A Field Guide to Getting Lost - Rebecca Solnit

Nothing more to read into the titles I present, it is what it is. A coincidence of the most coincidental kind. Rebecca Solnit was a name I had heard with respect to coining the word 'mansplaining'. This won my instant respect and admiration. So when I saw her books at the bookstore, this out of all the titles spoke to me.

Rebecca Solnit is beyond the most inspiring feminist writers of our times - I discovered (for myself) she is a philosopher extraordinaire. One among many who just are not proclaimed (self or otherwise) as thought leaders. Her dive into the self is visible in every essay in the book - which is all about finding and losing ourselves. She brings it alive through dissecting into her internal dialogues as she works through some of the very questions she poses. The experience comes along with the awareness of the experience, and then the stepping back to question happens? At least that is the pattern I picked up in many parts of the essays.

Some things that stayed with me:

1. 'How will you go about finding that thing of nature, which is totally unknown to you'.

2. 'Key is to know when you are lost - children are good at this'.

3. 'The winter - orient themselves to their habitat - directionally'.

4. 'The world is stable, you are contingent, nothing apart from our surroundings'.

5. 'Soul - you have been here before only when you were someone else'.

6. (We treat) 'desire as a problem to be solved. The blue is there and it casts a glow so enticing and it so does because it is far. So is desire a problem that will never be solved'.

7. 'References and words give a sense of scale - far away and nearby; physically especially, seem like the same once you change the way you look at it'.

8. 'You cease to be lost not by returning but by turning into something/someone else'.

9. 'The violence of metamorphosis is never pictured. The decay of one for the other to be born is never seen or shown'. 'Instar' - process of transformation consists mostly of decay and then of their crisis when emergence from came before must be total and abrupt'.

10. Map - no representation is complete. Terra incognita - the unknown in a map. Slavoj Zizek - the 'unknown knowns'. 'An awareness of ignorance is not ignorance but an understanding of knowledge's limits'.

11. Worry - is a way to pretend that you have control over something you don't, we seem to prefer ugly scenarios than the pure unknown'. For me, it is mentally preparing myself for the worst and/or believing that life is waiting to catch me off-guard (in a worst-nightmare kind of way).

12. Yves Klein & International Klein Blue (IKB) - grandiose ambition and mystical tendencies. Wanted to erase | dissolve | blur | wipe out | make one. Erasing the map of reason and entering the void of consciousness.

13. The leap into the void - 'we devour heaven in bites too small to be measured'. 'The moment of darkness in movies adds up to 30 minutes but we really never register it'. Is that the same for that moment of awareness and in culmination adds up to the years in one's life?

Life is about one insight to the other.

Loved the book, many connections old and new - her perspective is familiar yet the words and examples and the way she brings it to being gives a thrill of the new. Just because you understand it doesn't mean you are it - an assumption that all of us need to keep repeating to ourselves not to make. A great read.