When I started reading "A Field Guide to Getting Lost" by Rebecca Solnit, I did have to read some pages more than once because I found myself getting lost at some parts. From our discussion in class today about what Solnit meant when she said on page 14: "Never to get lost is not to live," I had more time to think about it after class. I went back to page 14 and I re-read that paragraph. On page 15, she also says: "...Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves...Not till we are completely lost, or turned round...do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of nature." I agree with what Solnit is saying here because I think that people learn when they experience things they don't know.

In continuing to read A Field Guide to Getting Lost after class, I focused my attention on figuring out what Solnit's argument is about getting lost. I think that when she says that you can't truly live unless you are lost she is assuming that living life without getting lost is impossible because everyone is lost, at least mentally, at one time or another. In fact, I would make the argument that people are born "lost" because a person is lost (how Solnit defines the word) until a person finds his or her place in the world...which can only come with maturity. With this assumption, I think her book is not telling us to necessarily lose ourselves but telling us HOW to be lost, when we inevitably are, and how to grow from it.

 Reflecting on the first half of A Field Guide to Getting Lost I think that, in opposition to Fun Home, prose is a good form for this novel. Pictures allow the reader to follow the story more intimately, where as with prose, the reader is able to "lose" herself in the text. The mix of stories, facts, and personal anecdotes fit together well, yet are varied enough that I did not know what to expect next as I read. 

Brain, Education, and Inquiry

Bryn Mawr College, Fall 2010

Session 4

Class is itself an experiment in a particular form of education: co-constructive inquiry

Learning by interacting, sharing observations and understandings to create, individually and collectively, new understandings and new questions that motivate new observations