21 MARCH
Today is the first day of spring. Blue sky above and I’m heading into the woods. I climb up along a frozen river running down to the lake, it’s about a third of a mile north of my cabin.
Nature’s solitude meets mine. And our two solitudes confirm their existence. Labouring through the powdered snow, I recall Michel Tournier’s meditation on the joy of having a companion at one’s side – to convince oneself that the world does exist. I’m the only person looking at these ash trees with their vertically striped bark. The shrubs are hung with clumps of snow like Christmas ornaments, and the tortured silhouettes of larches make the valley seem like an etching; in Chinese drawings it always looks as though the rivers and mountains were suffering. The human gaze is a baptism, but at present, no one is helping mine to give life to these forms. I have only my field of vision to make the world appear. If there were two of us, we’d conjure up more things.
I make progress, I’m past the grove, it’s now out of sight. Does it still exist? If I had someone with me, I’d ask my companion to make sure the world doesn’t disappear behind me. Schopenhauer’s affirmation that the world exists only as the representation of the subject is an amusing view of the mind, but it’s claptrap. This forest – don’t I feel it radiating with all its strength behind my back?
When the valley grows tighter, at about 2,600 feet, I reach the summit of the sharp ridge. Ye gods of the slopes! What a struggle to climb 650 feet through this morass of dwarf pines buried in snow! A bright line snakes through the greenish-bronze mass of the taiga: it’s the ash trees with their blond branches, marking out the torrent’s course with a stream of honey.
I hike down again in two hours through long white alleys, empty esplanades and silent avenues. The forest in winter is a dead city. In the cabin, I plunge back into Casanova. After his visit to an important pilgrimage site, the Abbey of Einsiedeln in Switzerland: ‘I felt that to be happy, I needed nothing more than a library.’ A propos of a young Italian woman: ‘I felt mortified at having to leave her without having paid to her charms the principal homage they deserved.’ During Casanova’s travels he stays in Rome, Paris, Munich, Geneva, Venice and Naples. He speaks French, English, Italian and Latin. He meets Voltaire, Hume and Goldoni. He quotes Copernicus, Ariosto and Horace. His lovers are named Donna Lucrezia, Hedwige or Henriette. Two centuries later, technocrats announce that we must urgently ‘build Europe’.
At eight o’clock, I set my table. Tonight: soup, some pasta, Tabasco sauce, tea, eight or nine ounces of vodka and a Partagás Cuban in a tube. The Tabasco allows you to swallow anything at all with the impression that you’re actually eating something. Before going to sleep, I light a wax taper in front of the picture of my darling and smoke while watching the flame flicker over her face. Why do separated lovers complain? For consolation, they need only believe in the incarnation of being in the icon. I blow out the oil lamps and go to bed.
Today I have not harmed any living creatures on this planet. Do no harm. It’s strange that the desert anchorites never offer this beautiful concern among the explanations for their retreat. St Pachomius (the founder of Christian cenobitic monasticism), St Anthony, the Abbé de Rancé – these men speak of their hatred for their centuries, their battles with demons, their inner torment, their thirst for purity, their impatience to enter the Heavenly Realm – but never of the idea of living without harming anyone. No harm done. After a day in the cabin of North Cedar Cape, that’s what a man can tell himself when he looks in the mirror.
22 MARCH
A stormy night. The Russians call the wind roaring down the western mountainsides of Baikal the sarma.8 The clanking of the tools hanging underneath the eaves kept me awake for hours. How can the birds stay in their nests? Will they still be here, alive, tomorrow?
The wind has blasted the snow from the lake surface and given the ice back to me. I skate for two hours beneath a chilly sun listening to Maria Callas.
This evening, since I’ve nothing much to do after having brought in enough wood for five days, I jot down the reasons for my retreat.
REASONS WHY I’M LIVING ALONE IN A CABIN
I talked too much
I wanted silence
Too behind with my mail and too many people to see
I was jealous of Crusoe
It’s better heated than my place in Paris
Tired of running errands
So I can scream and live naked
Because I hate the telephone and traffic noise
23 MARCH
I snowshoe along the lakeshore and through the woods all day long. This idea that landscapes have a memory. An agricultural plain remembers the ringing of the Angelus bell. A meadow full of poppies remembers the puppy loves of childhood. But here? The forests have no memories. They are without transformation, without history, they say nothing, and no echo of human actions lingers beneath their foliage. The taiga spreads over the land for itself alone. It covers slopes, storms up to peaks without owing anyone anything. Man finds nature’s indifference towards him hard to bear. The sight of a virgin forest gives him dreams of germination and production. Where man’s gaze falls upon the taiga, his axe soon falls in turn. Ah, the anguish of industrious creatures who suddenly realize that the wilderness does very well without them … Who loves nature for its intrinsic value and not for its gifts? In The Roots of Heaven, Romain Gary presents a concentration camp prisoner who holds up better than his companions: lying in his bunk at night, he closes his eyes and pictures herds of wild elephants. Knowing that out there on the savannahs these mighty beasts range free is enough to put steel in his soul. Thinking about the pachyderms gives him strength. And as long as there are taigas empty of man, I’ll feel good. There is consolation in wildness.
