John and Rosianna discuss A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit. This episode was originally released to subscribers in March 2019.
What does it mean to look and observe without immediately searching for an answer? What are the many implications of the color blue? How do we make sense of the distance between our younger selves and current selves? Join John Green and Rosianna Halse Rojas as they discuss A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit.
This episode was originally released to subscribers in March 2019. The Life’s Library Discord and subscriptions are now closed after a wonderful three years of reading together. Check out past books at www.lifeslibrarybookclub.com, Twitter, and Instagram.
Life’s Library logo by Bethany Mannion.
John Green: Hello, and welcome to the second episode of the Life's Library podcast. Before we get started discussing Rebecca Solnit’s extraordinary book, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, I have to tell you guys something, which is that Rosianna and I just got off the worst conference call that I have ever been part of in my entire life.
Rosianna Halse Rojas: Yeah, but you managed to get out of it really well. There was one point where you were like, I do not need to be on this phone call anymore. And at that moment, John got off the phone call.
John: Yeah. I was like, if there are no other questions for me, bye.
Rosianna: And I was like, I guess I'm going, too.
John: The way I felt during that, during that phone call was very much that I needed to get lost. Deeply, profoundly lost. I needed to leave the world as I knew it and try to become profoundly unfamiliar with my surroundings and reinvent myself, like completely.
Rosianna: Oh god. I mean, there's a certain kind of lost-ness I do feel on conference because, which is that I can't tell who anyone is. I have no idea.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: Especially American voices, for some reason, more than any other country, they would just blend into one another. And I'm like, who who's talking right now? Can we we'll say our names?
John: Yeah. Yeah yeah yeah. They're all very flat voices, but then there's also the loss-ness of, you're in this shared space with a lot of people. In this case, like eight, you know, eight or nine people or however many people, and you're in a shared space, but you're not in a shared space.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: Like you can't see them and you forget. You're like, oh right. That person is here. Huh. Okay.
Rosianna: Yeah. It's, oh, it's a bleak landscape.
John: It is.
Rosianna: But not perhaps the landscape that Rebecca Solnit talks about specifically.
John: No, but I think there's definitely some analogs.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: One of the things I really loved about this book and I'd never read a Rebecca Solnit book before. So in the same way that If You Come Softly was your introduction to Jacqueline Woodson, this was my introduction to Rebecca Solnit. And I just, I just thought it was phenomenal.
Rosianna: Oh, I'm so glad!
John: There were so many lines in this book that I underlined and thought that would make a great, like, quote at the start of a novel.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: She specializes in excellent epigraphs.
Rosianna: Yeah. There's that, there's actually one in this book that I have used at the beginning of something that I'm working on right now. So it's funny that you should say that.
John: Which one—do you know what it is?
Rosianna: It's about souls traveling west over the water. I can't remember exactly where it is, but it's just beautiful.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: I mean, there's so many and that's kind of—I did actually use the little notebook that we sent everyone in the package. To write down notes and I felt like I was back at university again, just like writing down every single quotation that I loved. And there's so, so many in this book. Even though I have read it a few times myself, I forget about so many of the lines.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: And it's not until I come back to the book that I'm like, oh yes. And this, and this.
John: One of the things I loved about the book is how it's structured, you know, with the kind of coming from and going to essays vaguely related to the color blue. It felt like getting lost, you know, like it felt like, being that sort of joy of wandering. That pleasure that one finds when one looks up and realizes that you don't know where you are.
Rosianna: Yeah, absolutely. And you kind of have to, like, she talks a lot about surrender in it as well, throughout all of the essays, really. And there's a kind of surrender you have to do, I think with books like this, especially. There's like something about the personal essay that you're just trusting someone's kind of inner compass to take you through, whatever the stream of consciousness is. And it's like, I don't know, there's kind of a mapping to that as well. There's a letting them guide the way to it—as with all stories, I think, but when it's personalized, when you're that close to someone's—what they find interesting, and they're telling you about an experience that you don't know about yet. You're trusting them to reveal it moment by moment.
