“For now she need not think about anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of—to think; well, not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others.
Virgina Woolf, in To the Lighthouse, cited by Rebecca Solnit in A Field Guide to Getting Lost
Field Guide promises to be a remarkable book, and it has pointed me toward The Lost Art of Finding Our Way by Edward Huth