Rebecca Solnit · A Field Guide to Getting Lost · Viking, 2005 · 209 pages
Twenty-one years on, this remains a book poets keep pressing on each other, and it is worth asking why a collection of autobiographical essays about deserts, punk-era San Francisco, captivity narratives and colour theory has ended up as an unofficial handbook for people who write lines.
The argument
Solnit's distinction is between two kinds of lost. There is the lost of the misplaced object — a failure, recoverable, annoying. And there is the lost of the unfamiliar world, where you have gone beyond your own map and something can therefore happen to you. The book is a sustained case for the second, delivered in the least hectoring voice imaginable. Never to get lost is not to live, she writes, and the sentence works because she has spent forty pages earning the right to say it plainly.
The blue of distance
Threaded through the collection are several essays all titled The Blue of Distance, returning like a refrain. Their subject is atmospheric perspective: the fact that the far mountains are blue because of the air between you and them, and that the blue is therefore not a property of the mountain but a measurement of your separation from it. You cannot walk into it. Arrive, and the blue has moved to the next ridge.
The colour of longing is the colour of distance, and distance is the one thing you cannot carry home with you.
This is the book's central image and its most useful gift to poets, because it describes what desire actually does in a poem. Longing is not a thing you resolve in the last stanza; it is an optical effect produced by the space between the speaker and the object. Close that space and the poem goes clear, grey, ordinary. Solnit gives you a physics for the thing most love poems get wrong.
How it reads
The structure is deliberately unresolved — memoir, natural history, art criticism and reportage set beside each other without transitional apology. Kirkus called the essays elegant, marked by surprising shifts and unexpected connections; other reviewers at the time found the same shifts puzzling, and the complaint is fair if you want a thesis. This is a book that models its subject: it wanders, and it declines to reassure you that the wandering is going somewhere.
It is the companion volume to Wanderlust, her 2000 history of walking, and the two are best read as one long thought about what the body learns by moving through space slowly and imprecisely.
Why we still recommend it
Because the alternative advice available to writers is almost entirely about control — outline, revise, know your intention, sharpen your ending. Solnit is one of the few serious voices arguing that the useful state is the one where you have surrendered the map, and she argues it without a trace of mysticism. Getting lost, in her hands, is a practical skill with a technique: you get lost on purpose, in a place where the stakes are survivable, and you pay attention to what your fear does.
Buy it secondhand, in a small paperback, and carry it somewhere unfamiliar. The book is not improved by being read at a desk.