‘a sense of limpidness in the suddenly tangible gravity of a small body on this middle-sized planet’
‘how will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?’
‘live always at the ‘edge of mystery’ – the boundary of the unknown’ (J Robert Oppenheimer) – idea that scientists transform the unknown into the known, artists ‘get you out in that dark sea’
Collaborating with chance
Essential mysteries in the world
Terra incognita on old maps
‘to be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery’
The use of storytelling
‘stories that make the familiar strange again’
‘I was never lost in the woods in my whole life though once I was confused for three days’
Lost is a state of mind
Wintu: east and west instead of left and right (directional consciousness)
Language differentiation is tied to ecological differentiation
Losing things: the familiarity falling away/getting lost: the unfamiliar appearing – ‘the world has become larger than your knowledge of it’
Seeing a piece of litter while out walking, thinking it to be a flower – ‘before it is fully revealed, it looks beautiful’
(Jewish tradition) some questions are more important than their answers
Blue as the colour of scattered light – of distance, of depth, ‘of where you are not’
‘I wonder sometimes whether with a slight adjustment of perspective desire could be cherished as a sensation on its own terms, since it is as inherent to the human condition as blue is to distance?’ (30)
‘Most of [my childhood memories] have grown fainter with time, and whenever I write one down, I give it away: it ceases to have the shadowy life of a memory and becomes fixed in letters; it ceases to be mine; it loses the mobile unreliability of the live’ – is there any other way we can physically store/manifest memories without writing them out explicitly? Rituals/binding memories up in objects? (38)
Children have little to no concept of distance, always concerned with what is right in front of them in the here and now – ‘Their mental landscape is like that of medieval paintings: a foreground of vivid things and then a wall. 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.’ (39)
“I wonder now what I was looking for when I seized upon stories and images to fill the void of her unknowability.” – this idea that not knowing is often better, this desire that Solnit spoke previously about is a feeling in itself to be cherished and held rather than to be resolved
‘Beauty is often spoken of as though it only stirs lust or admiration, but the most beautiful people are so in a way that makes them look likedestiny or fate or meaning, the heroes of a remarkable story. […] beauty can be seen like a door to meaning as well as to pleasure.’
Words in music are ‘always sounds first, spoken to the body before the mind’
‘In the 1980s we imagined apocalypse because it was easier than the strange, complicated futures that money, power, and technology would impose, intricate futures hard to exit. In the same way, teenagers imagine dying young because death is more imaginable than the person that all the decisions and burdens of adulthood may make of you.’ (106)
‘someone recalling a tragedy that unfolded long ago, generally about someone else, so that a sort of haze of remoteness lay over the once wrenching events’ (116)
‘Perhaps it’s that you can’t go back in time, but you can return to the scenes of love, of a crime, of happiness, and of a fatal decision; the places are what remain, are what you can possess, are what is immortal. They become the tangible landscape of memory, the places that made you, and in some way you too become them. They are what you can possess and what in the end possesses you.’ (117)
‘The places in which any significant event occurred become embedded with some of that emotion, and so to recover the memory of the place is to recover the emotion, and sometimes to revisit the place uncovers the emotion. Every love has its landscape. Thus place, which is always spoken of as though it only counts when you’re present, possesses you in its absence, takes on another life as a sense of place, a summoning in the imagination with all the atmospheric effect and association of a powerful emotion. The places inside matter as much as the ones outside.’ (118)
‘It wasn’t particular things but the space between them, that abundance of absence, that is the desert’s invitation. There the geology that underlies lusher landscapes is exposed to the eye, and this gives it a skeletal elegance, just as its harsh conditions […] keep you in mind of your mortality. […] The light belies the bony solidity of the land, playing over it like an emotion on a face’ (129)
‘Alive with the primal forces of rock, weather, wind, light, and time in which biology is only an uninvited guest fending for itself, gilded, dwarfed, and threatened by its hosts.’ (129-130)
‘clouds assembling in vast arrays that demonstrated how far the sky went and how high’ (137)
‘It was as though the whole world consisted of the tiny close-up realm of these creatures and the vast distances of heaven, as though my own scale had been eliminated along with the middle ground, and this too is one of the austere luxuries of the desert.’ (138)
Considering true representation – even a 1:1 map cannot detail ‘the layers of being of a place, its many versions’, the constant changes etc (162)
Also parables where a poet describes an emperor’s palace so completely he brands him a thief (Borges), or a painter who paints a landscape so completely it can be escaped into (162-163)
‘These parables say that representation is always partial, else it would not be representation, but some kind of haunting double. But the terra incognita spaces on maps say knowledge also is an island surrounded by oceans of the unknown. They signify that the cartographers knew that they did not know, and an awareness of ignorance is not just ignorance; it’s awareness of knowledge’s limits.’ (163)
‘to destroy false notions, without even going any further, is one of the ways to advance knowledge’ (Jean Baptiste Bourguignon d’Anville) (163)
‘it surprises me how much we prefer ugly scenarios to the pure unknown’ (165)
Known knowns, known unknowns, unknown knowns and unknown unknowns (168)
‘science is how capitalism knows the world’ (???) (169)
‘Throughout his work, Klein sought to transcend or annihilate representation itself, which is always about what is absent, for an art of immediacy and of presences, even if it was the presence of the immaterial, the void.’ (169)
‘Movies are made out of darkness as well as light; it is the surpassingly brief intervals of darkness between each luminous still image that makes it possible to assemble the many images into one moving picture. Without that darkness, there would be only a blur. Which is to say that a full-length movie consists of half an hour or an hour of pure darkness that goes unseen. If you could add up all the darkness, you would find the audience in a theatre gazing together at a deep imaginative night. It is the terra incognita of film, the dark continent on every map. In a similar way, a runner’s every step is a leap, so that for a moment he or she is entirely off the ground. For those brief instants, shadows no longer spil out from their feet, like leaks, but hover below them like doubles, as they do with birds, whose shadows crawl below them, caressing the surface of the earth, growing and shrinking as their makers move nearer or farther from that surface. For my friends who run long distances, these tiny fragments of levitation add up to something considerable; by their own power they hover above the earth for many minutes, perhaps some significant portion of an hour or perhaps more for the hundred-mile races. We fly; we dream in darkness; we devour heaven in bites too small to be measured.’ (175/176) (and all this in relation to Klein who died young, but with the implication that his life was perhaps condensed in this way, a movie without the dark spaces??)
‘think of how little has been salvaged from the compost of time’
‘We [think] we should be able to find our way back again by the objects we dropped, like Hansel and Gretel in the forest, the objects reeling us back in time, undoing each loss, a road back from lost eyeglasses to lost toys and baby teeth. Instead, most of the objects form secret constellations of our irrecoverable past, returning only in dreams where nothing but the dreamer is lost. They mus still exist somewhere: pocket knives and plastic horses don’t exactly compost, but who knows where they go in the great drifts of objects sifting through our world?’ (186)
‘material objects witness everything and say nothing’ (187)
Anna Harris 