A Field Guide to Getting Lost

Rebecca Solnit begins A Field Guide to Getting Lost with an image that captures her project: The open door left ajar during the Jewish Passover for the prophet Elijah. She recalls being a child at her family’s Seder, mistakenly drinking Elijah’s wine, and faintly remembering whether the door was left open at all. This uncertain detail becomes a metaphor that structures the essay. To leave the door open is to welcome mystery, to allow for the arrival of the unforeseen. Whether or not Elijah walks through is irrelevant. What matters is the invitation—the willingness to make room for transformation. The open door, then, is the book’s first symbolic marker, pointing the reader toward Solnit’s larger conviction that to live fully requires an embrace of uncertainty.

This opening image aligns with the first theme Disorientation as Discovery and Transformation. Solnit quotes Keats’s idea of “negative capability”—the ability to rest in uncertainty and doubt without grasping prematurely at fact or reason. She links this to Poe and Oppenheimer, thinkers who valued the capacity to step into the unknown. Each saw being lost as a kind of paying attention: “To be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery” (6). The paradox is that losing one’s way is not a failure but a condition for real presence. The open door is a portal into this state of disorientation, representing a threshold where the known gives way to the uncharted.

This chapter also develops the theme of Longing and Uncertainty as Destination. Solnit lingers of the etymology of “lost,” tracing it to an Old Norse word meaning the disbanding of an army. To be lost, in this sense, means to disperse and return home. This etymological reminder reframes being lost as a kind of release. She critiques modern habits of overprotection, such as children kept indoors and adults trained to avoid risk. Her encounters with search-and-rescue experts reinforce this point. Adults, she learns, often continue walking in denial, only increasing their danger, whereas children more readily admit when they are lost and wait to be found. To be lost, then, is both inevitable and instructive; it teaches humility, patience, and the ability to acknowledge disorientation as a state in which possibility resides.

Solnit contrasts author descriptions of getting lost with a recounting of her excursion with students into the woods and a return to her childhood Passover, situating her reflections in concrete places where the risk of being lost is real. This technique is used throughout the work, with Solnit weaving historical accounts with personal background to highlight The Interplay of Memory, Landscape, and Identity. Solnit uses her memory to show that one can become lost even in familiar surroundings if one allows identity to dissolve. For Solnit, this reveals that the geography of being lost is both external and internal: It happens in forests and deserts, but also in memory and solitude. Her own childhood memory of Elijah’s door demonstrates this. Even her uncertainty about whether the door was open becomes part of the meaning, as memory itself is a terrain where absence and doubt guide humans toward self-discovery.