A Field Guide to Getting Lost

Socrates says you can know the unknown because you remember it. You already know what seems unknown; you have been here before, but only when you were someone else. This only shifts the location of the unknown from unknown other to unknown self. Meno says, Mystery. Socrates says, On the contrary, Mystery. That much is certain. It can be a kind of compass.

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 are greeted by what you have never seen before. The material falls away in onrushing experience. It peels off like skin from a molting snake

It’s not about being lost but about trying to lose yourself.

Her getting lost was solitary, like Thoreau’s.

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, he asserts, get lost in it, and find your soul.

and perhaps by her sense that all this was home, or somebody’s home

Times when some architectural detail or vista that has escaped me these many years says to me that I never did know where I was, even when I was home.

I was trained by an outdoorsman who insisted you should always carry rain gear, water, and other supplies on the least excursion, that you should be prepared to be out for any amount of

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 calculate on the unforeseen is perhaps exactly the paradoxical operation that life most requires of us.