December 2011: A Field Guide to Getting Lost (Solnit)

Post date: Dec 16, 2011 11:45:0 PM

Eight of us gathered in Jennie's living room to discuss Rebecca Solnit's A Field Guide to Getting Lost on Thursday, December 15th. Before we even mentioned the book we had social chatter and then spent time reviewing the list of potential faculty speakers, sending a list of six finalists to club president Susan Strom to pursue for our Spring 2012 Faculty Speaker event - subjects ranging from sports to physics to poetry.

To Jennie's surprise, most of the gathered did not care for the book, found it slow-going (no narrative), dull, with a few gems of phrase sprinkled throughout. A few agreed that the first couple of chapters/essays were the best, including The Blue of Distance (I). Some also liked the references to country music lyrics as they evolved from the Blues, and folks did enjoy the local references to San Francisco (author's home), such as her exploration of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo.

Jennie read several excerpts from her favorite pages, for example (page 117):

Perhaps it's that you can't go back in time, but you can return to the scenes of a love, of a crime, of happiness, and of a fatal decision; the places are what remain, are what you can possess, are what is immortal. They become the tangible landscape of memory, the places that made you, and in some way you too become them. They are what you can possess and what in the end possess you.

Solnit's musings on time and space may have left some readers feeling lost rather than learning how to become deliberately lost, but others enjoyed the concepts of being lost in time as well as in geography as told through the stories of the author's life and her losses --and those of the native cultures she described-- as much as her losts.

(submitted by Jennie)