John: Yeah, but one of the weird things about this book is that it is personal essay, but it's also lots of other things.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: I was reminded that there aren't enough public intellectuals in the world, you know, Rebecca Solnit makes a big deal in her bios that she is an independent scholar. An independent writer. That she's not associated with any particular institution. And you can really feel that in these essays because they're art, historical, but they're also historical, but they're also personal. I loved the way that, you know, all of my ideas about where something fits in a bookstore or where something fits, you know, in a college curriculum or whatever, all of that was completely destroyed by this book. And it was like, we're going on a journey. You have to trust me. It's going to go a lot of different places, but you have that—because you have this, the guide of these, you know, these extraordinary sentences, you don't mind the wandering.
Rosianna: Yeah, I think that's really true. I've seen so many, you know, little blurbs and descriptions being like, this is a travel log, this is memoir. And I'm like, oh, that doesn't quite fit, or that's not quite right.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: Because it is so many of those things and also kind of refutes all of them at the same time.
John: Right. And a lot of books of essays are pretty clearly collections of things that were written for other magazines.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: Or, you know, like collections of assignments, basically. Like I love the work of John McPhee, but a lot of his books are just collections of the pieces that he writes for the new Yorker. And that's what they are. They don't hang together as carefully and as thoughtfully as this book does. Like, this is a collection of essays. It's also very much a book. This is a, you know, it's as close as you can come to a singular narrative, considering that it has absolutely no singular narratives. Like you're on an unseen path and you look back at the end of the book and you're like, oh my god. What a journey.
Rosianna: Yeah, it almost felt like persuasive writing in so many cases. But I wasn't quite sure what I was being persuaded. Of just to kind of consider lostness, I suppose, and pay attention to different things and spend more time with it.
John: Consider the many implications of the color blue.
Rosianna: Definitely. No shortage of the color blue in there.
John: Oh man. Yeah. I also I've read a lot of stories about exes, you know, like I love a good breakup memoir, I guess. I love stories about relationships that didn't work out. And I used to love to write them before eventually it got to a point where my friends and family and spouse were like, you know, this isn't that funny.
Rosianna: It's not interesting anymore to us.
John: Right.
Rosianna: Or maybe it never was.
John: I thought the way that she wrote about that love story in the desert was so beautiful.
Rosianna: It's so good.
John: And it was so spot on, it was respectful of the relationship, of the love, while also charting the story for you of why it ended.
Rosianna: It's in, Two Arrowheads and the very first line of it is, "Once I loved a man who was a lot like the desert. And before that I love the desert." And that just like, in itself, I spent like five minutes just kind of lingering on.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: She has this expansiveness, all of her writing, every part of her writing, whether it's about people or places. It has this kind of, looking for the expense. And I really found that in this. Yeah, in the story of this, you know, she described him, I think, as a hermit. Pretty quiet man, who's kind of very happy in his solitude. But around all the animals and the natural life.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: But yeah, but has this really expensive wonder before him and their time together while also as you say, you know, making it clear that this isn't a story that ended in them being together forever.
John: One of the lines in that story that I loved was the man she loves is talking to another man. And the line is about seeing a tortoise "and then they came out and in the manner of men, led on that they had seen tortoises as big. 'Have you ever seen one bigger?' I asked, and they fell silent." It is so true that every time I see something with Chris, no matter what it is, and I only have one male friend, so I don't have another—well, every time I see something with Chris, it's like, oh yeah, no, I've seen one of those before. It's like an inability to experience, it's like a denial of wonder.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: And I love that she kind of calls them out on it and their response to it is to fall silent. The little details in this book just, I loved them.
Rosianna: I felt like that was such a precursor to one of her later books and one that's done—at least in the UK—did really well, which was Men Explain Things to Me, which is kind of like her little manifesto on mansplaining. But I felt like, oh, I could see, I could see the early passages of that coming out through this.
