Response to Lost question - Alicia Freitag

Being lost is scary. It can be thought of as having sad or ominous tones, like losing grandma’s ring, or Fluffy the cat being lost in the woods. Sometimes the word is even associated with pain, for instance, when used as a synonym for a person’s death. You can lose objects, time, tradition, culture, places, past, and even personal identity in modern society. You cannot find what is lost. So why, when the idea of being lost is so frightening, would anyone want to get lost?
Rebecca Solnit wants us to get lost because it is a useful kind of hell. Just like Virgil, Persephone, and Hercules, hell is not a torment but a journey. Solnit herself reflects on an interpretation of hell where “Justice…stood at the gates of Hades deciding who would go in, and to go in was to be chosen for refinement through suffering, adventure, and transformation, a punishing route to the reward that is the transformed self.”(Solnit 21) In Solnit’s world, hell is a means for finding the way to heaven. I think that this describes perfectly the idea of hardships helping people find happiness. As in a science fiction book I read in high school, A Brave New World, taught me the bad is needed to define a perception of the good.
A tool of getting lost is a loss of balance. When balanced, people do not notice their problems and do not endeavor to work out a solution. Balance can be lost on an uneven terrain or with dizzy spells but with both there are other factors that effect whether you regain your footing or fall to the ground. Falling on your butt on uneven terrain only happens when you are not watching your steps; and a person can cause dizzy spells by spinning, getting dehydrated, or by being sick. Without falling we don’t learn to pick ourselves up again. Getting lost is like falling because you learn to find a way of changing the unfamiliar into familiar by getting home or making a new one in the new foreign unfamiliar. Getting lost automatically makes uneven footing or dizziness with those foreign environments which thereby disrupts any sense of safety, rational or calm emotions, and bounds of normality. Problems arise in times of helter-skelter, so getting lost catalyzes the resolving of issues, especially hidden ones.
Reading Solnit is a journey in it own right, where philosophy is handed down in story form. In her text we wandered down a road we did not know finding something new to see, feel and ponder about the many forms of getting lost. In that sense we were journeying into getting lost with Solnit to actualize some of the teachings of beinglost. Each of her chapters wound into odd revelations that did not become coherent until their closing. Solnit is teaching the reader, in the same ancient manner of fairy tales or Greek myths, outlining rules and morals. Her message is about the enjoyment of the process, not its end goal. For instance, the actual journey of a road trip is pulled into focus instead of its end, so you can actually notice the sunset or fields that are presently around you. In reading her book, you can become aware of the process involved in searching out or getting to a place. For when people lose sight of their present and only look to the future, they miss the dangerous terrain or wondrous beauty in front of them.
Solnit wants us to relish the feel of sorrow and glee so we may appreciate the good by knowing the bad. In this way, we are diving into what we could not even conceive and facing the expanse beyond our awareness. We are learning about what we do not know. Solnit wants us out in the black of space, mapping its depths. She wants us expanding our minds with science and philosophy, defining the unknown. Getting lost is the human madness to explore dark depths, new heights, vast distances, the hidden underfoot and microscopic bits. It is only that open-mindedness that allows for the inevitably unplanned intruding in the everyday.
When we get lost it is the unfamiliar that captivates us, because it is new, different, and even frightening. When Solnit explains the concept of “lost” she references many types: losing a memory by getting a childhood doll, getting lost in the woods, and getting lost in your own mind. Being lost is a part of life’s journey into the unknown. You instinctively become more aware when the path becomes strange and new. This divergence from the planned removes the safety of knowledge and experience this then creates the danger of the unknown. The loss of safety nets makes high flying more difficult, dangerous, but also more memorable. Lessons learned in such adverse conditions would create significant experience or wisdom.
Getting lost is about searching out the unknown. That frightening state does not deter us away from our greater fear of not knowing. “Go to hell, but keep moving once you get there, come out the other side.”(21 Solnit) When we want to know what is out there in the unknown, we need to move through its lands and come back to report our journey, at the very least to remember it for ourselves.