"Not to find one’s way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance — nothing more," says the twentieth-century philosopher-essayist Walter Benjamin. “But to lose oneself in a city — as one loses oneself in a forest — that calls for quite a different schooling.” To lose yourself: a voluptuous surrender, lost in your arms, lost to the world, utterly immersed in what is present so that its surroundings fade away. In Benjamin’s terms, to be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery. And one does not get lost but loses oneself, with the implication that it is a conscious choice, a chosen surrender, a psychic state achievable through geography.

We need to stop telling the story about the woman who stayed home, passive and dependent, waiting for her man. She wasn't sitting around waiting. She was busy. She still is.

We treat desire as a problem to be solved, address what desire is for and focus on that something and how to acquire it rather than on the nature and the sensation of desire, though often it is the desire between us and the object of desire that fills the space in between with the blue of longing.