John: Right. It's definitely part of the same genre of men—
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: Where in the same way that we're taught that the way to prove that we're smart is to say things with authority and explain them to people, including people who know more about them than we do
Rosianna: Yeah, and that's a, kind of having the answer to it. Like I've definitely always like worshiped at the altar of having the answer to things.
John: Right.
Rosianna: And I'm realizing that more and more, like there is something to, it sounds really cheesy to say it, but like a certain kind of humility before everything and before, especially these bigger questions. We're just kind of noticing something wonderful, noticing something amazing and kind of making an observation to someone and that response not having to be, I've already seen that, or I know about this, or here's a fact rather than response being to kind of like, stand side by side and look at it. Like that being the wonderful thing.
John: Right. To look together instead of immediately searching for an answer. Yeah. That's such a good observation. Like I, one of the things about getting older for me is that I now look back on times in my life when I felt very, very certain. Especially in times in my life, when I felt righteous indignation about something that I was very, very certain about. And I'm just like, oh god. Oh, I wish I could take that back. My entire life now is defined by uncertainty. And I don't know if I'll always feel this way, but right now it feels like the only honest response to consciousness. Like when I'm in the garden and I'm planting something, I don't know if it's going to grow and if I pretend otherwise, I look like an idiot because, yeah. I don't know. I don't know if that's enough bone meal. I don't know if that's enough fertilizer. I don't know if I'm watering it enough. Like that's the, you know, that's the thing.
Rosianna: Yeah, you're part of this bigger thing, but you're not its master, I think has been big one for me.
John: Right, yeah. Yeah, right. I'm not the expert in the room.
Rosianna: Yeah. Especially as I've been, uh, I've been planting a lot of things in my gardens lately and we've got lots of foxes around and they definitely have other plans for the things that I plant. They like to dig them up.
John: Yeah. That's part of, yeah. That's part of life. I have built a deer fence that is nine feet tall, but the wind blew it down yesterday.
Rosianna: Oh, no!
John: Well, it struck me as like kind of beautiful actually, because I was like, well, now I will do the work of building the deer fence again, and then the wind will blow it down again. And then I will build the deer fence again. And that will just be the rest of my life.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: And I don't know. I'm quite happy with that.
Rosianna: That's good. I like that. And that also brings me on to the—there's a great line, I think it's really, it might even be in the first essay about all these animals wandering around the suburbs.
John: Oh, I think I know what you're talking about. Is it where they think that the animals must think that this world is empty?
Rosianna: Yeah, totally. Like the kind of like apocalyptic landscape.
John: Right.
Rosianna: And it's all for them. And I think about that now, whenever I see the foxes, especially, because like, for them, it's great that we create a lot of waste and leave it outside. Because they're like, great, dinner.
John: Yeah. Well, we have designed outside very well for particular species, right? Like, obviously not for the majority of animal species, which are declining in number, but for certain animal species, they're like—like, if you're a goose or you're a fox or in my neck of the woods, if you're a coyote, you must be like, wow, it's so nice of these people to only come outside when they're leaving me food.
Rosianna: Yeah. It's so generous of them. And I'll say, do they even exist anymore?
John: This world is entirely mine, except occasionally these other creatures come into it, deliver me food, and then immediately go back to wherever they go.
Rosianna: And keep on going. I mean, I feel this to an extent in London, but I found it even more so when I was living in the U.S. and like, as you know, I don't know how to drive. So I tend to walk around a lot of places where most people drive. And he just, you do, I mean, I remember in Indianapolis seeing so many just bunnies running around everywhere and I was like, I can't remember the last time I sort of bunny in London.
John: Oh man. I love a good bunny.
Rosianna: They're so great.
John: We have, I mean, if you need a bunny, nothing but bunnies in Indianapolis. I have a very difficult relationship with them because of the garden.
Rosianna: Oh, yeah. Well, you got to have Peter Rabbit.
John: Yeah. Oh, I mean, I was watching that movie and I was like, I feel that they've made the wrong person, the good guy.
