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3.86 AVERAGE
3.86 AVERAGE
slow-paced
A poetic memoir of sorts with themes of exploring and adventure, introspection, and of course, getting lost.
This is the most meandering book I've read, which is incredibly fitting for the theme, but meandering books are not for me. I had trouble forcing myself to finish it on time before the library came knocking
That said, there's some incredible moments in here and quotes that take your breath away.
This is the most meandering book I've read, which is incredibly fitting for the theme, but meandering books are not for me. I had trouble forcing myself to finish it on time before the library came knocking
That said, there's some incredible moments in here and quotes that take your breath away.
hopeful
informative
inspiring
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
A book that requires all of your concentration. It has moments of profound clarity about topics, but its lack of an obvious structure can make it a challenge to read
[quotes]
A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit
(22) Because species disappear when their habitat does, he [David] photographed them against the nowhere of a black backdrop (which sometimes meant propping up a black velvet cloth in the most unlikely places and discouraging climates), and so each creature, each plant, stood as though for a formal portrait alone against the darkness. The photographs looked like cards too, cards from the deck off the world in which each creature describes a history, a way of being in the world, a set of possibilities, a deck from which cards are being thrown away, one after another.
(22) Lost really has two disparate meanings. Losing things is about the familiar falling away, getting lost is about the unfamiliar appearing. There are objects and people that disappear from your sight or knowledge or possession; you lose a bracelet, a friend, the key. You still know where you are. Everything is familiar except that there is one item less, one missing element. Or you get lost, in which case the world has become larger than your knowledge of it.
(48) She had fallen in love with a Russian her family urged her not to marry, followed her heart into Russia anyway, and survived there during the Second World War that took her husband when she was pregnant with her younger child, a son. After the war this widow went back to join her family in Poland, but every one of them had been exterminated. She stayed on alone with her children until tuberculosis took her when they were still small. They were consigned to an orphanage run by anti-Semitic nuns and then, when their ethnicity was discovered, shipped off to Israel. The son as far as I know lives there still, but the daughter went to France to study and later came to the United States. She had lived with bedouins in the Negev desert, with royalty in Kashmir, with architects in Arizona. On the table in her bedroom were small glasses of soil, beautiful powders in ochers and reds and even lavender she had gathered in deserts around the world, and it was as though through being uprooted so many times this was all the homeland that was left to her, this collection of earths like the jars of rouge and powder another woman might have on her vanity.
(56) Caustic, literary, radical, [my aunt] was the keeper of the family stories and photographs, though they served less as buttresses of a stable sense of the past than phantasms and fictions that metamorphose continually in accordance with the needs of the present. But all histories and photographs do that, public as well as private.
(106) In the 1980s we imagined apocalypse because it was easier than the strange complicated futures that money, power, and technology would impose, intricate futures hard to exit. In the same way, teenagers imagine dying young because death is more imaginable than the person that all the decisions and burdens of adulthood may make of you. Then I though of Marine’s death as the end of my youth because it signaled the end of my connection to that underworld, but it might instead have been because death became real.
(141) There are Parisian novels in which love of a woman and love of the city become the same passion, though a lonely one in which wandering, stalking, haunting are consummation, and real communion is unimaginable.
(169) “Klein used color,” writes art historian Nan Rosenthal, “as though it could be an explicit and overtly political tool for ending wars.” He had always been against making distinctions and divisions, fulminating even against the line in painting and celebrating the unifying force of color instead. And is work is a reminder that, however beautiful, with their ships and dragons, those old maps were tools of empire and capital…the distinctions and details these maps marked out were first of all for merchants and military expeditions. What was marked “Terra Incognita” was also what remained unvanquished. Painting the world blue made it all terra incognita, indivisible and unconquerable, a ferocious act of mysticism.
A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit
(22) Because species disappear when their habitat does, he [David] photographed them against the nowhere of a black backdrop (which sometimes meant propping up a black velvet cloth in the most unlikely places and discouraging climates), and so each creature, each plant, stood as though for a formal portrait alone against the darkness. The photographs looked like cards too, cards from the deck off the world in which each creature describes a history, a way of being in the world, a set of possibilities, a deck from which cards are being thrown away, one after another.
(22) Lost really has two disparate meanings. Losing things is about the familiar falling away, getting lost is about the unfamiliar appearing. There are objects and people that disappear from your sight or knowledge or possession; you lose a bracelet, a friend, the key. You still know where you are. Everything is familiar except that there is one item less, one missing element. Or you get lost, in which case the world has become larger than your knowledge of it.
(48) She had fallen in love with a Russian her family urged her not to marry, followed her heart into Russia anyway, and survived there during the Second World War that took her husband when she was pregnant with her younger child, a son. After the war this widow went back to join her family in Poland, but every one of them had been exterminated. She stayed on alone with her children until tuberculosis took her when they were still small. They were consigned to an orphanage run by anti-Semitic nuns and then, when their ethnicity was discovered, shipped off to Israel. The son as far as I know lives there still, but the daughter went to France to study and later came to the United States. She had lived with bedouins in the Negev desert, with royalty in Kashmir, with architects in Arizona. On the table in her bedroom were small glasses of soil, beautiful powders in ochers and reds and even lavender she had gathered in deserts around the world, and it was as though through being uprooted so many times this was all the homeland that was left to her, this collection of earths like the jars of rouge and powder another woman might have on her vanity.
(56) Caustic, literary, radical, [my aunt] was the keeper of the family stories and photographs, though they served less as buttresses of a stable sense of the past than phantasms and fictions that metamorphose continually in accordance with the needs of the present. But all histories and photographs do that, public as well as private.
(106) In the 1980s we imagined apocalypse because it was easier than the strange complicated futures that money, power, and technology would impose, intricate futures hard to exit. In the same way, teenagers imagine dying young because death is more imaginable than the person that all the decisions and burdens of adulthood may make of you. Then I though of Marine’s death as the end of my youth because it signaled the end of my connection to that underworld, but it might instead have been because death became real.
(141) There are Parisian novels in which love of a woman and love of the city become the same passion, though a lonely one in which wandering, stalking, haunting are consummation, and real communion is unimaginable.
(169) “Klein used color,” writes art historian Nan Rosenthal, “as though it could be an explicit and overtly political tool for ending wars.” He had always been against making distinctions and divisions, fulminating even against the line in painting and celebrating the unifying force of color instead. And is work is a reminder that, however beautiful, with their ships and dragons, those old maps were tools of empire and capital…the distinctions and details these maps marked out were first of all for merchants and military expeditions. What was marked “Terra Incognita” was also what remained unvanquished. Painting the world blue made it all terra incognita, indivisible and unconquerable, a ferocious act of mysticism.
challenging
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
The lyricism of Solnit cannot be denied, and in this book, it shines. The essay, "The Blue of Distance," is mesmerizing and transcendent. Dreamy, factual, meandering, and culturally broad in scope - this book is classic Solnit.
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
"Jätä ovi auki tuntemattomaan ja pimeään. Sieltä tulevat tärkeimmät asiat - tulemme sieltä itsekin ja sinne myös palaamme."
"Ei pidä siis unohtaa vaan ainoastaan päästää irti. Ja kun kaikki muu on mennyt, ihminen voi olla menetyksistään rikas."
"Ei pidä siis unohtaa vaan ainoastaan päästää irti. Ja kun kaikki muu on mennyt, ihminen voi olla menetyksistään rikas."
hopeful
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
a perfect reminder to breathe life in slowly and to see things for more than how they appear on the surface.
informative
reflective
slow-paced