A Field Guide to Getting Lost

The second chapter begins with a meditation on the color blue. Solnit explains that the world is blue at its edges—the mountains far away, the horizon line, the deep folds of a canyon, and the depths of the ocean. Blue, she notes, is not in the objects themselves but in the distance created by light scattering. This scientific phenomenon serves as the foundation for her metaphor: Blue is the color of longing, of what is beyond reach. Solnit describes her own infatuation with the color: “The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go” (27). Since the color is created by the atmosphere in the space between the viewer and the object, it symbolizes the unattainable horizon.

Solnit then connects this natural fact to cultural and personal history. Artists only began painting the blue horizon around the 16th century. Hans Memling’s painting of the resurrection in 1490 and Joachim Patenier’s depiction of Saint Jerome are just two of many examples Solnit provides of this movement toward embracing distance in art, highlighting how far away the object of desire can be.