In Chapter 6, Solnit turns her meditation on blue toward sound, exploring how country music and the blues opened new landscapes of meaning for her later in life. This chapter speaks strongly to The Interplay of Memory, Landscape, and Identity. Solnit notices that in many country songs, the lyrics describe love and loss, but beneath them runs a deeper love of place: “So though they were overtly love songs, in most of them the landscape was a deeper anchor for being and the object of another, more enduring love” (115). Place becomes the real subject of devotion, a substitute for the irretrievable past. This connection to landscape mirrors her own experience of memory. Just as the horizon in “The Blue of Distance” embodies longing for what cannot be reached, the landscapes of country music serve as shul—traces of what has passed but still orient identity.

The theme of Longing and Uncertainty as Destination resonates through music’s layering of absence. Songs function as emotional maps to places that no longer exist or cannot be returned to, carrying listeners across time and geography. Solnit reflects that although the world in which the blues were born—enslavement, the rural South, the fusion of African traditions with English folk forms—has vanished, the feeling remains. To listen is to inhabit an inheritance of longing. Music, like the horizon, creates an emotional geography where absence is as present as presence.

The chapter also advances Disorientation as Discovery and Transformation. Solnit recalls making a mixtape called “Blue,” a collection of songs that carried her into new ways of inhabiting space. Driving through landscapes while listening to these songs, she experienced them not only as personal memories but also as layered histories, sonic shuls that marked what had passed while guiding her forward. Music allowed her to get lost in unfamiliar cultural traditions and to find herself transformed by their cadences. In the act of listening—wandering emotionally through songs and landscapes—she discovered that being lost in sound can be as transformative as being lost in place.