Rosianna: That's all the people in the countryside believe about our very sweet relationship with foxes.
John: Right, I'm sure.
Rosianna: I mean it's different, different contexts, but yeah, I mean that, that kind of abandoned suburban landscape. I thought it was really, yeah, I don't know, it just really reminded me, especially with being, like, in my teens and walking back from a night out and then suddenly as you get to the more residential parts, like things just get really quiet and you suddenly feel like you're all by yourself.
John: Right.
Rosianna: But then like an animal runs out and actually it's kind of like, it's their kingdom.
John: Yeah. Yeah, it is so weird how much we have abandoned outside, like how uninteresting it's become to us. And as much as I do enjoy virtual experiences and virtual communities, especially really productive ones where, you know, people can make deep connections. I totally underestimated outside and kind of catastrophically so, I think. It's so good for my brain to be outside. And yeah, there's no replacement for it. Like no matter how good virtual reality gets, outside is always going to be a more complex system.
Rosianna: Yeah. Yeah. There was a conversation on the Aloe shelf on the Discord between Shell and KennaKae. And they were asking each other, do you find that you get caught up in exploring the digital world so much that it cuts into the time you could be doing things in the quote unquote real world. And that kind of led on to a question of like, can the internet open doors? And while I think it can, and I think, you know, that's an interesting thing to explore, like I definitely find that lately, I really enjoy being outside as much as possible and going on long walks and going to new places and being outside in a way that I definitely didn't when I was younger. I found that kind of excitement through the internet and through communities. And now I find that a lot more, I don't know, it's a lot more disconnecting, whereas I found outside far more connecting than it had previously been for me.
John: Yeah. It's interesting because in this book—the places that I found analogy, right, like I've never left it all behind to live with a man in the desert.
Rosianna: Not yet!
John: So there were a lot of places where I didn't find, you know, a super close analogy to my own experience. But a lot of the places where I did, was analogy to my experiences online. My feeling, my experiences of kind of getting lost online, especially when I was younger and when it felt new, and when it really did, kind of in my mind, at least feel like exploration. And I think probably online experience still feels that way for a lot of people. And the reasons it doesn't feel that way for me are probably more like developmental rather than a change in the internet.
Rosianna: Right.
John: Like, I'm just middle-aged now. And I can't find those cool places anymore. They're literally unavailable to me. But you know, like the feeling, for instance, of the first time you discover a new YouTube channel you love, or—I remember the feeling of the first time I watched like a lonelygirl15 videos and being like, oh, well this is a world.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: This is something that is, like, way, way bigger than anyone understands, which now is a feeling that I get primarily outside.
Rosianna: Yeah. Well, it's interesting you say about the world because I feel like there's a line that Lorde said on the Rookie podcast—good old Rookie—about music creating a very specific sonic world. And when she was doing her album Melodrama, that that's kind of—she knew what she was trying to get to because she had in her mind this very specific sonic world. So I feel like for me, like music has kind of a way of, kind of getting lost in those ways and exploring those ways—
John: Right.
Rosianna: —as well, in the same way that you talk about community.
John: Yeah. And she writes about, you know, country music and Patsy Cline and "Lost Highway" and "Lonely Street" and all those songs and—
Rosianna: Yeah, which I had no, like relation, like, no, what's the word. I had no idea what they were
John: Right. You've probably never heard any of those songs.
Rosianna: No.
John: I was thinking about, I was thinking about you as I was reading that part because I was like, I wonder if in England, people even know about this part—it's such an American form of music that, like, high lonesome country sound. There is no real—I guess like, a little bit in like Scots-Irish folk music, you hear it?
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: Yeah, it is very particular to America.
Rosianna: I mean, my knowledge of country music is my mom playing "Achy Breaky Heart," which in the nineties, like, that's the extent of it. And then also, I mean, what I was thinking about a lot reading those country music chapters was, there's a couple of episodes of revisionist history where Malcolm Gladwell kind of goes on a similar, almost like on a similar line of thinking about how, you know, there was a certain kind of country music that does it properly and certain kind that doesn't, and it was interesting to me that they seem to be on the same page about that.
