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A Field Guide to Getting Lost Paperback – June 27, 2006
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From the award-winning author of Orwell's Roses, a stimulating exploration of wandering, being lost, and the uses of the unknown
Written as a series of autobiographical essays, A Field Guide to Getting Lost draws on emblematic moments and relationships in Rebecca Solnit's life to explore issues of uncertainty, trust, loss, memory, desire, and place. Solnit is interested in the stories we use to navigate our way through the world, and the places we traverse, from wilderness to cities, in finding ourselves, or losing ourselves. While deeply personal, her own stories link up to larger stories, from captivity narratives of early Americans to the use of the color blue in Renaissance painting, not to mention encounters with tortoises, monks, punk rockers, mountains, deserts, and the movie Vertigo. The result is a distinctive, stimulating voyage of discovery.
- Print length224 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherPenguin Books
- Publication dateJune 27, 2006
- Dimensions5.35 x 0.58 x 8.35 inches
- ISBN-109780143037248
- ISBN-13978-0143037248
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"Solnit has been compared to both Annie Dillard and Susan Sontag . . . her own work resembles a richly conceived character, capable of sudden turns and sharp twists, changing direction from book to book and page to page in ways that, in retrospect, are nevertheless consistent with what she's done before. [A Field Guide to Getting Lost] has something close to perfect pitch, an intermezzo in an increasingly impressive career."
—The Nation
"An altogether sublime collection. . . she sees in the act of embracing the unknown a gateway to self-transcendence."
—Maria Popova, Brainpickings.org
"This indespensable California writer's most personal book yet, alive as ever to the subtle nuances of the natural world, but newly responsive to the promptings of her own heart and history."
—San Fransisco Chronicle
"This meditation on the pleasures and terrors of getting lost is . . . a series of peregrinations, leading the reader to unexpected vistas."
—The New Yorker
"An ode to losing yourself and finding out what's on the other side of familiarity. For Ms. Solnit . . . getting lost is more than a matter of merely physical circumstances. It's a state of mind to be embraced and explored, a gateway to discovering more about yourself in relation to the rest of the world."
—The Dallas Morning News
From the Back Cover
The New Yorker
"This indispensable California writer s most personal book yet."
San Francisco Chronicle
"An intriguing amalgam of personal memoir, philosophical speculation, natural lore, cultural history, and art criticism . . . a book to set you wandering down strangely fruitful trails of thought."
Los Angeles Times
About the Author
Product details
- ASIN : 0143037242
- Publisher : Penguin Books; Reprint edition (June 27, 2006)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 224 pages
- ISBN-10 : 9780143037248
- ISBN-13 : 978-0143037248
- Item Weight : 2.31 pounds
- Dimensions : 5.35 x 0.58 x 8.35 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #41,508 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #79 in Travelogues & Travel Essays
- #151 in Author Biographies
- #1,486 in Memoirs (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit is the author of seventeen books about environment, landscape, community, art, politics, hope, and memory, including the updated and reissued Hope in the Dark, three atlases, of San Francisco in 2010, New Orleans in 2013, and New York forthcoming in October; 2014's Men Explain Things to Me; 2013's The Faraway Nearby; A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster; A Field Guide to Getting Lost; Wanderlust: A History of Walking; and River of Shadows, Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (for which she received a Guggenheim, the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, and the Lannan Literary Award). A product of the California public education system from kindergarten to graduate school, she is a columnist at Harper's and frequent contributor to the Guardian newspaper.
She encourages you to shop at Indiebound, your local independent bookstore, Powells.com, Barnes & Noble online and kind of has some large problems with how Amazon operates these days. Though she's grateful if you're buying her books here or anywhere....
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“There is a voluptuous pleasure in all that sadness, and I wonder where it comes from, because as we usually construe the world, sadness and pleasure should be far apart. Is it that the joy that comes from other people always risks sadness, because even when love doesn’t fail, mortality enters in; is it that there is a place where sadness and joy are not distinct, where all emotion lies together, a sort of ocean into which the tributary streams of distinct emotions go, a faraway deep inside; is it that such sadness is only the side effect of art that describes the depth of our lives, and to see that described in all its potential for loneliness and pain is beautiful?”
And one more because I can’t help myself:
“The places in which any significant event occurred become 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. Thus place, which is always spoken of as though it only counts when you’re present, possesses you in its absence, takes on another life as a sense of place, a summoning in the imagination with all the atmospheric effect and association of a powerful emotion.”
To lose is to succumb to the fate that awaits us all--the diminutive sense of depletion and reduction. Solnit, though, disagrees. In her stunning collection of essays that make up A Field Guide to Getting Lost, for Solnit, loss is a transformative force, rather than a negative one--a powerful impetus for change that moves into the world of the liminal--the spaces between moments rather than the spaces that constitute moments.
Relying on notable figures ranging in discipline and trade from Henry Thoreau, Conquistador Cabeza de Vaca, and Parisian performance artist and judo extraordinaire Yves Klein to pull her through from a state of solidity to that of the fluid, that of the blue itself--Solnit walks us through landscapes and worlds that are altogether foreign and exotic, to strangely convey the most familiar landscape of all--change.
Solnit alternates between the constant imagery of the solid, the grounded, the ideas that allow us to plant ourselves in the constant--only to transition into that of the "blue"--that of the ethereal and atmospheric, that of the liminal. Every other essay is titled: "The Blue of Distance" allowing for discussion of the philosophical means of the color blue as an aesthetic principle and metaphor of fluidity--the intent of which is to bring us into the space between relinquishment and acquisition--giving and taking.
More than a simple collection of essays, where Solnit succeeds is in the connection to the personal. We create ourselves through our association with others, picking and choosing tidbits of cultural ephemera we deem appropriate to absorb into our own lives--to make our own--making Solnit's viewpoint wholly relatable. She almost takes the form of overt autobiography. Association with Solnit's points becomes inherent.
Although, the collection seems sporadic at times--the essays jump and move and transition like a child hopping from puddle to puddle mid-rain storm--hence the exploratory milieu, making the readability erratic. A singular essay can cover topics ranging in breadth from her own home life, the world of the Conquistador and pre-colonial United States, to the diminishing microbes of our environment, and the death of the desert tortoise. It's fascinating and intriguing, but at times comes across disjointed.
Nevertheless, A Field Guide to Getting Lost is a philosophical treatise on the idea of flux--the essence of the middle, and the spaces between places in which our bodies and psyches transition to worlds and climes that are foreign and beautiful. The book is a success in that it reminds us, yet again, that the only constant in life is change.
For more great book reviews, see bookguyreview.com
As one person said, if someone asked me what it's about, I couldn't say.
Still, there's something to getting lost, and I appreciate that.
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自分の語彙の貧しさももちろんだが、考え方の根柢の部分をよく理解できていなかったかもしれない。