A Field Guide to Getting Lost

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.