Rebecca Solnit Open Door

The excerpt “Open Door,” from A Field Guide To Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit talks about the true meaning of getting lost and how the experience is different for each person. The meaning of getting lost for Solnit is actually a chance for someone to find themselves. Solnit argues that becoming lost is an essential and wondrous tool of one’s self identity and their ability to grow, change and to become informed. Solnit uses sources of philosopher’s, poet’s, scientist’s and more to back up her ideas of getting lost and becoming enlightened at the same time. As I continued to read the story I began to see how the different experiences of getting lost somehow all tied to one central idea. The idea of being lost helps to bring us closer with nature and our surroundings as well as becoming enlightened. Throughout the story a question that was asked by a pre-Socratic philosopher Meno “How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?”(4, Solnit) seemed to really resonate with her. One way of getting lost, is in a person’s own mind. Solnit says “for …show more content…
This typically seems to be a disconnect between an individual and their surroundings. This is not comparable to losing oneself but rather getting lost in your unknown surroundings. Solnit mentions Jaime de Angulo, a Spanish storyteller-anthropologist who believes there are two outcomes to wandering in one’s surroundings, “wandering can lead to death, to hopelessness, to madness, to various forms of despair, or that it may lead to encounters with other powers in the remoter places a wanderer may go” (19, Solnit). The state of mind of a person has to be accepting or surrendering, because nothing can be obtained without going beyond what the person already knows. As Solnit says “You get lost out of a desire to be lost” (20, Solnit) meaning there isn’t a certainty that anyone will actually find