Status Updates From A Field Guide to Getting Lost

Is it that there is a place where sadness and joy are not distinct, where all emotion lies together, a sort of ocean into which the tributary streams of distinct emotions go, a faraway deep inside; is it that such sadness is only the side effect of art that describes the depths of our lives, and to see that described in all its potential for loneliness and pain is beautiful?

B

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.

[Her opening line, though—The first time I got drunk was on Elijah's wine. I was eight or so.]

"Only the continuation of abundance makes loss sustainable, makes it natural."

"he ceased to be lost not by returning but by turning into something else"
I'd like to remember that line.

How do you let yourself get lost? In time and/or space? How do you look for what you don't know exists? (a question I've actually thought a lot about)

"You already know what seems unknown; you have been here before, but only when you were someone else."

"Is it that the joy that comes from other people always risks sadness, because even when love doesn't fail, mortality enters in."

Awareness of ignorance is not just ignorance; it's awareness of knowledge's limits.

...that abundance of absence, that is the desert's invitation.

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

There is no distance in childhood: for a baby, a mother in the other room is gone forever.

Solnit quoted the part from To The Lighthouse that first axed the ice in me and then proceeded to talk about Virginia's suicide as an attempt to be fully present, or what I oversimplified and called natural, in my review.

!!!

In Benjamin's terms to be lost is to be fully present, and to be filly present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery.

(Walter Benjamin seems to be seeking my attention. Okay maybe I'm seeking him.)

So far this is infinitely quotable, which nearly makes up for the fact that it is also tedious.

This is not a genre of book I am used to reading. Hmmm.....

I expect this book to be challenging and interesting and not one that will meet my needs for a discussable book.

Great concept, loving the philosophical and existential fodder. Feeling properly dosed with some red pill thinking.

The practice of awareness takes us below the reasonableness that we'd like to think we live with and then we start to see something quite fascinating, which is the drama of our inner dialogue, of the stories that go through our heart, and we start to see in this territory it isn't so neat and orderly and, dare I say it, safe or reasonable.

"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."

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

Beautiful prose. Why have I not read Solnit before?

*Gasp.* This one also, lovely. *Sigh.*

"Maybe writing is its own desert, its own wilderness."

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. Without noticing it you have traversed a great distance; the strand has become familiar and the familiar if not strange than at least awkward or uncomfortable, an outgrown garment.

Not quite lost. Not quite here.

It's a little early, but I already love it? The concept is fantastic. I'm mesmerised by it actually and the prose... I just hope it continues on being this good.

I am really enjoying this exploration of being lost and the idea of being lost.

I am devouring this book. "The landscape in which identity is supposed to be grounded is not solid stuff; it's made out of memory and desire, rather than rock and soil..." (121)

I heard about this book from the Brain Pickings blog. So far, it does not disappoint. "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." (14)