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Solnit is one of the most eloquent, urgent, and intelligent voices writing nonfiction today; from Men Explain Things to Me to Storming the Gates of Paradise, anything she's written is well worth reading. But her marvelous book of essays A Field Guide to Getting Lost might be her most poetic, ecstatic work. Field Guide is [...]

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A lot is made of the romance of bookstores. The smell of paper! The joy of discovery! The ancient, cracking leather bindings of books with dated inscriptions! And it's true that bookstores are magical places to browse and linger — just maybe not in the two days before Christmas. Because in the swirling mad hum [...]

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First, a confession: I hate-watched the first two seasons of Lena Dunham's Girls. Every situation and character on the show made me cringe. Most scenes involve unpleasant people having unpleasant sex, or scheming to have (unpleasant) sex, or dealing with the discomfort of trying to avoid or distance themselves from earlier, unpleasant sex. Sure there [...]

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Rebecca Solnit has gone on my list of authors whose work I’d like to own and read all of. It started off with her newest essay collection Men Explain Things To Me and was cemented by A Field Guide to Getting Lost. Field Guide was on my TBR list for years but I just never got around to it. Why did I take so long? I am a believer that every book has the right time and for whatever reason the right time wasn’t until now.

How to describe the book? Essays? Yes but not really because each one is connected. But it isn’t straight up nonfiction either because there is no real “plot” other than the theme of getting lost. Which makes it very much a long meditation. But yet there is a direction of sorts because four of the chapters/essays are called “The Blue of Distance” and these alternate with chapters called things like “Abandon” and “One-Story House.” The blue chapters all tend to be outward facing, about someone — the artist Yves Kline for instance — or about something — a certain color of blue or country western music. The other chapters tend to be more personally reflective and wide-ranging discussing things like leaving the door open for Elijah during Passover dinner, hiking in the wilderness, and family history. But even the distinction between the blue chapters and the named chapters blurs as Solnit will include personal reflection in the blue chapters and quotes Meno, Simone Weil, and a Tibetan sage in the personal chapters. I found all this intermingling to be satisfying and wanted the book to be longer than it is. A Good sign, right?

A Field Guide to Getting Lost is about many things, but at its core it is about stories:

A story can be a gift like Ariadne’s thread , or the labyrinth, or the labyrinth’s raving Minotaur; we navigate by stories, but sometimes we only escape by abandoning them.

Stories anchor us, tell us who we are or point to who we want to be. We can become lost in our stories. We can also be oppressed by our stories and only find out who we are by giving them up and losing ourselves. Trouble is, we think of being lost as a bad thing, but when we are lost we are more open to possibility than we are when we are sure of ourselves and our stories:

Never to get lost is not to live, not to know how to get lost brings you to destruction, and somewhere in the terra icognita in between lies a life of discovery.

Even when we are sure of our stories, we still change over time and lose the person we used to be. When it happens so slowly we don’t even notice it we are not bothered by it until we are startled into awareness by an old photograph or letter, or a person we haven’t seen in many years. Sometimes, of course, loss happens very fast and unexpectedly and we are thrown for a loop. Not only do we write the story of our past but we write it well into the future and a sudden loss throws us into uncertainty, a place in which we do not feel comfortable spending time. And so we worry:

Worry is a way to pretend that you have knowledge or control over what you don’t — and it surprised me, even in myself, how much we prefer ugly scenarios to the pure unknown. Perhaps fantasy is what you fill up maps with rather than saying they too contain the unknown.

In the last chapter there is a beautiful piece of a lecture Solnit shares that she heard given at the Zen Center in San Francisco. Zen, you may know, is all about mindfulness, paying attention, living in the hear and now not dwelling on the past or projecting into the future. And this lecture coming as it does nearly at the end of the final chapter, serves to sum up much of the whole book. It is such a wonderful story it is hard to pick out an exact sort of summary quote, but this might give you and idea:

‘Maybe if I really paid attention I’d notice that I don’t know what’s going to happen this afternoon and I can’t be fully confident that I am competent to deal with it. Maybe we’re willing to let in that thought. It has some reasonableness to it, I can’t exactly know, but chances are, possibilities are, it’s not going to be much different than what I’ve usually experienced and I’ll do just fine, so we close up that unsettling possibility with a reasonable response. The practice of awareness takes us below the reasonableness that we’d like to think we live with and then we start to see something quite fascinating, which is the drama of our inner dialogue, of the stories that go through our minds and the feelings that go through our heart, and we start to see in this territory it isn’t so neat and orderly and, dare I say it, safe or reasonable.’

