As a jumping-off point, Solnit uses a question that a student once presented to her, a gem from the Greek philosopher Meno: “How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?” In other words, how can you hope to discover anything new when you only know where to look for new things based on your knowledge of things already discovered? Anything truly novel and original will be discovered only by accident. Solnit uses that idea to conclude that being “lost” is actually a doorway to possibility; only by wandering aimlessly do we allow ourselves the possibility of finding things that would have otherwise remained undiscovered. So, with that philosophy in hand, Solnit begins to wander.

Every second essay in the collection shares the same title - “The Blue of Distance” -and the first of these “Blue” pieces is promising enough. She begins by examining the use of the color blue in painting, beginning in the middle ages, to depict the atmospheric haze that indicates distance in landscape painting; things far away are given a bluish tint because that’s the way the world looks to us - the thick atmosphere bends light over distance so that remote objects appear blue. Walk all the way to those distant objects, however - trees, hills, mountains - and you’ll find that they’re the same color as the close-up mountains all around you. Blue, therefore, is the color of distance, and when we see blue things, we are presented with the possibility of travel, a journey to those far-off blue lands, and who knows what we’ll discover in the space between?

Fair enough. But the other “Blue” essays are far less fulfilling. One tells of a wayward Spanish explorer who ends up living for several years among the natives when he loses his way in America. He becomes a different man, a shaman who rambles naked through the wilderness, leaving behind, at least for a while, all that he was before. From there, Solnit digresses into historical accounts of other pioneers who were abducted by natives and introduced into new lives. Then she talks about caterpillars turning into butterflies. It’s a solid analogy but an obvious one.

Another “Blue” piece explains the modernist painter Yves Klein, who, in his quest to purify his paintings, eventually began painting everything the same unbroken shade of blue. Eventually, Klein purified his paintings to the point that he stopped painting anything at all; he sold collectors bits of imaginary space that represented a painting that wasn’t there. Then he threw away the money he had been paid for the commission (well, half of it, anyway) and made the buyer burn the receipt, thereby reducing the transaction to nothingness (minus, of course, the cash that he kept). Solnit’s essay on Klein inevitably evaporates, and the only thing that gets lost is meaning.

The essays in between the “Blue” are mostly autobiographical strolls about Solnit’s family history, her lost loves, the places she’s lived and all the other stuff you usually get in personal essays. There are some interesting stories, like the one about her mysterious grandmother who had been committed to an asylum or the one about a wayward friend who died of a drug overdose. There are also some uninteresting stories, like the one about her relationship with a man who lived in the desert and liked to play with rattlesnakes. There are also extended meditations on country and punk music, both which are tedious, and on Hitchcock’s Vertigo, which is not exactly scintillating, either.