A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“That thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you is usually what you need to find, and finding it is a matter of getting lost.”

By invoking Meno’s paradox, Solnit suggests that only through losing direction do we encounter what we most need. Getting lost becomes an epistemological stance rather than a mistake. This illustrates Disorientation as Discovery and Transformation by treating uncertainty as a method of finding.

“We treat desire as a problem to be solved, address what desire is for and focus on that something and how to acquire it rather than on the nature and the sensation of desire, though often it is the distance between us and the object of desire that fills the space in between with the blue of longing.”

Here desire is likened to distance, colored by the motif of blue. Solnit reframes longing as generative, creating a space for imagination between self and object. This directly engages Longing and Uncertainty as Destination.

“Some things we have only as long as they remain lost, some things are not lost only so long as they are distant.”

Solnit emphasizes that distance preserves meaning. What is lost or out of reach gains intensity precisely because it cannot be grasped. This reflects Longing and Uncertainty as Destination, since distance itself becomes the condition that sustains desire.

“I stopped before the trees were gone, not ready that day to disappear entirely into the vastness. Perhaps these spaces are the best corollary I have found to truth, to clarity, to independence.”

Pausing before the forest disappears reflects Solnit’s refusal of total certainty. The forest represents the tension between retreat and immersion, shaping her independence. This illustrates Disorientation as Discovery and Transformation, because the act of stopping acknowledges that selfhood deepens in moments of hesitation and vulnerability.

“To have such an immediate ancestor who represented mystery and the unknown might perhaps be a gift, generous as the empty air above the prairie is generous, just as some questions are more profound than their answers.”

The great-grandmother becomes a figure of absence and mystery, a kind of shul. Her story embodies the richness of unanswered questions. The passage highlights how fragments, rather than full narratives, can serve as guiding marks of identity.

“These captives lay out in a stark and dramatic way what goes on in every life: the transitions by which you cease to be who you were.”

Captive narratives dramatize transformation through dislocation. Stripped of context, individuals become new selves in new landscapes. This embodies Disorientation as Discovery and Transformation. The rupture of captivity, like all change, becomes the very condition that allows for rebirth.

“The strange resonant word instar describes the stage between two successive molts, for as it grows, a caterpillar, like a snake, like Cabeza de Vaca walking across the Southwest, splits its skin again and again, each stage an instar.”

The motif of instar links natural metamorphosis with human change. Cabeza de Vaca’s survival parallels the shedding of skins. This highlights Disorientation as Discovery and Transformation, since both literal and figurative molting represent identity’s continual re-formation.

“A city is built to resemble a conscious mind, a network that can calculate, administrate, manufacture. Ruins become the unconscious of a city, its memory, unknown, darkness, lost lands, and in this truly bring it to life.”

Solnit uses ruins as a metaphor for the unconscious of a city. They hold memory and reveal what the surface world conceals. In this image, the ruin functions as both a wound and a reservoir, where what is forgotten continues to pulse beneath the visible.

“But fear of making mistakes can itself become a huge mistake, one that prevents you from living, for life is risky and anything less is already loss.”

Fear of error is reframed as paralysis. Solnit insists that risk itself defines life. This connects to Disorientation as Discovery and Transformation, since stepping into uncertainty—even at the cost of mistakes—is what allows growth.

“Perhaps it’s that you can’t go back in time, but you can return to the scenes of a love, of a crime, of happiness, and of a fatal decision; the places are what remain, are what you can possess, are what is immortal. They become the tangible landscape of memory, the places that made you, and in some way you too become them.”

Landscapes become repositories of memory and identity. Solnit suggests that we are inseparable from the places that shape us. This illustrates The Interplay of Memory, Landscape, and Identity, because place functions as a mirror that both stores and reshapes memory.

“The places in which any significant event occurred became embedded with some of that emotion, and so to recover the memory of the place is to recover the emotion, and sometimes to revisit the place uncovers the emotion. Every love has its landscape.”

Here, Solnit links place and emotion, showing how landscape retains and triggers feeling. Memory becomes inseparable from geography. The lyric rhythm of this passage mirrors the recurrence of memory itself, surfacing again and again with intensity.

“People look into the future and expect that the forces of the present will unfold in a coherent and predictable way, but any examination of the past reveals that the circuitous routes of change are unimaginably strange.”

The past resists linear explanation, unfolding in strange, circuitous ways. Solnit suggests that the future will be equally unpredictable. This connects to Longing and Uncertainty as Destination, because the inability to know what lies ahead becomes an invitation to inhabit uncertainty.

“Once I loved a man who was a lot like the desert, and before that I loved the desert. It wasn’t particular things but the space between them, that abundance of absence, that is the desert’s invitation.”

