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A few Christmases ago my father gave me a portable GPS. Thrilled but worried by my wintry exploits up snow-covered mountains, he figured that this extra piece of kit, which hangs like a cop's truncheon from my belt, would make me a tad safer. And he was correct. When the mists have come down, the GPS has more than once put me right.
Still, I try to use the thing as little as possible. Better to keep your eyes on the land and the map and the compass: one day, shit might really happen and the thing's batteries will be dead. More than that, though, I like the sense of uncertainty that goes with walking. I like to know where I am - but I like, too, the idea that I might be wrong. I like, in other words, the threatening promise of being lost.
I share this perversion (as friends' wives have called it) with Rebecca
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christopher bray finds a kindred spirit in a writer who relishes the risk of not knowing where she is
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Solnit, the freelance scholar who has devoted her latest book to the joys of being lost. So much so that A Field Guide to Getting Lost (Canongate, £7.99) itself reads like a maze. Solnit draws a web of connections between phenomena so seemingly disparate - cartography, The Divine Comedy, Alfred Hitchcock - that it can be hard to keep track of precisely where you are with her.
Put another way, this is as much a book for dipping into as for reading straight through - something its brevity (200 very small pages) invites. Solnit, who wrote a magnificent cultural history of walking a few years back, is a Thoreau for our age, and her prose - at once mystical and muscular, gnomic and neurotically precise - begs to be read and read again and then read out loud. So go on, I say: get lost! 
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POSTED MAY 2, 2006
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