Rebecca Solnit (2005) A Field Guide to Getting Lost

p. 13 >>> I worry now that many people never disband their armies, never go
beyond what they know. Advertising, alarmist news, technology, incessant
busyness, and the design of public and private space conspire to make it so.

p. 15 >>> The simplest answer nowadays for literal getting
lost is * people who get lost aren’t paying attention when they do
so *don’t know what to do when they realize they don’t know how to return, or
*don’t admit they don’t know.

There’s an art of attending to weather, to the route
you take, to the landmarks along the way, to how if you turn around you can see
how different the journey back looks from the journey out, to reading the sun
and moon and stars to orient yourself, to the direction of running water, to the
thousand things that make the wild a text that can be read by the literate. The lost
are often illiterate in this language that is the language of the earth itself, or don’t
stop to read it.

And there’s another art of being at home in the unknown, so that
being in its midst isn’t cause for panic or suffering, of being at home with being
lost.

p. 16 >>> Children, Landon said, are good at getting lost, because “the key in survival is knowing you’re lost”: they don’t stray far, they curl up in some sheltered place at night,
they know they need help.

p. 17 >>> Nineteenth-century Americans seldom seem to have gotten lost […] being off course for a day or a week wasn’t a disaster for those who didn’t keep a tight schedule, knew how to live off the land, how to track, how to navigate…

Explorers, the historian Aaron Sachs wrote me in answer to a
question, “were always lost, because they’d never been to these places before.
They never expected to know exactly where they were. Yet, at the same time,
many of them knew their instruments pretty well and understood their
trajectories within a reasonable degree of accuracy. In my opinion, their most
important skill was simply a sense of optimism about surviving and finding their
way.”

p. 19 >>> … the Wintu in north-central California, who don’t use the words left and right to describe their own bodies but use the cardinal directions. I was enraptured by this description of a language and behind it a cultural imagination in which the self only exists in reference to the rest of the world, no you without mountains, without sun, without sky.

p. 20 >>> Jaime de Angulo [..] wrote, “I want to speak now of a certain curious phenomenon
found among the Pit River Indians. The Indians refer to it in English as
‘wandering.’ They say of a certain man, ‘He is wandering, ’ or ‘He has started to
wander.’ It would seem that under certain conditions of mental stress an
individual finds life in his accustomed surroundings too hard to bear. Such a man
starts to wander. He goes about the country, traveling aimlessly. He will stop
here and there at the camps of friends or relations, moving on, never stopping at
any place longer than a few days. He will not make any outward show of grief,
sorrow or worry. . . . The Wanderer, man or woman, shuns camps and villages,
remains in wild, lonely places, on the tops of mountains, in the bottoms of
canyons.” This wanderer isn’t so far from Woolf, and she too knew despair and
the desire for what Buddhists call unbeing, the desire that finally led her to walk
into a river with pockets full of rocks. It’s not about being lost but about trying to
lose yourself.

22 >>> Lost really has two disparate meanings. Losing things is about the familiar
falling away, getting lost is about the unfamiliar appearing