Anse, the shy, calculating head of the Bundren family in “As I Lay Dying,” was no friend of roads. He believed the road built alongside his property had turned his sons into dreamers. A man is “up-and-down ways,” but a road is longways. His son Darl, who had “got his eyes full of the land all the time,” begins to dream of distant things. He finishes the book in the madhouse.

Faulkner, often willfully complex, exaggerates the farmer’s understanding. But the effect of landscape on human imagination is fact. In “A Field Guide to Getting Lost” (Viking, 224 pages, $21.95), Rebecca Solnit, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, makes a book-length meditation out of the difference between here and there. She wonders “if you can look across the distance without wanting to close it up, if you can own your longing.”

It’s hard not to imagine Caspar David Friedrich’s “Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog,” a painting that has been iconic to students of modernism, in which a lone figure, seen from behind, bravely surveys a vista of crags and mist. He seems to be inspired by his own longing – of the idea of himself as as a figure important only in relation to the mountains.

Ms. Solnit comes to similar conclusion, perhaps surprisingly, about country music.

“The names or just the facts of bridges, mountains, valleys, towns, states, rivers (lots of rivers), highways were recalled in reveries,” she writes, “and psychic states themselves became places, “Lost Highway” and “Lonely Street.” She’s thinking of Bobbie Gentry’s Tallahatchie Bridge, and Johnny Cash’s recording of “Long Black Veil,” in which “the grave, the town hall light, the hills, and the gallows are all more vivid than the protagonists.”

There is a strong and illuminating connection between the poetic value of place-names and the “moving” power of distant vistas. After all, we peg our memories to places, as nostalgia for old neighborhoods attests. “Every love has its landscape,” Ms. Solnit writes. We speak about a remembered place as if it only exists when we are present; therefore we are eager to return to it, to make it come alive. The place seems to summon us; it assumes, in Ms. Solnit’s words, “all the atmospheric effect and association of a powerful emotion.”

The atmosphere of Ms. Solnit’s own distant memories is striking. Like the misty paintings of Friedrich – which function as an unmentioned backdrop to this book – Ms. Solnit’s sense of the youthful sublime is ruinous. She believes the early 1980s were “a sort of golden age of ruins,” that “ruins were the symbolic home of much of the art of the time, some photography and painting, much music, the science fiction movies of the time, even the backdrops for rock videos and fashion photographs, for clothes that looked ancient, worn, combat and cobweb stuff.”

If this last bit reminds us of today, it is because the punk aesthetic adumbrated by Ms. Solnit in this chapter has become a perpetual flavor of American youth culture. If country music, for Ms. Solnit, owns its own longing through devotion to “aftermath, to the hard work it takes to keep going, punk is something more strategic, a fatalistic exit embraced by teenagers who, like Keats, “have been half in love with easeful death.”

The punk, she amply realizes, may also die as a result of his or her lostness. She memorializes the artistic, apocalyptic no man’s land of Chelsea Piers prior to its renovation as a sports complex. Though the renovation was certainly good public use, Ms. Solnit’s contrasting vision is based on a strong civic sense. “In the 1980s,” she writes, “we imagined apocalypse because it was easier than the strange complicated futures that money, power, and technology would impose, intricate futures hard to exit.” This may sound retrograde, but Ms. Solnit’s intention is to appreciate the ideal unpredictability and wildness of life in New York. A little urban decay makes the present city seem distant, something you can dream about.

Throughout this book, she makes a case for self-estrangement, for getting lost. “Never to get lost is not to live,” she writes, noting provocatively that explorers are people who are always lost. She can be romantic on this point, describing “a voluptuous surrender,” in which one is “utterly immersed in what is present.” Ms. Solnit’s sense of adventure is summarized in a line from Plato’s dialogue Meno. “How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?” she quotes Meno as asking. Her simple answer is that you have to happen onto it.