Not Oprah’s Book Club: A Field Guide to Getting Lost

A while back, Sady Doyle wrote a brilliant post about, among other things, some “serious doubts” she was having about her “place in Internet Feminism”. She called out “that outraged, righteous, upright, know-it-all person who has compassion for all the right people and scorn for all the wrong ones, who’s on the right side (your side) of all the issues”  and named her “dangerous, and… at least partially false.” Essentially, she challenged us all to push our feminism beyond a place of certainty, smugness, black-and-white, and right-and-wrong.

I thought this was a brilliant analysis, not just for feminism but for society at large. In this wacky era of raving mad columnists and ill-informed pundits, we all could use a little reminder that sometimes “knowing it all” means not knowing that you don’t know quite enough. And maybe the most transformative, real, and important experiences can come from admitting when you don’t know what you think, or aren’t even sure where you’re going. In short, there’s importance, depth, and beauty to the state of being lost.

Such is the ever-so-expertly executed soft hypothesis of Rebecca Solnit’s “A Field Guide to Getting Lost”. Coming (for me) on the heels of Sady’s astute callout, this gem of a book acts as an extended, gorgeously written manifesto on the joy and intense beauty of Not Knowing. I’m not sure how Rebecca Solnit would describe her book (part memoir, part meditation, part philosophical musing, perhaps? At one point she even gives a detailed art history lesson) but I would describe it as one of the most gorgeously written books I’ve ever read.

Solnit makes a case for embracing those moments in your life, large and small, where certainty escapes you and uncertainty abounds. She skillfully praises them as both romantic and practical, as integral to transformation and transcendence as they are scary and debilitatingly painful.

In a passage describing the transformation of caterpillars to butterflies, she reminds us:

“The process of transformation consists mostly of decay and then of this crisis when emergence from what came before must be total and abrupt.”

And her passages on “the blue of distance,” woven skillfully throughout the book, were especially moving to me.

“The world is blue at its edges and in its depths. This blue is the light that got lost…The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go.”

…

“We treat desire as a problem to be solved, address what desire is for and focus on that something and how to acquire it rather than on the nature and sensation of desire, though it is often the distance between us and the object of desire that fills the space in between with the blue of longing.”

This is a feminist book because it is a deeply personal book written by a deeply thoughtful woman, and because it fundamentally supports the kind of personal growth and self-examination that will make us all better feminists. You know, the kind that Sady calls for in her post, the feminist that displays the “sort of courage” to “point you to the parts of your life or yourself that you can’t quite look at directly, or that you haven’t quite figured out” and to “make some new ideology” to continue to evolve our feminism and do what works best for us, for women, even if it hasn’t been done before.

The journey of getting lost, of becoming totally immersed in the unknown, is an important part of my own feminism, and I’m thankful for this book for helping me to not only realize that, but embrace it.