43 pages • 1-hour read
A Field Guide to Getting Lost
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Themes
Content Warning: This section includes discussion of child abuse.
Disorientation as Discovery and Transformation
One of the most consistent arguments in A Field Guide to Getting Lost is that disorientation is not an error to be corrected, but a necessary state of being that enables discovery and transformation. Solnit presents getting lost—whether in the wilderness, in a city ruin, or within memory itself—as an opening for self-discovery and renewal. Losing one’s bearings strips away certainty, leaving room for new ways of perceiving and becoming.
This theme emerges in the book’s attention to thresholds. The open door of childhood memory becomes a metaphor for this practice of invitation. To step through or even to leave the door ajar is to welcome the possibility of what cannot be predicted. Similarly, the figure of the butterfly in its instar stage captures the essence of disorientation: An organism suspended between forms, vulnerable and unstable, yet on the verge of radical change. For Solnit, disorientation is akin to this liminal stage—it is where identity sheds old skins and begins to take on new forms.
The captive narratives explored in one chapter sharpen this argument. Figures like Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, who was stripped of clothing, possessions, and even language, illustrate how disorientation becomes a crucible for reinvention. When all else is lost, what remains is the capacity to adapt, to discover kinship and healing where conquest once guided him. Similarly, the stories of colonists taken into Indigenous communities reveal that disorientation did not necessarily lead to despair but could open lives into unexpected forms of belonging.
In Solnit’s own youth, the ruins of San Francisco carried the same potential. Punk culture thrived amid decayed industrial districts, turning abandonment into opportunity. For her and her friends, the crumbling city became a wilderness where new forms of art and identity could emerge. Disorientation was the soil of creativity. Even when Solnit reflects on her friend Delphine’s life, marked by abandon and tragedy, she acknowledges that Delphine embodied a raw, if dangerous, freedom: An embrace of uncertainty that mirrored the ruins she inhabited.
In all of these examples, disorientation is less a detour than the path itself. To get lost is to shed old stories, old maps, and old selves. What follows is not a return to certainty but a deeper attunement to the provisional and transformative nature of life. Solnit insists that being lost is not only survivable—it is essential for growing and becoming, allowing people to recreate themselves.
Longing and Uncertainty as Destination
Solnit suggests throughout A Field Guide to Getting Lost that longing is itself a form of arrival. Instead of measuring life in terms of what we hold or complete, she suggests that the experience of desiring, of moving toward horizons that never settle, is where meaning resides. The recurring symbol of blue crystallizes this perspective. Blue appears in distant mountains, across wide canyons, and along the horizon line of the sea. Its beauty depends on separation. The more one approaches, the more it vanishes. This is not a failure of perception but a reminder that longing animates the imagination and keeps human beings oriented toward possibility.
Solnit illustrates this longing and uncertainty through moments where ordinary landscapes are transformed by distance. Looking at San Francisco from Mount Tamalpais, she feels an ache for the city, even though it is the place she already lives. Longing makes the familiar strange, renewing her relationship with the known. Her walk toward Antelope Island across the Great Salt Lake extends this insight. Though her steps never seem to close the distance, the journey itself becomes a lesson in persistence and desire. The value lies in moving through the space of longing, regardless of whether or not one ever reaches the physical destination.
Music provides another avenue for this theme. The country songs and blues that Solnit comes to appreciate present landscapes as cemeteries of feeling. These songs hold histories of displacement, loss, and endurance, and they teach listeners that sorrow and joy often inhabit the same space. Even though the cultural conditions that produced them may have passed, the feelings remain alive. By listening, Solnit connects to a lineage of longing that transcends her own background, discovering how uncertainty becomes a bond across time and culture.
Relationships also echo this pattern. Solnit’s romance with a desert hermit, though brief, was formative. When it ended, its story fragmented into many smaller ones, each losing force over time. The experience demonstrates that longing does not always seek resolution in permanence. Instead, it reshapes the self even when it is temporary. Desire continues beyond the relationship itself, reorienting identity even in its aftermath.
For Solnit, longing and uncertainty are not detours on the way to stability. They are the journey itself. They keep perception alive, open futures that can never be fully mapped, and make absence a vital part of human experience. To live in longing is to inhabit possibility.
The Interplay of Memory, Landscape, and Identity
Solnit consistently shows that memory and landscape are inseparable, and together they form the contours of identity. Memory carries the fragments of family stories, personal experiences, and cultural histories, while landscape provides the settings that anchor and transform those fragments. Identity is neither purely personal nor entirely external; instead, it emerges in the interaction between what we recall and the places that shape those recollections.
Family history provides the clearest example. In “Daisy Chains,” Solnit confronts her grandmother’s and great-grandmother’s stories, which exist only in partial and often contradictory forms. Photographs appear and disappear, artifacts shift meaning, and narratives collapse into fragments. Solnit embraces this incompleteness, suggesting that identity is made not only of what is remembered but also of what cannot be recovered. The Tibetan word shul, meaning a trace left behind after something has passed, captures this insight. Family history leaves impressions that guide her forward, even if the full story remains unknown. Instead of looking for the definitive, true story, Solnit accepts that these fragmented narratives contribute something important to her own sense of identity.
Landscapes reinforce this dynamic. The desert becomes a place of both solitude and companionship, where animals signal unpredictability and resilience. The ruins of San Francisco mirror the cultural disintegration and creative ferment of her youth. Country music carries landscapes of loss and longing across time, turning songs into emotional maps that sustain memory. Each environment alters the way Solnit perceives herself, making identity a product of both geography and recollection.
The childhood home explored in Chapter 9 extends this theme. Though the house was marked by abuse, it persists in her dreams as a shifting, gothic space filled with tortoises, skeletons, and broken glass. These dreams show how landscapes of the past continue to inhabit the present. As an adult, she no longer enters the house in her dreams but sees it from the outside, symbolizing her growth and transformation. The memory of the house remains, but her relationship to it changes.
Through these layered examples, Solnit demonstrates that identity is always relational. It forms through the traces of memory, the terrains that hold those traces, and the ways landscapes evoke or reshape recollection. By moving through deserts, ruins, mountains, and homes, she encounters versions of herself linked to those places. The result is an understanding of identity as a mosaic, built from fragments of memory and impressions of landscape, always incomplete yet always in motion.
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