Rebecca Solnit

Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go.

student came in bearing a quote from what she said was the pre-Socratic philosopher Meno. It read, “How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?”

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Her getting lost was solitary, like Thoreau’s.

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