Relinquishing Certainty

[AltTransBikes]

A few years back author Rebecca Solnit published a lovely little book titled: A Field Guide to Getting Lost.

The writing is personal with memoirs but also contains distinct and various stories from episodes in history. One notable reading is that of Spanish explorer Cabeza de Vaca, after being shipwrecked by a storm in 1528, his journey overland from the coast of Texas to California and then to Mexico City took eight years to complete. Remarkable for this was in the 16th century. He found himself very lost.....or lost himself very found. In either case, his life was much changed and never to be the same thereafter.

Tales and stories aside, the thread running through the book is about valuing the unstructured, the unquantifiable, the unknown, and the wandering that brings one to these necessities.
The art of being lost is that through this vulnerability, you are no longer stopped by what you know. One becomes open and quick with the world.

One enduring image the author conjures is that of a long-distance runner.... accumulating moments when neither foot is on the ground, “tiny fragments of levitation,” and argues by analogy that in relinquishing certainty we approach, if only fleetingly, the divine.

I've been rereading it recently, some excerpts:

“The art is not one of forgetting but letting go. And when everything else is gone, you can be rich in loss.”

“Explorers ‘were always lost, because they’d never been to these places before. They never expected to know exactly where they were. Yet, at the same time, many of them knew their instruments and understood their trajectories within a reasonable degree of accuracy. In my opinion, their most important skill was simply a sense of optimism about surviving and finding their way.”

“When someone doesn't show up, the people who wait sometimes tell stories about what might have happened and come to half believe the desertion, the abduction, the accident. Worry is a way to pretend that you have knowledge or control over what you don't--and it surprises 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 that they too contain the unknown.”

“Getting lost was not a matter of geography so much as identity, a passionate desire, even an urgent need, to become no one and anyone, to shake off the shackles that remind you who you are, who others think you are.”

“To lose yourself: a voluptuous surrender, lost in your arms, lost to the world, utterly immersed in what is present so that its surroundings fade away. To be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery.”

“Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go.”

 

[Thoreau]

ATB, thanks for taking the time to share that extensive taste of the book.

Ms. Solnit sounds like she can write quite lyrically.

From the snippets shared, it seems that the book, content and style, is something of a mix between psychology, philosophy, and poetry--and sometimes uses straightforward argument intended to be understood literally, at other times aims more for inspiration, evocativeness, or rhetorical paradox.

For some, that strikes the perfect set of chords for their internal sense of "music."

One of the reasons you likely speak about the book and its topic in this forum is that vandwelling, or full-timing a life of travel, is attractive to many because it allows one to lose the self, to re-invent the self, to not remain trapped in one's own, or others', conception of who one is, or what life's sounds and sights and smells and thoughts must be.

There is an unruined magic, an untrodden snow, about strangers and strange places--and the way strangers and strange places give you another chance to see with new eyes, and to be seen in turn as unbounded.

Thanks again for sharing the book's message and quotations.

 

[AltTransBikes]

One of the reasons you likely speak about the book and its topic in this forum is that vandwelling, or full-timing a life of travel, is attractive to many because it allows one to lose the self, to re-invent the self, to not remain trapped in one's own, or others', conception of who one is, or what life's sounds and sights and smells and thoughts must be.

I must say, if there was a target in mind, you supplied the bullseye. Thank you for an insightful and erudite reply.

And to add a bit of prescience to the mix, in one passage Solnit quotes HDT:

""It is a surprising and memorable, as well as valuable experience, to be lost in the woods any time. Often in a snow-storm, even by day, one will come out upon a well-known road and yet find it impossible to tell which way leads to the village. Though he knows that he has traveled it a thousand times, he cannot recognize a feature in it, but it is as strange to him as if it were a road in Siberia. By night, of course, the perplexity is infinitely greater. In our most trivial walks, we are constantly, though unconsciously, steering like pilots by certain well-known beacons and headlands, and if we go beyond our usual course we still carry in our minds the bearing of some neighboring cape; and not till we are completely lost, or turned round- for a man needs only to be turned round once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost- do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of nature. Every man has to learn the points of compass again as often as be awakes, whether from sleep or any abstraction. Not till we are lost, in other words not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations."

Thoreau is playing with the biblical question about what it profits a man if he gains the whole world and loses his own soul. Lose the whole world, get lost in it, and find your soul.”


ps: I grew up less than a mile from Walden Pond though wherever I am, the spirit of the place has never left me.

 

[owl]

What a great thread to get to enjoy first thing in trhe morning. I will think on it all day, thank you both. One thing I would add, this life allows you to reinvent yourself, fufill your dreams on a daily basis.

 

[mockturtle]

Losing our 'selves' and finding our souls makes sense to me. To truly find yourself, you must lose yourself.

 

[Thoreau]

ATB: Thanks for the follow-up. Yes, the confluence of the snow metaphors, the Thoreau screen name, and now snow and cold in much of the country...is fun.

Some of the most telling passages I've found from Thoreau come not from his book Walden, which, though excellent, was heavily crafted and edited to be impressive and presentable, but from his journals...which give both a less posturing, and more naturally contextual, taste of his thoughts. In fact, much of Walden is excerpted from his journals, but, again, without the context of the rest of the journal entry. And, interestingly, in his journals, Thoreau himself wonders whether seeing his thoughts in the natural settings of their original context would not have been better than to pull them out and squeeze them artificially into a different book.

One of the better book purchases I've made, therefore, was Thoreau's journals, in a set comprising 2 massive volumes. They take up the space and weight of many normal volumes, but if I do take to the road, they would be among the very few hundred books I would take. (No typo there.)

