A Field Guide to Getting Lost

Rebecca Solnit’s Field Guide to Getting Lost is a collection of essays that reflect on uncertainty, wandering, and the human need for transformation. While the book ranges across topics such as art, history, landscape, and memory, it can be framed within two major traditions of modern philosophy: Existentialism and phenomenology. Both traditions emphasize the centrality of lived experience and the necessity of confronting uncertainty. By reading Solnit’s essays in dialogue with these traditions, readers can see how her reflections continue a long philosophical conversation about the value of not knowing, about what happens when the familiar is stripped away, and about how human beings come to discover themselves.

Existentialist thought arose in the 19th and 20th centuries in response to the collapse of traditional religious and moral frameworks. Søren Kierkegaard described “angst” as the dizziness of freedom—the feeling that emerges when a person realizes that their life is not predetermined, but open to possibility. Nietzsche argued that the death of God created a cultural void in which human beings would need to invent new moral values. Heidegger described the process of finding oneself in a world that one did not choose. Solnit’s essays reflect these existentialist themes by treating disorientation as a necessary part of human life.