Status Updates From A Field Guide to Getting Lost

I have been reading it for a while now actually, I am just bad at adding things because I'm moving around so much.

"A story can be a gift like Ariadne's thread, or the labyrinth, or the labyrinth's ravening Minotaur; we navigate by stories, but sometimes we only escape by abandoning them."

This book is magic so far. Sad, lonely magic.

"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."

A very slow read. Enjoyable.

"Lose the whole world...get lost in it, and find your soul."

"Lost the whole world...get lost in it, and find your soul."

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

"Not to find one's way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance - nothing more," says the twentieth-century philosopher-essayist Walter Benjamin. "But to lose oneself in a city - as one loses oneself in a forest - that calls for quite a different schooling."

Beautifully written.

Magical.

a much needec break from childhood trauma... what better way than to get lost!

The slowest essay in the book, and the last, is focused on the desert tortoise. Go figure.

Even the most tentative of Solnit's essays are good, if not great.

Listening to Jean Michel Jarre while reading that last chapter was trippy as all heck. The fact that I'm coming down with something added to the hypnognosis.

The paragraph on this page about the view as one climbs a mountain is wrought with meaning. One of the greatest implied metaphors I'very ever read. Humbling insight about sight and humility.

This is hitting some buttons of my childhood as a wandering Air Force brat. Profound and poignant. This should be an interesting review to write . . .

Ouch. The paragraph about the permanence of place is a knife to the heart of this wandering Air Force brat. Some of the places of my youth no longer exist, entire bases the size of small cities buried in ash or completely transmogrified from end to end. This kind of hurts. Kicked me right in the feels.

Solnit's essay on ruins is breathtaking. More quotes for the review! Quotes for everyone, on me!

The pages about butterflies, pp. 81-83, are moving and profound. One or more of those paragraphs are going into my review. Absolutely beautiful!

Youch. What a somber, desolate, yet moving essay about Solnit's family history. Not at all what I was expecting in this volume. There's a slow moving power, like a whispering bulldozer, in this essay.

Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That's where the important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go.

Solnit's definition of two ways to interpret "lost" is poetic brilliance. I shall definitely be quoting this in my review.

Solnit makes a good argument for being lost, but not stupid lost, more intentionally lost.

This will slow my Joyce reading down dramatically. I'm getting drawn in by Solnit's warm tone and careful, poetic thought.

wtf this is so good i want to live in these paragraphs

A good book to come to with an empty mind. If you try and impose too much order or stare too hard you lose the forest for the trees. Redwoods, natch.

Great so far!

Five stars, no kidding. What a wonder!

Two arrowheads: With other men you get to know their families, with this unhurried man who seemed like a desert hermit, animals seemed to fill that place and they were always around his home. Solitude in the city is about the lack of other people or rather their distance beyond a door or wall, but in remote places it isn't an absence but a presence of something else