The desert here is defined not by fullness but by absence, which Solnit describes as an invitation. Loving both man and desert reflects this attraction to space itself. The metaphorical desert becomes an emblem of desire that thrives on distance and The Interplay of Memory, Landscape, and Identity.

“Solitude in the city is about the lack of other people or rather their distance beyond a door or wall, but in remote places it isn’t an absence but the presence of something else, a kind of humming silence in which solitude seems as natural to your species as to any other, words or strange rocks you may or not may turn over.”

Solnit distinguishes between urban solitude and wilderness solitude. In the city, solitude comes from walls; in the desert, it comes from presence. This illustrates Disorientation as Discovery and Transformation. Solitude forces a new awareness of self in relation to nonhuman life.

“There are Parisian novels in which love of a woman and love of the city become the same passion, though a lonely one in which wandering, stalking, haunting are consummation, and real communion is unimaginable.”

Love of the city and love of a woman collapse into the same yearning, both defined by distance rather than fulfillment. What lingers is not communion but the restless act of wandering, haunting, and searching. This illustrates Longing and Uncertainty as Destination. Desire here is sustained not by possession but by its own unending movement through absence.

“The hermit crab: grabbing on one side and clinging on the other. Eventually the creature outgrows the shell, and thus comes the risky moment called the molt, when the crab is between shells.”

The hermit crab’s molt symbolizes the vulnerable stage between homes. Exposure is unavoidable, but it is also the condition for growth. This illustrates Disorientation as Discovery and Transformation, because identity reshapes itself only when the old shell no longer fits and the new one is not yet found.

“Many love stories are like the shells of hermit crabs, though others are more like chambered nautiluses, whose architecture grows with the inhabitant and whose abandoned smaller chambers are lighter than water and let them float in the sea.”

The chambered nautilus offers an image of growth as continuity rather than rupture. Its expanding chambers hold the memory of earlier stages, creating a structure that is both present and archival. This connects to The Interplay of Memory, Landscape, and Identity, since the self, like the nautilus, carries its past within it, floating forward because of what it has already left behind.

“Blue the color that represents the spirit, the sky, and water, the immaterial and the remote, so that however tactile and close-up it is, it is always about distance and disembodiment.”

Blue is defined as both close and distant, material and immaterial. Its paradoxical qualities reflect longing’s dual nature—an ache that is both embodied and unreachable. This illustrates Longing and Uncertainty as Destination, because the color itself demonstrates how desire endures precisely by remaining unattainable.

“Between words is silence, around ink whiteness, behind every map’s information is what’s left out, the unmapped and unmappable.”

Silence, whiteness, and blankness frame every act of representation. Maps and texts gesture not only to what they include but also to what they exclude. Solnit reminds readers that absence is never empty; it shapes meaning just as powerfully as presence, leaving knowledge haunted by what cannot be named.

“To acknowledge the unknown is part of knowledge, and the unknown is visible as terra incognita but invisible as selection.”

Terra incognita becomes a symbol of humility. To name parts of the map as unknown is to admit the limits of power and possession. This reflects Longing and Uncertainty as Destination, since orientation toward what cannot be mastered invites a mode of living in incompleteness.

“Worry is a way to pretend that you have knowledge or control over what you don’t—and it surprises me, even in myself, how much we prefer ugly scenarios to the pure unknown.”

Solnit believes that worry pretends to offer control, but it only limits the horizon of what can be imagined. By clinging to worst-case scenarios, the mind narrows itself to fear instead of opening to possibility. This reflects Longing and Uncertainty as Destination, because Solnit frames the willingness to dwell in uncertainty as a form of freedom, one that resists the false comfort of prediction.

“A story can be a gift like Ariadne’s thread, or the labyrinth, or the labyrinth’s ravening Minotaur; we navigate by stories, but sometimes we only escape by abandoning them.”

Stories can illuminate or ensnare. They act as Ariadne’s thread through the labyrinth, but they can also confine like the Minotaur’s prison. Solnit gestures here toward Disorientation as Discovery and Transformation, because relinquishing narrative control can allow new paths of becoming to emerge.

“In dreams, nothing is lost. Childhood homes, the dead, lost toys all appear with a vividness your waking mind could not achieve. Nothing is lost but you yourself, wanderer in a terrain where even the most familiar places aren’t quite themselves and open onto the impossible.”

Dreams preserve what waking life loses—childhood homes, lost toys, the dead. However, in dreams the self itself becomes unstable, wandering through impossible terrains. The passage resonates with The Interplay of Memory, Landscape, and Identity, since dreams turn memory into shifting landscapes that remake identity each time they return.