Neil Hopcroft

[Audiobook]

A field guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit, read by Rebecca herself. She has a lovely voice, calm, melancholy, soporific, and absolutely dreadful to listen to while driving. I have listened again because her words got lost in the sound of the diesel engine first time around, it will get another listen too, so much is there to be absorbed.

The book explores some of the many ways of getting lost. The personal, where you don’t know where you are. The objective, where you don’t know where something is. The psychological, where you don’t know what you are thinking. The social, where you don’t know where your people are.

This is really a loose collection of essays rather than a coherent book, they are threaded through with a theme of loss, with many memories and observations about her life growing up. She shares some deeply personal moments and the feelings of loss that went with those moments, as well as more general observations about how other people (indeed peoples) deal with disappearances.

There are many topics for reflection for me here, different ways of understanding things that have happened around me, a new lens through which to view my journey through life.

I no longer have time for being lost – some of the happiest moments have been those of being lost and unexpectedly arriving back to the familiar, a common experience during my time in Tokyo, a period during which I found myself lost, in so many ways.

As a book it says nothing, but it says everything. Getting lost in getting lost, this is the perfect companion.