I climb to the very top of the rise and build a big fire up there, in the shelter of a granite boulder. Cooking some soup gives me an excuse to sit quietly looking at the cadaverous face of the lake, with its blue and purple blotches, its marbling, its patches and lichens.
24 MARCH
I don’t dare get up this morning. My will is roaming freely in the field of blank days. The danger: remaining paralysed until nightfall, staring at the whiteness thinking: God, how free I am!
It’s snowing again. There’s no one. Not even a vehicle in the distance. The only thing passing here is time. The happiness in my life at seeing the titmice appear … Never again will I make fun of those old ladies who cherish a canary at the centre of their lives or coo over their poodles with baby-talk on the posh pavements of Auteuil. Or those old men in the Tuileries carefully feeding pigeons with the birdseed they clutch in little paper bags. Hanging out with animals makes one young.
Lady Chatterley. In chapter 7, Clifford, no question, is a suffocating presence, he disgusts poor little Constance: ‘… he talked, always talked; infinite small analysis of people and motives, and results, characters and personalities, till now she had had enough. For years she had loved it, until she had enough, and then suddenly it was too much. She was thankful to be alone.’ I close the book, go outside, dig the axe out of the snow and for two hours, whack away like a madman at the chopping-block, galvanized by Lady Constance. There’s more truth in the blows of my axe and the cackling of the jays than in droning psychological explication. ‘What must first be proved is worth little’ (Nietzsche in the Twilight of the Idols). Letting life express itself through blood, snow, the cutting edge of the axe and the gleam of sunshine on a chattering rook.
Today, out in the snow, I retrieve my bormash trap, delicately breaking the ice to avoid disturbing the boughs. I spread out a blanket, lift up the branches, and shake them over a bucket. Thousands of organism
s quiver in the clear water. I pour them into a bottle – and I have my bait. In a few days, I’ll go fishing.
You have to have a warped mind to think Lady Chatterley’s Lover is an erotic novel. The book is a requiem for wounded nature. The England of peaceful woods and pastures, of leafy glades full of memories, is dying before the heroine’s eyes. Mining is ravaging British soil. The pits are gutting the land, the smokestacks rise into smudged and gritty skies. The air stinks, soot stains the brick buildings, even men’s faces are growing hard. The country is prostituting itself to industry and a new race of businessmen-technicians expounds abstract socio-political themes and speculates about technology. It’s the death agony of the world. ‘The industrial England blots out the agricultural England.’ Constance feels the sap rise in her flesh; she understands that progress de-substantializes the world. Lawrence puts prophetic words into the young woman’s mouth as she protests against the uglification of the countryside, the debasement of the human spirit, the tragedy of a people losing its vitality (‘its manhood’, she says) in the drumbeat of mechanization. Primitive and pagan love blossoms within Lady Chatterley at the same time as she witnesses the shipwreck of the modern soul, sucked into a sinister energy: a Promethean ‘madness’ weakens humanity in the din of the machine. In his Confession, Gorki stakes out the opposing position: as a revolutionary he rejoices in Russia’s immense dedication to progress, and he predicts that the monstrous energy concentrated in industrial centres will spread throughout the world in a magnetic cloud. This psycho-physiological force will persuade all the peoples of the Earth to roll up their sleeves to make every tomorrow sing. Lawrence was anxious about the titanic nervous tension roiling the world. Gorki hailed it with all his heart. Lawrence knew that the sweet peacefulness of the countryside is one face of its beauty. Gorki believed only in the splendour of skies crackling from the metallurgy of iron and steel. And Constance, sweating with desire, suffering the Passion of the Earth, cries out beneath the sheltering boughs of the forest like a tragic actress – whose lament has already been drowned out by the clatter of machines: ‘Ah God, what has man done to man?’
This evening, I contemplate the lake, sitting on my wooden bench beneath the canopy of cedars. This above all: a lovely landscape before one’s eyes. Then everything can fall into place, life may begin. Lady Chatterley is right. And I’d be delighted to welcome her here for a few days, I tell myself, before going off to bed.
25 MARCH
Up with the sun. Faced with such glory, I go back to bed for a bit. This morning the weather allows me to go outside for the first time in days. I climb up to the waterfall by a different route, along the right bank of the torrent. The forest awaits, clotted with snow: my real test. Two hours to get through a quarter-mile of uneven terrain. Woodpeckers hammer at the dead trees. Then I have an eighth of a mile of good hard footing. After that, the ordeal of crossing a deep, narrow valley full of dwarf pines. I tumble into pitfalls three feet deep. I’m aiming for a granite ledge a little over 300 feet above the iced-over waterfall. From below, with my binoculars, I think I see a platform suitable for a bivouac.