John: Yeah. I there's a little bit of—I think there's a little bit of nostalgia involved—
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: —in that worldview. I think that "Walking after Midnight" is a great song and a super weird song as, as she points out, like the more you listen to it, the more you're like, what the heck is happening right now. But I also think that like, I don't know, Alan Jackson's "Way Down Yonder on the Chattahoochee" is a great country song and it's just doesn't seem as great because we discovered it at a different time, you know.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: I don't know. It's always hard to know the relationship between self and music. Like I've been thinking about that a lot for this episode of The Anthropocene Reviewed I'm writing. That like some songs—it's not even that they're good or bad, really. It's just that they have this magical power over you. They have this power to transport you to places that you, used to be, or people that you used to be. And you know, you'll find any justification you can for saying that you love the song, but what you really love is the time travel part of it.
Rosianna: Yeah. That's so true. Because that's kind of what I was thinking when I was reading it. I was like, you're trying to persuade me that it's inherently better.
John: Right.
Rosianna: But I just think that it's inherently better to you and that's totally fine. And I loved reading about that. And then I was thinking about like, there's so many kind of amazing contemporary artists like Kacey Musgraves who are doing really interesting things within the genre.
John: Yeah, for sure.
Rosianna: Who I'm sure would like fall under the—like, oh, that's pop, that's different. That's doing something different. But it just was kind of a good reminder to me about how everyone connects with these different areas. I was listening to a lot of the Libertines over the weekend and I was like, oh, this was such a good time of music. Everything was so great. And it kind of had me think like, was it was that or I was just fourteen and it was amazing.
John: Yeah, I know. I feel the same way. Like I feel like 1995 was this critical year in the history of music. But what it really was, was the year I turned eighteen.
Rosianna: Yeah. And we like, oh, they don't do it this way anymore. It's not—yeah. It's funny.
John: Yeah. Even, well, even the artists that I love. Like, I still think that their best work was done in 1995.
Rosianna: Yeah. Yeah. Hundred percent.
John: Inescapably. Yeah.
Rosianna: Oh shoot. I mean, should we talk about blue?
John: Yeah. Let's talk about blue.
Rosianna: The recurring theme of blue and the blue of distance. Yeah.
John: I had never known about that. I'd never known—I kind of knew a little bit of the history of blue as a color and blue as a color in art. But I did not know about the idea of the blue distance and it is, I mean, no wonder she devotes half the book to it, you know, one way or another, because it is so, yeah, it's just super resonant.
Rosianna: Yeah, absolutely. And it, and just such interesting ways as well. Like I think one of my favorite bits is when she talks about the cyanotypes?
John: Mhm.
Rosianna: The blue photographs that vanish.
John: Mhm.
Rosianna: Like that's so fascinating to me.
John: Mhm.
Rosianna: I mean, yeah, all these amateur artists, amateur photographers, creating these photographs in those prints. But they're vanishing, but that is itself being something kind of beautiful, like letting something disappear or creating it to just try and kind of get on the ladder or whatever it is
John: Right.
Rosianna: Like I found that so, so beautiful.
John: Yeah. And also everything is vanishing.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: And so the cyanotype is really just aware of its own vanishing-ness in a way that most things aren't, you know. Like we try to make things permanent to make them feel like they're permanent. When I take a picture. What did they say? Like isn't there something like a picture is forever or something, but of course, a picture isn't forever. Like nothing is, and I wonder what will happen to all of our pictures.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: You know, I wonder how they'll vanish in the end, but I know they will.
Rosianna: Yeah, that idea of like, you can possess something, but you can't actually, because it fundamentally changes the nature of it.
John: Right.