The story goes on to remind us that it is okay to not know; okay to be uncertain; okay to run into a barrier and ask for help. It is okay to be lost. Because we can only really find what we need if we are lost:

That thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you is usually what you need to find, and finding it is a matter of getting lost.

Filed under: Books, Essays, Nonfiction, Reviews Tagged: Rebecca Solnit

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In The Faraway Nearby, Rebecca Solnit weaves seemingly disparate topics, from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to the birdman cult on Easter Island, with elements of her own life: her mother's advancing Alzheimer's, the collapse of a long-term relationship, a brush with cancer. The result is a book that is as fluid and boundless as a dream, [...]

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At Powell's, our book buyers select all the new books in our vast inventory. If we need a book recommendation, we turn to our team of resident experts. Need a gift idea for a fan of vampire novels? Looking for a guide that will best demonstrate how to knit argyle socks? Need a book for [...]

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I can never use the term "in the gloaming" without thinking of my friend Alice Elliott Dark's perfect and classic short story by that same name. And so, last night, leaving the city at the gloaming hour, I thought of Alice. I thought of Joan Didion, too, and Rebecca Solnit, and all those writers who have captured this shade of sun-glinted blue with words.

The city was eager for spring, and full of its promise. Rittenhouse Square and its horn player, a little spontaneous drumming on the side. Restaurants and their outdoor seats. People reading on benches with their coat collars high.

My husband and I were there at the end of a long moving week—cleaning our son's now vacated city apartment at Spruce and 16th, and imagining him at the park in his new near-Manhattan 'hood. Sharing a meal at Serafina. Going home in the old Wrangler, two for-sure empty nesters now.

Meanwhile our son texts me this morning, his first day of his first full-time job. Up at 5:30, he confides. At Starbucks. Excited.

There's dusk. And then there's dawn.

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I was harder on Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking than many readers were.  I thought it at times too self-consciously clinical, too reported, less felt.  Many of my students at the University of Pennsylvania disagreed with me.  I listened.  Of course I did.  I wanted to be convinced.

I do not feel disinclined about Blue Nights, which I have read this morning and which will break your heart.  The jacket copy describes the book as "a work of stunning frankness about losing a daughter."  It is that; in part it is.  But it is also, mostly, as the jacket also promises, Didion's "thoughts, fears, and doubts regarding having children, illness, and growing old."

A cry, on other words, in the almost dark.  A mind doing what a mind does in the aftermath of grief and in the face of the cruelly ticking clock.  Blue Nights is language stripped to its most bare.  It is the seeding and tilling of images grasped, lines said, recurring tropes—not always gently recurring tropes.  It is a mind tracking time.  It is questions: 

"How could I have missed what was so clearly there to be seen?"

"What if I can never again locate the words that work?"

"Who do I want to notify in case of emergency?"

Joan Didion, always physically small and intellectually giant, is, as she writes in this book, seventy-five years old.  She is aware of light and how it brightens, then fades.  She writes of blue—a color and a sound that has long obsessed me, and has obsessed writers like Rebecca Solnit.  She writes of the gloaming, a word I will forever associate with the immensely talented Alice Elliott Dark. 

Here is how she writes:

You pass a window, you walk to Central Park, you find yourself swimming in the color blue: the actual light is blue, and over the course of an hour or so this blue deepens, becomes more intense even as it darkens and fades, approximates the blue of the glass on a clear day at Chartres, or that of the Cerenkov radiation thrown off by the fuel rods in the pools of nuclear reactors.  The French called this time of day "l'heure bleue."  To the English it was "the gloaming."  That very word "gloaming" reverberates, echoes—the gloaming, the glimmer, the glitter, the glisten, the glamour—carrying in its consonants the images of houses shuttering, gardens darkening, grass-lined rivers slipping through the shadows.

