss that is also memory of an absent richness and a set of clues to navigate the present by; the art is not one of forgetting but letting go. And when everything else is gone, you can be rich in loss."

"Of course to forget the past is to lose the sense of loss that is also memory of an absent richness and a set of clues to navigate the present by; the art is not one of forgetting but letting go. And when everything else is gone, you can be rich I loss."

I'm having trouble following the writer. Have to maintain strict concentration --very abstract. This seems more like it wants to be a series of poems.

Truly a delightful read. Some breathtaking sentences along the way.

I've come to long not to see new places but to return and know the old ones more deeply, to see them again. p120

With ruins a city springs free of its plans into something as intricate as life, something that can be explored but perhaps not mapped.
p89

History is made more of crossroads, branchings, and tangles than straight lines. p59

But in the place called lost strange things are found. p21

Esta autora se esta convirtiendo en una de mis favoritas. Fácil de leer pero con momentos muy poéticos.

Ugh, I want to hold all these words in my hand on a long hike.

I find myself (literally) writing in the margins throughout this book. Asking myself questions, giving myself pointers on what to write about. It's insane how much this brings to the surface for me. Thanks, Solnit. Has anyone read all of her books and can recommend me a next one? Not sure why I started here other than this one spoke to me at the time of buying... (I'm in a lost place at the moment).

Struggling with this, it has wonderful metaphors and paints some stunning imagery, but reads a bit like a blind sloth wandering through the jungle chasing a butterfly. I'm sure that's purposeful and others live it but not really my thing

"Teenagers imagine dying young because death is more imaginable than the person that all the decisions and burdens of adulthood may make of you".

"Sometimes an old photograph, an old friend, an old letter will remind you that you are not who you once were, for the person who dwelt among them, valued this, chose that, wrote thus, no longer exists"

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

It's so good ! It makes me rethink of how good is to feel lost sometimes, to know how to let it go, and just to be a "now person".

"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."

So yeah, I'm finding this pretty overwrought.

I am too awake, too early, and have read too much of this for five in the morning. But it does make me wonder whether I have been too concerned for too many years with where I'm going and the fear of where I'm going rather than where I am.

"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."

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

"The art is not one of forgetting but letting go. And when everything else is gone, you can be rich in loss."

This is not appealing to me right now. I am going to let it go and know that I will pick it again when I am ready.

Every time I finish an essay in this book I double back, gathering the thread I paid out in the maze and am amazed at how short the physical distance, the actual brevity of it. Each packs a novel's worth of reverie.

Writing is the most disembodied art, and reading and writing are largely private and solitary experiences, so music and dance have always enchanted me as arts in which the body of the performer communicates directly to the audience, welding a kind of communion writers rarely experience. (p. 97)

We treat desire as a problem to be solved, address what desire is for and focus on that something and how to acquire it rather than on the nature and the sensation of desire, though often it is the distance between us and the the object of desire that fills the space in between with the blue of longing. (p. 30)

The question then is how to get lost. Never to get lost is not to live, not to know how to get lost brings you to destruction, and somewhere in the terra incognita in between lies a life of discovery. (p. 14)

I'm surprised by just how much I like this book.

this book is so beautiful I want to carry it with me like a parasol so it can protect me from things like sunlight while teaching me how to live

awesome