Fine snow is blurring my vision of the lake lying placidly at the foot of the mountain. My intuition was good: at an altitude of 3,610 feet, the rocky ridge offers a perfect shelf, a spectacular observation post. A wonderful place for an idyllic night of love. I’ve got the venue, anyway; that’s already something.
I slog down from there in snow up to my thighs, panting like a real Russian; then I keep quiet, so I can hear the snow crinkling on the backs of the white trees.
At the mouth of the river, I limber up my muscles on the flat ground near the lake by following the tracks of a fox, which walked almost two miles out onto the ice and looped around to come back. Simply a fox going for a stroll.
The snow is coming down hard now. This masking of the world makes the bite of solitude ten times more sharp. What is solitude? A companion for all seasons.
It’s a salve for wounds. It’s an echo chamber in which impressions are magnified when you are the only one witnessing them. It imposes responsibility: I am the ambassador of the human race in a forest devoid of men. I must enjoy this sight on behalf of those who are deprived of it. Solitude fosters thought, since the only conversation possible is with oneself. It sweeps away all chitchat, allowing the sounding of one’s self. It calls to mind the memory of those we love. It binds the hermit in friendship with plants and beasts and perhaps a little god just happening by.
At the end of the afternoon, I check on my bormash: the tiny creatures are swimming around in the bottle. Tomorrow or the next day, they’ll be bait.
It’s eight in the evening. I’m resting in my cube, at the edge of the forest, at the foot of the mountain, along the rim of the lake, in the love of everything around me.
I fall asleep reading Chinese poetry. I learn by heart a verse to offer in a conversation after running out of arguments: ‘There is deep significance in all this. Just as I was about to say so, I’d already forgotten what I was going to say.’
26 MARCH
Snow. I walk on the lake and hold out my face, mouth open. I drink in snowflakes at the breast of the sky.
In the evening, I cut a hole in the ice with the hand-drill, in thirteen feet of water and a cable’s length from shore. The cloud of crustaceans turns the water murky. Now I need only await the arrival of the spotted char. I’m getting tired of pasta al Tabasco.
27 MARCH
A morning of Chinese poetry. I arrived here with snowshoes, ice skates, crampons, an ice axe, fishing line, and I find myself reading stories in which hermits sitting on stone benches watch the wind flutter through bamboo groves. Ah, the genius of the Chinese! Inventing the principle of ‘non-action’ to justify staying all day in the golden light of Yunnan on the threshold of a cabin …
Fishing in the evening. I’m perched on my stool, moving my hook up and down. Through the hole I can see char passing by, attracted by the bormash. Fishing is a Chinese activity: one opens oneself to the flow of hours while staring at the pole, hoping it will twitch. Which doesn’t happen once the whole evening.
I drown my sorrow at returning empty-handed in eight or nine shots of vodka and let the alcohol do its work.
Chinese poets! I need some help here!
28 MARCH
Strange, this need for transcendence. Why believe in a God outside His own creation? The crackling of the ice, the gentleness of the titmice, and the puissance of the mountains stir me more than any idea of the master of these ceremonies. They are enough for me. 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.
Dense fog has settled onto the lake. The horizon is gone. I bundle up and head out across Baikal. After about a mile, I can’t see the shore behind me. I walk for two hours. Only my footsteps link me to the cabin. I’ve brought along neither compass nor GPS and if the wind comes up, erasing my tracks, I’ll lose my way. I don’t know what pushes me on. Some slightly morbid force. I plunge into nothingness. Abruptly, after two hours, I say: ‘That’s enough’ and turn back, lengthening my stride. In two hours I see the mountain appear behind the white veil and I reach the cabin.
There is a Chinese tradition in which old men would retire to a cabin to die. Some of them had served the emperor, held government posts, while others were scholars, poets or simple hermits. Their cabins were all alike, the settings selected according to strict criteria. The hut had to be on a mountain, near a source of water, with a bush for the wind
to caress. Sometimes the view was towards a valley alive with the bustle of humanity. Incense smoke helped time to pass. In the evening, a friend would appear, to be welcomed with a glass of tea and a few circumspect words. After having wanted to act upon the world, these men retrenched, determined to let the world act upon them. Life is an oscillation between two temptations.
But please note! Chinese non-action is not sloth. Non-action sharpens all perception. The hermit absorbs the universe, paying acute attention to its smallest manifestation. Sitting cross-legged beneath an almond tree, he hears the shock of a petal striking the surface of a pond. He sees the edge of a feather vibrate as a crane flies overhead. He feels the perfume of a happy flower rise from the blossom to envelop the evening.
And this evening, I’m learning the 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 …’
Consolations of the Forest: Alone in a Cabin in the Middle Taiga Page 8