Rosianna: And you can't really possess the thing that you desire because that changes its nature.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: Like it, it stops being that. And I think that, yeah, both of those things kind of correlates to really nicely with, I don't know. I see a lot of people now, this is kind of strange analogy, but talking about things like archiving their entire Instagram and starting from scratch, or even like the types of things we're seeing. Like Instagram stories that disappear after a certain time—
John: Mhm. Mhm. Mhm.
Rosianna: —messages that self-destruct after a certain time. I think for a long time, especially in recent history, we got really fixated on the acquisition of information, generating it and kind of keeping things. And now, I don't know whether it's because we are more that it's not possible to have it all at once or just a shift in where we are right now, but—
John: Maybe it's because we're kind of horrified by how much we're preserving, you know.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: How much of ourselves we're preserving. Like I found it so wonderful to archive my Tumblr and then have it go away.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: And then the idea that you can do something on the internet and then it won't be there anymore is lovely.
Rosianna: Yeah!
John: I think there isn't much in this book that's really related to virtual experience or to internet experience. But I kept going back to it because like I said earlier, that's my equivalent. The atlas that I've had to use over the last twenty years has mostly been the virtual atlas. And so it is really interesting to think about what we're leaving behind and what we're going to choose not to.
Rosianna: Yeah, that whole concept of the right to be forgotten—
John: Yeah. Yeah.
Rosianna: —that lets people have like Google results removed and things like that. Like I think that we'll be seeing more towards that. I loved the way she wrote about being confronted with these memories that conflict with your memory of them, I suppose. Especially when she talked about finding this turquoise blouse that she used to wear and seeing that it's absolutely tiny because it was when she was a toddler and like that the dissonance between remembering what it felt like to be inside it and seeing this like tiny object in front of you.
John: Mhm.
Rosianna: And just the complete lack of connection between the two. Like, when I stumble across like an old shoe I used to wear, like my mum keeps this patent leather shoes that I wore when I was two or three. And like how could I possibly remember wearing them? And yet they're in front of me and they're tiny.
John: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I always think about going into your childhood house or apartment and suddenly it's so small.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: And I only went into my childhood house once as an adult. And I just remember looking at the ceilings and the ceilings were so low in that house, and just being like, how, how?
Rosianna: Who did this?
John: Yeah, who did this? Like how can I make sense of this change? How can I make sense of this? You know, the me I don't get to be anymore. And the home that isn't like, isn't really real anymore because you know, it's as much a time as a place.
Rosianna: Yeah. Yeah. And the great kind of the loss in that as well.
John: Mhm.
Rosianna: Yeah, I think she wrote someone like, when it kind of exists in your mind, anything's is kind of possible in that moment of desire.
John: Mhm.
Rosianna: Like it it's longing and you still feel it, but anything's possible. And then the moment you get to it, something is lost, kind of at once.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: Yeah, the—I might've told you this story before, but the thing that made me think about was when I wrote this story when I was in college about a newly ordained minister and it was so good, Rosianna. It was by far the best thing I've ever written and I lost it and I grieved it terribly. And I would think, oh man, if I just had that story about the newly ordained minister, I'd have a, you know, two-thirds of another novel and I could publish it tomorrow. And people would say rightly that it's overwhelmingly the best thing I've ever written. And then one day my old religion professor was like hey, I came across this story that you gave me. I don't know if you have it, but it's pretty good. I'd like to send you a copy. And I was like, oh my God. Like, I love that story. That's the story. And he sent it to me and it was just terrible. I mean, there wasn't a salvageable sentence in it. And I was, it was horrible.
Rosianna: Yeah...
John: Like I desperately wish that I could just go back to thinking that it was brilliant.
Rosianna: Yeah. And have that be like, ah, the what if.
John: Right. Yeah. Yeah. The object of desire. Yeah, because you don't—the last thing you need is to have it be, you know, transformed by reality.
Rosianna: Yeah. There is something to that to kind of celebrating that space, that middle space, and we don't, we, we celebrate like being on the other side of it, even when it's not pleasant.
John: Right.
