For Solnit, getting lost can be a positive act of abandonment; a transformative opening of one's life and possibilities to the unknown, rather than just a defeat or a problem. It is clear that she is fascinated by how and why people get lost and, more importantly, what happens when they are found, find themselves or decide to stay lost.

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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. Of the other sense of loss, absence or ending, she writes with the same passion; loss is bound up with beginnings.

 

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. She writes as if she has no fixed home, talking of travels through deserts and along remote coastlines, allowing her thoughts to come freely without any restrictions, like WG Sebald who is also inspired by nature, memory and folk mythology. Hers is a growing knowledge, made from years of stories heard and remembered. Children look only at the foreground, she notes in one of the sections, 'The Blue of Distance', a theme that runs through the book. 'The blue of distance comes with time, with the discovery of melancholy, of loss, the texture of longing, of the complexity of the terrain we traverse, and with the years of travel.'