The art of staying lost and staying under the duvet

In the eighth chapter of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, on “inadvertent actions”, Freud recalls two occasions on which, visiting a certain building, he climbed a floor too high; the verb he uses is versteigen: “to become lost while mountaineering”. On both occasions, he deduces, a professional daydream was to blame: the first time, a feeling that he was travelling ever onwards and upwards; the second, a fear that he would be accused of “going too far”. The anecdote functions as an allegory of psychoanalysis itself: like Homer, Augustine and Dante before him, Freud knows that we get lost in order to discover ourselves, but also that sometimes we go looking in order to lose our way. Both Rebecca Solnit and Jenny Diski ask what it might mean to get lost in a world where those insights have hardened into cultural cliché. Can we still get lost without being forced to find ourselves too soon? Or stay at home and still stray far enough to remain interesting?

Solnit’s nine linked essays take up themes from at least two of her previous books. In Wanderlust: A history of walking (2001), she showed that the speed of thought is about three miles per hour. The Romantic walker composes self and text as he goes: Rousseau, Wordsworth and De Quincey invent themselves at leisure on the open road. The walking pace of Baudelaire, Poe and Benjamin, on the other hand, is frenetic and distracted, closer in its stop-start rhythms to the photographic experiments of Eadweard Muybridge, who was the subject of Solnit’s Motion Studies (2003).
That book also examined the photographer’s relationship to American landscape, his recording of the slow time of geology and the accelerated modernity that carved railroads through the West. As a cultural historian, Solnit is informed and elegant on the relationship between nature and technology. In A Field Guide to Getting Lost, she essays something more nebulous and ambitious: an inventory of the senses in which “lost” still has some meaning.

“Some things”, she writes, “we have only as long as they remain lost, some things are not lost only so long as they are distant.” Solnit’s own family history – in an old photograph, her grandmother, from Bialystock in Poland, is pictured at Ellis Island – is linked to the fate of the first conquistadors and, in turn, to the many settlers captured, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, by Native Americans, and thought “lost” by their white families, even as the captives themselves grew accustomed to a new culture. Solnit is a connoisseur of ruins: “with ruins a city springs free of its plans into something as intricate as life, something that can be explored but perhaps not mapped”. And in the story of a friend who died of a heroin overdose, she reflects on her own urge to lose herself, to become inhuman, “reptilian”. These reflections are separated by four essays, each entitled “The Blue of Distance”. Here, Solnit looks into the hazy depths of her subject. In the art of Yves Klein (his blue paintings and his 1960 photograph, “A Leap into the Void”) and the doleful “blue” of country music (“a far away deep inside”), she finds that “the colour of that distance is the colour of an emotion, the colour of solitude and desire, the colour of there seen from here, the colour of where you are not”.

The blue of distance, Solnit notes, “comes with time, with the discovery of melancholy, of loss, the texture of longing”. Jenny Diski spent a good deal of her youth on the move: being expelled from schools, hospitalized with depression, escaping her dramatically unhappy family. Now, in her fifties, she has, she insists, no truck with travel; she would like to spend her days in a nest made of books and bedclothes. But she keeps being displaced, finding herself faced with the exhausting task of making sense of things, talking to people and (worst of all) joining in. In New Zealand, she goes in search of a place with the magical name Doubtful Sound. En route, a dismal bus station turns out to be owned by Evangelical Christians, and bungee-jumping seems to have become a sort of religion. Once at her destination, she embarks on a boat trip to hear what the captain describes as “the sound of silence”, but “unfortunately, there was the sound of listening”. Back in England, retreating to a farm in the Quantock Hills, she relishes the thought of weeks of solitude, then finds that the farmer has been worrying that she might be dead, such is her lassitude. Nobody seems to want to leave her alone: which is odd, as she is hilariously grumpy.

Or rather, she affects a mordant persona on the page, but you have the impression she must be charming in person, or she would still be getting expelled. She spends a lot of time turning things down: “I am not a grateful person”. More than anything, she wants not to have to bother with the very contemporary business of getting lost in order to find out who she is. Faced with all this opportunity to become the fullest version of herself she could be, Diski just shrugs: “I simply walk away from the complete person I could have been and live thrillingly with the vertiginous knowledge of all the opportunities I have turned down to make me the curtailed person I am”. For better or worse, her body seems to agree with this urge towards refusal. As a child she “yearned for a condition”; in middle age, this “guilt-ridden hypochondriac” finds that she has suffered for most of her life from a debilitating disorder of the metatarsal. Staying still will one day be her natural condition, not a necessary whim.
On Trying To Keep Still is also a book about writing and thinking, and whether they have anything to do with each other at all; “more and more I am convinced that there is nothing in my head”, Diski writes. She longs “to think, meaning not be connected to anyone”. She is honest and funny on the everyday ruthlessness of the average writer, whose monstrous, adolescent need for solitude is such that Diski cannot even bear to know, when she sits down at her desk, that she has an appointment in three days’ time.
In his essay on solitude, Montaigne wrote: “we should reserve a store-house for our selves . . . . altogether ours, and wholly free, wherein we may hoard up and establish our true liberty”. The literary form of such freedom is the essay, a vagrant genre that strikes out to map a certain restricted territory, and finds itself pleasurably diverted, suddenly at large in a wider world or turning inward to reflect the author’s own infolding mind. The essayist is either an explorer like Solnit, or a sluggard like Diski who would rather invent her adventures from under the duvet. Where one embraces the idea of being totally lost as the only way to discover what it was she wanted to say, the other would prefer, Bartleby-like, to say nothing at all, but rather (as Diski puts it) to “hold still and silent until it’s done”. In the end, maybe, they amount to the same thing.




The art of getting lost - and staying under the duvet - TLS Highlights - Times Online