From the experiences of continental explorers like Cabeza de Vaca, she turns to new world captivity narratives, wondering all the while about how their senses of loss became fresh opportunities for being found.
She puzzles over the artistry of European and American painters and photographers, grappling particularly with the lost horizons of the color blue. Robert Oppenheimer, Edgar Allan Poe, Albert Camus, Simone Weil, Dante, Socrates, Meno, to name only a few of the many voices that join with Solnit’s. The extent of that range, and its philosophical touchstones, is both broad and deep. “Lose the whole world, he asserts, get lost in it, and find your soul.” Thus, in the opening essay of A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Solnit sets out the map for the range of soul-searching and soul-seeking explorations that will follow. First of all, the author posits that getting lost “seems like the beginning of finding your way or finding another way.” She goes on to say that “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.” Finally, she refers to Henry David Thoreau. Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost essentially is a memoir of the mind, an intense collection of personal essays about losing oneself intellectually, emotionally, physically, and psychologically.
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