Lostness lost

I like Rebecca Solnit, and I like the title of her new book, A Field Guide to Getting Lost. Lostness as a condition worth pursuing--that's an compelling idea. Unfortunately, the book itself seems to have lost its way, paying brief visits to one profound idea after another but failing to connect the dots coherently, and while Solnit produces glittering paragraphs, the syntax sometimes wanders.

A passage in the essay "Two Arrowheads" crystalizes Solnit's artistic vision:

What is the message that wild animals bring, the message that seems to say everything and nothing? What is this message that is wordless, that is nothing more or less than the animals themselves—that the world is wild, that life is unpredictable in its goodness and its danger, that the world is larger than your imagination? I remember a day when he was out working and I was alone in his house writing. I heard a raven fly by in air so still that each slow stroke of its wings was distinctly audible. I wondered then and wonder now how I could give all this up for what cities and people have to offer, for it ought to be less terrible to be lonely than to have stepped out of this sense of a symbolic order that the world of animals and celestial light offers, but writing is lonely enough, a confession to which there will be no immediate or commensurate answer, an opening statement in a conversation that falls silent or takes place long afterward without the author. But the best writing appears like those animals, sudden, self-possessed, telling everything and nothing, words approaching wordlessness. Maybe writing is its own desert, its own wilderness.

This passage displays Solnit's prose style at its best and worst: the profound idea succinctly expressed ("words approaching wordlessness") rubbing shoulders with the irrelevant personal detail ("he was out working and I was alone in his house writing": why do we care whose house it is? Is his home-ownership important to the anecdote?), the delicious rhythm and sound repetition ("air so still that each slow stroke of its wings was distinctly audible") bumping into clunky phrases abounding with weak linking verbs ("I wondered then and wonder now how I could give all this up for what cities and people have to offer, for it ought to be less terrible to be lonely than to have stepped out of this sense of a symbolic order that the world of animals and celestial light offers"). How does one step out of a sense?

Maybe I'm just being picky. Solnit's writing does provoke a great deal of thought about the value of lostness, and she often constructs lovely sentences and even whole paragraphs worth a second look. But the book as a whole fails to hold together, circling so loosely around the idea of lostness that lostness itself gets lost.

But maybe that's the point.