43 pages • 1-hour read
A Field Guide to Getting Lost
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Content Warning: This section includes discussion of substance abuse.
The Blue of Distance
If there is a single image that threads Solnit’s life and writing, it is blue—the color that emerges as a recurring title in A Field Guide to Getting Lost: “The Blue of Distance.” Here, blue signals longing and absence, a beauty that exists only as horizon. Solnit begins with the scientific explanation: Blue arises at the edges of vision, created not by the object itself but by the atmosphere between the viewer and the faraway. Mountains, canyons, and oceans are tinted blue because of distance itself.
This fact becomes metaphor. Blue symbolizes the unattainable, the perpetual elsewhere, the quality of longing that never resolves. Solnit reflects on how painters in the 16th century began to depict horizons in blue to capture this desire, and how her own glimpses of San Francisco from Mount Tamalpais filled her with longing for a city she already inhabited. Blue becomes both a color and a condition: To see it is to acknowledge absence as a part of beauty, to accept longing as a destination in its own right. “The Blue of Distance” recurs throughout the book, reminding readers that absence is formative, not merely a lack.
Open Door
In the first chapter, Solnit begins with the image of the open door. As she recalls an early Passover celebration with her family, she tries to remember whether the door was left open for the prophet Elijah to enter—a part of the holiday traditions. Solnit recalls feeling how special and unusual it was: “Ordinarily, we locked doors, though nothing unexpected came down our street in this northernmost subdivision in the county […] This opening the door to night, prophecy, and the end of time would have been a thrilling violation of ordinary practice” (4). The open door becomes a symbolic threshold between certainty and the unknown.
Whether Elijah enters or not is beside the point; what matters is the gesture of leaving the door ajar, the posture of invitation. For Solnit, this image comes to represent the act of deliberately courting disorientation: Welcoming what cannot be predicted, allowing for transformation by making space for the unforeseen. Like Meno’s question to Socrates—how can we find what we do not yet know?—the open door is a paradoxical map. It embodies Solnit’s central conviction that mystery itself must be invited, that to live fully requires opening oneself up to uncertainty.
Instar
Solnit introduces the concept of the instar while reflecting on the transformation of captive narratives and the metamorphosis of butterflies. Instar is the word for the interval between molts in a caterpillar’s life, when the creature sheds its skin and passes through stages toward eventual transformation. Instar becomes a key symbol for disorientation: A threshold that is neither what came before, nor what will follow. It marks the in-between stage where identity dissolves and reforms.
Cabeza de Vaca, shipwrecked and enslaved, shed his skin like a snake in the Southwestern sun, stripped of fear and greed, becoming someone entirely new. The captives who were taken from Puritan settlements and absorbed in Indigenous communities similarly inhabited instar states, in which they left behind old certainties and identities. Instar names the beauty and terror of transformation. It is a symbol of the unstable but necessary space where disorientation becomes discovery, and where metamorphosis takes root.
Ruins
Ruins represent one of the most haunting symbols in the book. In Chapter 5, Solnit recounts coming of age amid the decaying industrial landscapes of San Francisco during the 1980s. Factories closed, buildings were abandoned, and entire districts were hollowed out as the industrial economy collapsed. To the young people of the punk scene, these spaces were playgrounds of possibility. Solnit suggests that they are also symbols for leaving the past behind and making it into something new.
Ruins mark endings—the collapse of the American dream, the failure of optimism—but they also open space for transformation. Solnit recalls making a film with friends in an abandoned hospital, treating its emptiness as a stage. Her friend Delphine embodies this same paradox: Restless, wild, constantly reinventing herself, a ruin in human form. Her overdose underscores the precariousness of living entirely amid collapse. Ruins remind Solnit that decay is both loss and freedom.
Shul
The Tibetan word shul describes the trace left behind after something has passed, like the hollow of a footprint in the earth. Solnit adopts this concept to describe her relationship to memory, ancestry, and the past. In “Daisy Chains,” she reflects that her grandmother and great-grandmother are like shul: Impressions of lives partly lost, guiding her without offering full clarity. Photographs that vanish, family stories that contradict, and the silence of her father’s generation all contribute to an inheritance defined by absence as much as presence.
Shul becomes a way to think about how memory operates—not as a complete account but as a landscape of traces. The motif also extends to geography, as ruins, deserts, and horizons are themselves forms of shul, marks of what has been transformed or disappeared. For Solnit, following shul is a way of traveling through uncertainty, guided by what lingers after loss.
Unlock the meaning behind every key symbol & motif
See how recurring imagery, objects, and ideas shape the narrative.
- Explore how the author builds meaning through symbolism
- Understand what symbols & motifs represent in the text
- Connect recurring ideas to themes, characters, and events