Consolations of the Forest

I already knew that one must never travel with books related to one’s destination; in Venice, read Lermontov, but at Baikal, Byron.

Solitude is this reconquest of the enjoyment of things.

How can people adore abstract fancies more than the beauty of snow crystals?

I wanted to settle an old score with time. I had discovered that walking provided a way to slow it down. The alchemy of travel thickens seconds: those spent on the road passed less quickly than the others.

Cold, silence and solitude are conditions that tomorrow will become more valuable than gold. On an overpopulated, overheated and noisy planet, a forest cabin is an Eldorado.

De-growth will never be a political option. Only an enlightened despot could impose such a remedy, and what leader would be brave enough to try? How would he convince his people of the virtue of asceticism? And persuade billions of Chinese, Indians and Europeans that it’s better to read Seneca than to gobble cheeseburgers?

And I discover the vertigo of the hermit, the fear of the temporal void. The same pang of distress as on the cliff– only not for what lies below, but for what lies ahead.

The hermit faces this question: can one stand living with oneself?

The captivating spectacle of what’s happening outside the window. How can anyone still have a TV at home?

The anchorites wished to escape the temptations of their century, but some of them sinned through pride by confusing wariness towards their time with contempt for their fellow men. Not one of the anchorites returned to the world after tasting the poisonous fruit of the solitary life.

Societies do not like hermits and do not forgive them for their flight.

Setting up residence in a one- room Siberian hut is a victory in the battle against being buried alive by objects. Life in the woods melts the fat away.

The sole virtue, in these latitudes, is acceptance.

After the frigid air, the sound of a vodka cork popping near a cast-iron stove produces infinitely more pleasure than a palatial stay on the Grand Canal in Venice. That huts might rank with palaces is something the habitués of royal suites will never understand. They did not experience the aching of numbed fingers before they learned about bubble baths. Luxury is not a state but the crossing of a line, a threshold beyond which, suddenly, all suffering ceases.

Our dreams come true but only as soap bubbles fated to burst.

And as long as there are taigas empty of man, I’ll feel good. There is consolation in wildness.

Strange, this need for transcendence. Why believe in a God outside His own creation?

If I were God, I would atomize myself into billions of facets so I could dwell in ice crystals, cedar needles, the sweat of women, the scales of spotted char, and the eyes of the lynx. More exhilarating than floating about in infinite space, watching from afar as the blue planet self-destructs.

funeral oration of Tao Yuanming,9 who died in 427: ‘Dignified in my humble hut, at my ease I drink wine and compose poems, attuned to the course of things, conscious of my destiny, now free, therefore, from all mental reservations …’ I go to bed thinking there’s no point in keeping a journal when others can sum up their lives in thirty-one words!

‘My cabin is far away and me, I know nothing’– a Russian proverb born in the taiga.

The Cabin Credo: Do not react … never let your buttons be pushed … never give up … float slightly tipsy in the snowy silence … admit indifference to the fate of the world … and read Chinese writers.

‘I have nothing to do with this system, not even enough to oppose it.’

The consumer society offers the choice to conform to it, and with a little discipline … Surrounded by abundance, some are free to live like pushovers but others may play the monk and stay lean amid the murmur of books, retreating to inner forests without leaving their apartments. In a society of penury, there is no other alternative. One is condemned to a state of want, and conditioned by it. Willpower is neither here nor there. A famous Soviet joke says a guy goes into a butcher shop and asks: ‘You have any bread?’ Answer: ‘Ah, no, this is the place where we have no meat, so for the place where they have no bread, go next door to the bakery.’

The consumer society is a somewhat vile expression, born of the phantasm of childish grown-ups disappointed at having been too spoiled. They haven’t the strength to reform on their own and dream of being constrained to live in sober moderation.

Some people can dine exclusively by feasting their eyes on a landscape. That is one definition of Eden.

My dinners at Baikal comprise a faint glimmer of grey energy, which is embodied energy. Grey energy skyrockets when the caloric value of the food is less than the energy necessarily expended in its production and transportation. The orange once offered at Christmas was a treasure. Everyone knew it was swollen with grey energy, and they appreciated the cost of its voyage. A catfish pulled from a bend in the Mekong by a Laotian fisherman and grilled on the river bank has zero grey energy. Like my chars, cooked a few yards from the fishing hole. Steak from Argentina, however, from cattle who feed on soya beans on the estancias of the pampas before being shipped across the Atlantic to Europe, is tarred with the brush of infamy. Grey energy is the shadow of karma, the balance due for our sins. One day we will be called upon to pay it.

One day, man enters the woods, and the gods withdraw.

Nothing is as good as solitude. The only thing I need to make me perfectly happy is someone to whom I could explain this.

There is joy in these woods, but not an ounce of humour.

Depending on my mood, my shelter is an egg, a womb, a coffin or a wooden ship. I bid farewell to my friends. Oh, the happiness that wells up as the rumbling of their engine dies away …

This would have been a good spot for Paradise: infallible splendour, no serpents, impossible to live naked, and too many things to do to have any time left over for inventing a god.

In Life of Rancé, this quotation from the Elegies of Tibullus: ‘How sweet it is while lying in bed to hear fierce winds.’ The wind rampages all day long and I read my Tibullus.

In the hammock, I study the shapes of the clouds. Contemplation is what clever people call laziness to justify it in the eyes of the supercilious, who watch to ensure that we all ‘find our place in an active society’.

Rain falls from a sky utterly lacking in imagination.

Walking in the rain, a factory for memories.