Rosianna: Even if when you come across reading the old story, like there's the celebration like, oh, I got to this thing. But not being in the middle place.
John: Mhm. Well, yeah, the story has an ending, right?
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: Like even in my telling of the story, the button of the story is the joke that the story was battle along. If, you know, if I hadn't found it, I probably wouldn't even tell you about it because you know, it would still be, it would still be firing me on the inside.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: And it would still feel super personal and super interior. But then the moment you find the thing, it becomes different. Lesser.
Rosianna: I mean, that's—that's an interesting point because there is something so personal about longing and desire. The book feels very personal, very intimate in lots of ways.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: And yeah, and maybe that is a big part of why that is a part of a larger social vocabulary, even if it is part of our interior vocabulary, this longing-ness and this desire.
John: Mhm.
Rosianna: Because it is so personal and it's so revealing. You know, everyone walking around with a Mirror of Erised behind them, just talking about their various states of longing and desire.
John: Right.
Rosianna: It would be quite a different social structure, I think.
John: Yeah, yeah, no, I mean, we were super embarrassed about what we would see in a Mirror of Erised. In fact, the thing that's always struck me as weird about that scene is that Harry and Ron are both so willing to tell each other what they see.
Rosianna: Yeah, absolutely.
John: Whereas I think that if I looked into the Mirror of Erised, I would be like, well, that's between me and my God.
Rosianna: It's definitely socks. Definitely socks.
John: Definitely socks, definitely socks.
Rosianna: Just tons of socks.
John: Yeah. No, on that front, there's this one passage I really wanted to read where she talks about the other kind of lost, you know, the other kind of lost that is separate from the sense of being disorientated or whatever. "Lost 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's a loss of control. Imagine yourself streaming through time, shedding gloves, umbrellas, wrenches, books, friends, homes, names. This is what the view looks like. If you take a rear facing seat on the train, looking forward, you constantly acquire moments of arrival, moments of realization, moments of discovery, the wind blows your hair back and you're greeted by what you've never seen before. The material falls away and on rushing experience, it peels off like skin from a molting snake. Of course, to forget the past is to lose the sense of loss that is also a memory of an absent richness and a set of clues to navigate the present by. The art is not one of forgetting, but letting go. And when everything else is gone, you can be rich in lost."
Rosianna: Oh god, it's so beautiful.
John: Oh, god.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: I mean, I would kill a lot of people to write a sentence like, "And when everything else is gone, you can be rich in lost."
Rosianna: Yeah. I mean, that's what I've seen all over the Discord. And it was one of those things that when I read it, I'm like, I want to tattoo it on my body so I can look at it every day. But there's so many of them I'm like, which one do I pick? But that, I mean, that's one of my favorite passages in the book. I'm really glad you read it.
John: Yeah. I do think there's something about loving a quote so much that you want to put it on your body.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: I did feel that way a couple of times reading this book and I have to say, I do not often feel it, because I don't have any tattoos. And so I don't have that sensation of having done it before. But yeah, I just think that line, I don't know, just really has stuck with me.
Rosianna: Yeah. I mean, for me, it's also, yeah, hypothetical tattoos. Constant hypothesis of getting a tattoo, but no, it's beautiful. And that the idea of the unfamiliar, I think the unfamiliar in a lot of like contemporary discourse is always, I guess they always talk about like the uncanny, like that feeling of being really repulsed by something or really uncomfortable around something. So it gives it a different perspective. It gives it something—it's not neutral, but something a bit more open
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: Rather than something like yeah, interior to it in a negative way.
John: Yeah. Yeah, and Rosianna and I really liked this book. Obviously we picked it for the book club. We hope that you also liked it. From the Discord, most of you seem to have, which is good.
