Lost really has two disparate meanings. Losing things is about the familiar falling away, getting lost is about the unfamiliar appearing. There are objects and people that disappear from your sight or knowledge or possession; you lose a bracelet, a friend, the key. You still know where you are. Everything is familiar except that there is one item less, one missing element. Or you get lost, in which case the world has become larger than your knowledge of it. Either way, there is a loss of control. Imagine yourself streaming through time shedding gloves, umbrellas, wrenches, books, friends, homes, names. This is what the view looks like if you take a rear-facing seat on the train. Looking forward you constantly acquire moments of arrival, moments of realization, moments of discovery. The wind blows your hair back and you are greeted by what you have never seen before. The material falls away in onrushing experience. It peels off like skin from a molting snake. Of course to forget the past is to lose the sense of loss that is also memory of an absent richness and a set of clues to navigate the present by; the art is not one of forgetting but of letting go. And when everything else is gone, you can be rich in loss.
Rebecca Solnit, from
A Field Guide to Getting Lost
The dancer slows her frantic pace in pain and desperation
Her aching limbs and downcast face aglow with perspiration
Stiff as a wire her lungs of fire
With just the briefest pause
The flooding through her memory
The echoes of old applause
And she limps across the floor
And closes the bedroom door
The writer stares with glassy eyes
Defies the empty page
His beard is white, his face is lined and streaked with tears of rage
Thirty years ago how the words would flow with passion and precision
But now his mind is dark and dulled by sickness and indecision
And he stares out the kitchen door
Where the sun will rise no more
Some are born to move the world
To live their fantasies
But most of us just dream about the things we'd like to be
Sadder still to watch it die than never to have known it
For you the blind who once could see
The bell tolls for thee