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Today, at the Rutgers-Camden Summer Writer's Conference, I'll be asking the students to reflect on the color of life, a prompt inspired by the wholly moving Gerald Stern poem, "Eggshell."

Among the readings will be a brief passage excerpted from the Rebecca Solnit essay, "The Blue of Distance." Solnit writes from a place of knowing toward a place of wonder. An excerpt here:

The world is blue at its edges and in its depths. This blue is the light that got lost. Light at the blue end of the spectrum does not travel the whole distance from the sun to us. It disperses among the molecules of the air, it scatters in water. Water is colorless, shallow water appears to be the color of whatever lies underneath it, but deep water is full of this scattered light,the purer the water the deeper the blue. The sky is blue for the same reason, but the blue at the horizon, the blue of land that seems to be dissolving into the sky, is a deeper, dreamier, melancholy blue, the blue at the farthest reaches of the places where you see for miles, the blue of distance.  This light that does not touch us, does not travel the whole distance, the light that gets lost, gives us the beauty of the world, so much of which is in the color blue.

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Part II: Engage!

I didn't necessarily read all the escapist books first and all the inspiring/engaging books after that (and certainly most of the books I read over the 12 Days of Christmas had elements of both). But as I enjoyed the comforts of fantasy and adventure, I also found myself getting a bit fired up about interesting ideas. Since I had been a little worried that end-of-the-year letdown and disappointments would leave me lethargic and apathetic, I was willing enough to let these next books work their magic.


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Berlin, City of Stones
and


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Berlin: City of Smoke
by Jason Lutes

Jason Lutes' Berlin series is one of those graphic novels that the ALP has been telling me I should read for ages, while I was more interested in the flashy superhero stuff (Green Arrow, for example). During the cold, quiet days of the year's end, I finally felt inclined to pick up the first volume, and within pages was immersed in a vision of 1929 Berlin, rich with early 20th century details but eerily recognizable: the economy is very bad, violent political factions each proclaim themselves the true voice of the people, the gulf between the haves and the have-nots is impossibly wide, and nightlife, the arts, journalism, and relationships can seem to offer either perspective or an escape. Lutes' story is complexly structured and peopled with dozens of well-drawn (literally and metaphorically) characters; I felt I wanted to read everything slowly and repeatedly to grasp the shape and the details of the world he created, but at the same time I had to read quickly to know what happened next -- the pleasant agony of the best books.

But perhaps the most lasting effect the books have had is an ongoing conversation, first with the ALP and spreading to others, about the responsibilities of artists to engage with politics. One of the main characters is an artist, concerned mainly with art for art's sake and drawn into the decadent nightlife of Weimer urbanity; another, a journalist, is frustrated by the artist's naivete as he struggles to articulate what is happening in his country, yet his rejection of jazz seems of a piece with his detached observer's stance. Is an intense engagement with culture a sufficient stance in itself? Is a refusal to take sides an act of cowardice, or the only honest reaction to a situation of great complexity? The issues are starker because we know that these characters are on the precipice of the Third Reich, but they illuminate (or complicate) contemporary issues as well. Lutes itself, it seems, has found a way to engage deeply while remaining true to his art; his work elevates the comics form to the most cogent cultural history, and the best fiction, which makes demands on the real world.



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Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics
by Rebecca Solnit

This essay collection is yet another work I'd been meaning to read, but picked up with a bit of reluctant crankiness: am I really in the mood to read something this serious? But Solnit, whose writing I loved in A Field Guide to Getting Lost, is on fire here, and set me burning as well, with the gorgeous and horrifying intersections of place and politics that she illuminates. Partly it was because this is the kind of writing I have done and want to do: narrative nonfiction that makes little distinction between the familiar and the formal, that incorporates place and memory and philosophy and ethics and other parts of the human experience into pieces as structured and artful as poetry and as stirring as a great speech. Partly it because she is talking about hugely important issues that I suspect but don't know much about: the poisonous fallout of large-scale corporate mining, especially for gold; the need for (and difficulty of) architecture and urban design that creates human-scale communities; the out-of-fashion but still present problems of land grabs from Native Americans and nuclear testing and waste disposal in the Nevada desert. Here is an artist engaged.

