Vartika's Reviews > A Field Guide to Getting Lost

Throughout this book, I couldn't get Picasso's The Blue Room out of my mind. Just like the painting, A Field Guide to Getting Lost holds a deep sense of intimacy; of isolation, the slippage of time and memory; a yearning for and appreciation of the outside. As with the painting, there is a hidden portrait between the covers of this book, a life composed and painted over with disparate, affective visuals, to be lost and found.

The Blue Room (1901), 21 x 24 Oil on Canvas

There is something about Solnit's writing here that's quite like the colour blue—the blue of distance—that dominates it; the beauty of her words derives so much from the landscape around them that it seems to disappear and go out of depth when sought out for itself, so that it is nearly impossible to quote from any essay in this volume. It requires presence, and absence, and knowing, and not knowing, to get lost—be it between these pages or otherwise.

A Field Guide to Getting Lost presents a rather different side of Solnit than in her more recent political writing: it is unhurried—purposedly slow, even; a tessellation of essays where cultural history, memoir, nature writing, and aesthetic criticism wash into each other, wave building upon wave until they form delicate rosettes of ideas that, like desert selenite, can best be appreciated in the manner of their coming together; it is in their intricacy and otherworldliness that they become precious perspectives on realities that are otherwise relegated to the mundane.

This book has left me with much to think about, and perhaps it will make more—and less—sense in the blue of distance, and out of the blue. I am left thinking that the horizon is made material out of thin air, and that in all our yearning we project our selves onto a lesser an unknown composed of the need for knowing.