"The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon," surmised Ralph Waldo Emerson. "We are never tired, so long as we can see far enough." There is something about a horizon that provides alignment. It is situating. Is it the sky's orientation? The foresight of things to come and far sight of things that have been?   American poet Mary Oliver, a disciple of Emerson and self-professed sister of Walt Whitman, once wrote that she longed for a "heaven-verging horizon." In other words, that long, far horizon. It is imagery we often use because it is mutually understood.

Or maybe, as Rebecca Solnit (born June 24, 1961) suggests in A Field Guide to Getting Lost, the distant, far horizon represents that which is lost, unknown, and thus, it captivates our interest.   In her landmark work on embracing chaos and pain as a means to peace, Pema Chödrön argues that in cultivating moment-to-moment curiosity - such as looking to a far horizon and wondering - we just might find our deepest kind of peace.

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 in to the sky, is a deeper, dreamier, melancholy blue, the blue at the farthest place.

If lost were an image, it might be that blue horizon.

"Ginevra de' Benci" by Leonardo da Vinci painted when the artist was in his early 20s. Leonardo wrote "To make one appear more distant than another, you should represent the air as rather dense. Therefore make the first building of its color; the next make less outlined and more blue." Learn more.

If blue is the color of lost, the form of lost is shape-shifting. It arrives in many forms and Solnit holds our hand through each one.

Like the distance that exists between friends when both move forward individually and life's details are unknown to the other:   Solnit quotes French philosopher Simone Weil who wrote "let us love the distance, which is thoroughly woven with friendship..." Love which is present even when knowledge is not. For more on the expanse of knowledge read my "Can Knowledge be Gained Through Feelings?

Even when that friend arrives on the doorstep, something remains impossibly remote; when you step forward to embrace them in your arms, you are wrapped around mystery, around the unknowable, around that which cannot be possessed. The far seeps in even to the nearest.

There is also the loss of the past, what has been, what transpired before. The unreachable loss for which we often long:

‘Emptiness is the track on which the centered person moves,’ said a Tibetan sage six hundred years ago, and the book where I found this edict followed it with an explanation of the word ‘track’ in Tibetan: shul, a mark that remains after that which made it has passed by—a footprint, for example. In other contexts, shul is used to describe the scarred hollow in the ground where a house once stood, the channel worn through rock where a river runs in flood, and the indentation in the grass where an animal slept last night. All of these are shul: the impression of something that used to be there.

Footprints, shells, and photographic images are shul. Empty remnants. These words are shul, I am no longer the person who writes them.   In fact, the person who writes these words is dead, to paraphrase the Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood. I purged myself of that person so I could now be this person.

 Leonardo's masterpiece digitally retouched to mitigate the darkening effects of aging. Shapes form in a blue horizon. "In the fifteenth century, European painters began to paint the blue of distance, Earlier artists had not been much concerned with the faraway in their art."

As she conjoined disparate narratives in The Faraway Nearby, so Solnit braids together concepts of 'lost' in A Field Guide.

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. Either way, there is a loss of control.

All humans are in the business of handing over precious things, language and words, memories and stories to people, our children mainly, for lost items to once again be "found". It strengthens our vitality.

But what do we do to find our lost self? I imagine that not being known to our self must be the most heartbreaking, destructive feeling of lost and this "getting lost" is the true focus of Solnit's narrative.

 Solnit writes "The painters seemed to have become smitten with the blue of distance, and when you look at these paintings you can imagine a world where you could walk through." The space beyond is one in which we can become lost.

When she discovered her father was not her biological father, Dani Shapiro was torn by questions of self and identity: "If my father wasn’t my father, who was I?" the writer wrote in Inheritance.

Or consider the wonderful Welsh writer Jan Morris who lived 45 years in a "disunified" body before she had a sexual reassignment surgery.   I also think of American poet Ocean Vuong who recently uncovered the identity of his grandfather and that not knowing who the man was (they were unable to meet before the elder died), gave Vuong a missing sense of self.

Solnit is a storyteller, but rather than chronology, she uses themes as her backbone. Individuals like painter Yves Klein and explorer Cabeza de Vaca, as well as her own friendships, journeys, and distilled memories of place interlock to form a narrative of getting lost.

Photograph by Ellen Vrana.

On Virginia Woolf, the originator of this space/freedom metaphor:   Solnit included a passage from Woolf's To the Lighthouse  
"For now she need not think about anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of - to think; well, not even to think. To be silent; to be alone."  
  
As a mother, I feel this need for silence so often, so deeply. My favorite short story is Doris Lessing's' "To Room Nineteen", which is a story of the same need for space and silence squelched by a world that will never understand.

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 the 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.

Do not be misled by Solnit's meandering style and imagine she too might be lost, however. Far from it, Solnit is a writer of great structure, sharp self-consciousness, and precious world awareness.

Accompany this immediate study of the unknown with my own "The Need to Empty Ourselves", Ocean Vuong's poetry of identity, Gaston Bachelard's poetry as space, and the Diaries of Vaslav Nijinsky, a firsthand account of a person tumbling through psychosis and thus, truly lost from himself.