Children look only at the foreground, she notes in one of the sections entitled 'The Blue of Distance', a theme that runs through the book in alternate chapters.
Hers is a cumulative knowledge, culled from years of stories heard and remembered. She writes as if she has no fixed abode, narrating travels through deserts and along remote coastlines, allowing her thoughts to free-associate in the manner of WG Sebald or Annie Dillard, inspired by nature, memory and folk mythology. It sounds a little neo-hippy but Solnit, a cultural historian and activist based in San Francisco, is closer to a medieval wandering sage. This book is more intensely personal and meditative than Hope in the Dark here, she is simply sharing her reflections on what it means to live creatively, savouring the physical world. She invokes Keats's theory of Negative Capability, the quality of embracing uncertainty without fearing it, recognising that some questions are more valuable than their answers.
Of the other sense of loss, absence or ending, she writes with the same passion loss is bound up with beginnings. It is a rare writer who can write so excitingly with both heart and head * Scotsman * Like Simon Schama, Solnit is a cultural historian in the desert-mystic mode, trailing ideas like swarms of butterflies * Harper's Magazine * The book itself is a kind of wandering, and it is hard to say where we get to, but there are good things along the way.Her version of lost is embarking on a journey with no fixed destination, wandering through a city or landscape open to joyful discovery of its hidden wonders. As with Solnit's previous books, there is an emotional, even a polemical dimension to these ideas. Possessed of eloquence and erudition in equal measure, her books have a wonderful capacity to lead the reader on unexpected and intriguing journeys. Who knows what you'll find * Guardian * Rebecca Solnit is unquestionably one of the finest non-fiction writers of her generation.
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