I don't always agree with her assertions -- sometimes I'm arguing with her throughout an essay, sometimes I swallow it whole and only in talking about it afterward discover that I question some of her conclusions or assumptions. (One essay about Silicon Valley, for example, written in the early '90s, is full of interesting metaphorical connections but a little embarrassing in its judgements on the internet.) Most left me with more questions than answers. Why haven't I heard about this before? Who is responsible for this? If this isn't the right way to do things, then how? But each also left me with the satisfaction of a complete work of art: the kind I'd like to make. I'm still reading this one, still wrestling with Solnit as an activist and admiring her as a writer. It's good to get set on fire again.



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Moomin, Book 3
by Tove Jansson

Moomin is a comic strip with talking animals (or creatures of some kind -- the Moomins are more like Jeff Smith's Bone creatures than like the hippos they are occasionally, scandalously mistaken for). It is also not exactly for kids. Jansson's humor is sometimes wicked, her scenes often melancholy, and her worldview rather subversively anarchic. I've been reading this series as its been re-released by Drawn & Quarterly, and feel rather proprietarily fond of the fussy Mrs. Fillyjonk, the always lovesick Mymble, the practical but mean Little My, the outlaw Stinky, and of course Moominpappa (top-hat wearing, high-mindedly silly), Moominmamma (supremely competent but not at all fussy), Moomin himself (a wistful everyman) and Snorkmaiden (his on-and-off girlfriend, moody but loveable). In this volume they encounter an encroaching jungle (the animals are quite nice given a chance), move to a lighthouse (and back) for the sake of Pappa's great novel of the sea (which becomes a great novel of the veranda), deal with the vagaries of love (a leading lady seduces Moomin) and loyalty (Moominmamma finds herself a member of both a law-upholding and a law-breaking club). It seems silly, but this book was the one that made me happy to relax and engage in the comfort and chaos of family life. The ALP and me are a bit like the Moomins, I like to think: a little silly, a little chaotic, prone to wacky ideas that don't always pan out, not quite respectable, but awfully loving, and awfully happy. As a character says in the last panel of the book:

"Indeed you are the most idiotic family I ever saw -- but you are at least living every minute of the day!!"

May the same be said of all of us. Thanks to these books for making the season bright, and here's to a new year full of magic, adventure, art, and engagement with the world.

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I went looking for W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz yesterday, and of course it was buried. There are thirteen bookshelves in my diminutive house and all of them are double stacked—triple, if physics allows—and this despite the fact that I take an alarming number of books to the local library for broader circulation. Even more alarming, I don't consider myself to be sufficiently well read. Or perhaps I read too many genres to have ever specialized in one. I love experts. I wish I were one. I'm not.

In any case, in the course of hunting for Austerlitz, I fell upon The History of Love, the Colum McCanns, the Rebecca Solnits, the complete Cathers, The Book of Salt and The Night Watch, The Optimist's Daughter, The Awakening, and I was Amelia Earhart, and when my husband found me fortressed in by a tower of books and asked (inevitably), "What are you doing?" I looked up and said, "Oh, Bill, I love these books, I love these books." With tears in my eyes that I had not known were there.

Tears because some of my dearest titles have grown slightly vague in my mind. Tears because I can no longer recite some of my favorite lines. Tears because I've just bought three new books for me along with so many books for others—books I have not, in some cases, yet read. Tears because I'm reading Brideshead Revisited for the very first time—the first time!—and when will I have time to read again my favorite books?

Why isn't there ever enough time?

We will take our son to the university bus today, and he will be driven, along with some of his classmates, north, returning for his first set of college finals. He will come home again two weeks from now. We'll miss him in the meantime.

Separately, unexpectedly, yesterday I discovered that a blog reviewer whom I've always admired had this to say about HOUSE OF DANCE. Thank you, Becky of Becky's Book Reviews. Thank you so much.

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