Rosianna: Yeah. It was funny because I obviously wrote in the letter that it was a book that I found quite hard to read initially and I think that some people then—I scared some people away from starting it for a little while. Just from writing that letter itself. But I think that's part of, as you were saying, of that kind of surrendering to the texts for me is, letting myself not understand everything or feel like I don't understand everything. Yeah. And as I said, that's kind of part of the reason why we picked up lots of different types of books. Because for some people, I think this type of writing will be very familiar and for others it will be very different. And that's kind of part the fun of it. At least for me.
John: Yeah. Yeah. We want to offer people reading experiences that are different from what they've had and maybe as a way to learn what you don't like, but also as a way to learn what you like, what you want to read more of. And that, for me, that process of discovery is a huge part of the joy of reading. Like when you find a new writer or a new book. I've gone on to read another Rebecca Solnit book. And I will probably read more. And also I was reminded of Sarah Manguso, a writer you introduced me to, Rosianna, who wrote a book called Ongoingness about abandoning her diary after twenty years. And yeah, those authors seemed like kin to me somehow, in that they both write like super carefully observed beautiful sentences that take me on a journey that I did not know I was interested in.
Rosianna: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'm really, really glad you enjoyed it. Another book of hers that I really love is Wanderlust, which was from that same, what was it called? Imagined, no, Mapping Identities class that I did. Very Vassar College name for a course.
John: That is such a Vassar College name for a class.
Rosianna: They really know how to name classes there. They really know how to name classes.
John: Didn't you take a class there called Modernism at Night?
Rosianna: I did, I took Modernism at Night, Mapping Identities. What else did I take? I can't remember, but they were all great.
John: I mean, Modernism at Night seems like a class where the professor thought of the name for the class and then was like, well, I mean, that's a really good name. So we're going to have to figure out some stuff to read.
Rosianna: Honestly, knowing him, I think that is what he did. The last class `of that semester, we gathered in the oldest building on campus in one of like the weird dark old rooms, turned off all the lights and just had a class by candle light, drinking wine.
John: Wow.
Rosianna: And I was like, this is the university experience that I kind of dreamed about it just in that little experience, yeah, little moment. It was a really—
John: Wow.
Rosianna: I mean that year abroad was amazing. I loved it, and it really introduced me to so many different writers that I loved. And just the idea of, yeah, reading different things where I think my UK course was much more traditional. I don't know, more like run of the mill expected text—
John: Right.
Rosianna: —whereas, taking different, weird courses that I picked mostly on the strength of their names. Yeah, was really rewarding.
John: Yeah. That is one of the great pleasures of the American education system. The downside of course, is the crushing debt.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: And the absurd tuition and fees, and just also the absurd process of getting into college, which I know is also absurd and weird in the UK, but oh my God. Like when I hear stories from young people about the worlds they have to navigate to go to college now I'm just like, ugh, I can't—
Rosianna: It's brutal.
John: I can't imagine it.
Rosianna: Yeah. It's yeah, it should be much, much easier and much, much cheaper. And hopefully we'll get to there. I don't know.
John: Yeah. Yeah. But regardless, thanks to everybody for listening and thanks to everybody for being part of Life's Library with us. We hope that you're having a good experience and we're excited to share our next book with you.
Rosianna: Yes, and at the end of this month, we're actually going to be doing a Q&A. John and I are going to be answering questions about the book, about A Field Guide to Getting Lost. We don't have a date set for that at the time of recording this, but keep an eye on the Discord and we'll tweet it out as well, so you can get questions ready for us about the book.
John: Yeah. Rebecca Solnit was unavailable for a Q&A, presumably because she's walking slowly through the desert thinking big thoughts about the blue distance.
Rosianna: And tortoises, maybe.
John: Yes. There's like three or four appearances of tortoises—
Rosianna: Yeah!
John: —It can't have been a coincidence, but I don't know what it meant.
Rosianna: There were quite a few of them. Maybe that should be our next reading, though. Reading for tortoises.
John: Yeah. I'm sure somebody on the Discord is going to do a deep dive on the tortoises of A Field Guide to Getting Lost.
Rosianna: I definitely hope so.
John: Thanks again for listening. And don't forget to be awesome.