Although he scorned travel, and although he lectured against having many possessions and would scoff at owning, much less traveling with, hundreds of anything, including books, I find much to like about him. He was a bold non-conformist, an original thinker who "stepped outside" his era, self-sufficient to a high degree, a philosopher, writer, poet, and nature lover. And he was remarkably confident in his own judgment, no matter how much it diverged from what "everybody" thought or did.

Owl: Yes, I, too was happy to find this thread of ATB's. Only a minority in any group is interested in much literature or philosophy--but for that minority it's a wonderful treat.

 

[mockturtle]

Thoreau did recognize that solitude has its limitations. A finding that disappointed me greatly. ;-)

 

[Thoreau]

Mockturtle,

As you may know, Thoreau lived in his cabin in the woods, on Emerson's land, for two years or so. Even during that time, he had a good number of visitors to his cabin, and he visited his family and friends in town fairly regularly, too. His experiment was never intended to be one of complete solitude, but rather of living self-sufficiently, without having to conform to society--in the type of house he lived in, or the type of food he ate, or the type of work he did, etc.. He wanted to live life "on its own terms," without all the artificial stuff heaped on top of it.

Still, he writes many times of his love of solitude, and undoubtedly he experienced more solitude than most--before, during, and after his time in the woods.

He left the woods after two years or so not because his experiment failed, but because, as he writes toward the end of Walden:

"I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one. It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves."

[By the way, I think that's a good model to keep in mind when one tries a certain lifestyle for a while--such as vanliving or full-time RV'ing--and later one chooses to move on to something else. A person may have "several more lives to live."]

Even among the relatively few people whose lives we know much about, there were (and are) others who have been better "hermits" than Thoreau; there were (and are) others who have been better woodsmen and survivalists and small homesteaders than Thoreau; there were (and are) more independent-minded people, and fiercer non-conformists than Thoreau; there were (and are) better writers and poets than Thoreau; and there were (and are) better thinkers and philosophers than Thoreau.

But his combination of all those traits to a highly developed degree (and with the good fortune to have Ralph Waldo Emerson and other notables as friends, ultimately ensuring that his writings and story would not be lost to the world) makes Thoreau, to me, a compelling figure whose writings I find, in places, deeply resonant.

 

[AltTransBikes]

more excerpt:

“All those summer drives, no matter where I was going, life all before and behind me, I was suspended in the beautiful solitude of the open road, in a kind of introspection that only outdoor space generates, for inside and outside are more intertwined than the usual distinctions allow.

The emotion stirred by the landscape is piercing, a joy close to pain when the blue is deepest on the horizon or the clouds are doing those spectacular fleeting things so much easier to recall than to describe.

Sometimes I thought of my apartment in San Francisco as only a winter camp and home as the whole circuit around the West I travel a few times a year and myself as something of a nomad (nomads, contrary to current popular imagination, have fixed circuits and stable relationships to places; they are far from being the drifters and dharma bums that the word nomad often connotes nowadays).

This meant that it was all home, and certainly the intense emotion that, for example, the sequence of mesas alongside the highway for perhaps fifty miles west of Gallup, N.M., and a hundred miles east has the power even as I write to move me deeply, as do dozens of other places, and I have come to long not to see new places but to return and know the old ones more deeply, to see them again. But if this was home, then I was both possessor of an enchanted vastness but also profoundly alienated.”

 

[owl]

I thoroughly enjoyed Thoreaus writings in Civil Disobedience. Everyone knows the quiet desperation line. This is my favorite--

“There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience

 

[compassrose]

Solitude is a state of mind. One can exist as a solitary individual even in a crowd.

 

[mockturtle]

I thoroughly enjoyed Thoreaus writings in Civil Disobedience. Everyone knows the quiet desperation line. This is my favorite--

“There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience

Absolutely! Those words inspired me long ago and made me appreciate the stark difference between the USA and Europe, where 'the good of the whole' [a nice euphemism for the ultimate power of the State] is more important than the sanctity of the individual.

 

[Thoreau]

Owl: Yes, Thoreau was a passionate individualist, and the sentence you cite reflects this orientation vis-a-vis his view of government. I sympathize strongly with that approach.

---

ATB: Okay, you've convinced me to buy the book.

Her cumulative sentences, insightful and lyrical, with a good deal of balance, are beautiful.

I particularly like, "The emotion stirred by the landscape is piercing, a joy close to pain when the blue is deepest on the horizon or the clouds are doing those spectacular fleeting things so much easier to recall than to describe."

The editor in me wants to refine the final sentence quoted, which is: "But if this was home, then I was both possessor of an enchanted vastness but also profoundly alienated.”

It is not parallel. Parallel would have been either of the following:

a) But if this was home, then I was both possessor of an enchanted vastness but also of a profound alienation.
b) But if this was home, then I was both enchanted by the vastness but also profoundly alienated.

Also, the use of "both" followed by one example and then by "but" instead of "and" strikes my ear as a little awkward, especially since the sentence is not parallel.

Moreover, because she began the sentence with "but," the second "but" seems to me to be an ungainly, unintended echo.

I might write instead:
But if this was home, then I was both possessor of an enchanted vastness and also of a profound alienation.

Overall, though, she writes beautifully, and I've put the book in my Amazon.com shopping cart.

Thanks again for introducing us to her.

 

[Thoreau]

Quick follow-up and clarification for word-lovers: Parallel word use is especially important when one introduces a set of words as a pair or a set. In the sentence referred to above, the author introduces a pair by saying ..."both" (followed, of course, by "possessor of an enchanted vastness but also profoundly alienated.”).

..." And because she announces a pair, the pair should have matched in presentation, by having parallel constructions.