The Heinz company sells around fifteen kinds of tomato sauce.
The supermarket in Irkutsk stocks them all and I don’t know
which to choose. I’ve already filled six carts with dried pasta
and Tabasco. The blue truck is waiting for me; it’s -26º F outside
and Misha, the driver, keeps the engine running. Tomorrow
we leave Irkutsk and in three days will reach the cabin, on the
western shore of the lake. I must finish my shopping today. I
decide on Heinz Super Hot Tapas. I buy eighteen bottles: three
per month.
Fifteen kinds of ketchup. That’s the sort of thing that made
me want to withdraw from this world.
9 February
I’m stretched out on my bed in Nina’s house on Proletariat
Street. I like Russian street names. In the villages you’ll find a
Labour Street, an October Revolution Street, a Partisans Street,
and sometimes an Enthusiasm Street, along which trudge
grey-haired Slav grannies.
Nina is the best landlady in Irkutsk. A former pianist, she
used to play in the concert halls of the Soviet Union. Now
she runs a guest house. Yesterday she told me: ‘Who’d ever
have thought I’d wind up cranking out pancakes?’ Nina’s cat
is purring on my stomach. If I were a cat, I know whose tummy
I’d snuggle on.
I’m poised on the threshold of a seven-year-old dream. In
2003 I stayed for the first time at Lake Baikal. Walking along
the shore, I discovered cabins at regular intervals, inhabited
by strangely happy recluses. The idea of going to ground alone
in the forest, surrounded by silence, began to intrigue me.
Seven years later, here I am.
4
I must find the strength to push the cat off. Getting up from
a bed requires amazing energy. Especially when it’s to change
a life. This longing to retreat just at the point of achieving your
heart’s desire . . . Certain men do an about-face at the crucial
moment. I’m afraid I might be one of them.
Misha’s truck is packed to the point of bursting. It’s a five-
hour drive to the lake across frozen steppes, navigating over
petrified wave crests and troughs. Villages smoke at the foot
of hills, wreathed in mists trapped in the shallows. Faced with
visions like these, the Suprematist painter Kazimir Malevich
wrote: ‘Whoever has crossed Siberia can never again aspire to
happiness.’ At the top of a ridge, there it is: the lake. We stop
to have a drink. After four brimming glasses of vodka, we
wonder: how in the world does the shoreline manage to follow
the water so perfectly?
Let’s get the statistics out of the way. Baikal: 435 miles long,
50 miles wide, almost a mile deep. Twenty-five million years
old. The winter ice is over three and a half feet thick. Beaming
its love down upon the white surface, the sun doesn’t give a
damn about such things. Filtered by clouds, patches of sunshine
slide in a gleaming herd across the snow, brightening its cadaverous
cheeks.
The truck ventures out onto the ice. Beneath the wheels,
it’s two-thirds of a mile down. If the truck plunges through a
fissure, it will topple into a black abyss. The bodies will sink
in silence. Slow snowfall of the drowned. The lake is a godsend
for anyone who dreads decay. James Dean wanted to die and
leave ‘a beautiful corpse’. The tiny copepods called Epischura
baikalensis1 will clean the bodies within twenty-four hours,
leaving only ivory bones on the lake bed.
10 February
We spent the night in the village of Khuzhir on Olkhon Island,
pronounced ‘Olkrhone’, Nordic style, and we’re heading north.
Misha isn’t a talker. I admire people who keep quiet; I imagine
their thoughts.
I’m on my way to the place of my dreams. Outside, the
atmosphere is bleak. The cold has let its hair down in the wind;
wisps of snow skitter away from our wheels. The storm wedges
itself into the cleft between sky and ice. I study the shore,
trying not to think about living for six months in the requiem
mass of those forests. All the ingredients of the imagery of
Siberian deportation are there: the vastness, the livid cast of
the light. The ice rather resembles a shroud. Innocent people
were dumped for twenty-five years into this nightmare, whereas
I will be living here by choice. Why should I complain?
Misha: ‘It’s dreary.’
And nothing more until the next day.
Constructed in the 1980s as a geologist’s hut, my cabin is
off in a clearing of the cedar forest in the northern sector of
the Baikal-Lena Nature Reserve. My new neighbourhood is
named after these trees: North Cedar Cape. It sounds like an
old people’s home. And after all, I am going on a retreat.
Driving on a lake is a transgression. Only gods and spiders
walk on water. Three times in my life I’ve felt I was breaking
a taboo. The first was when I contemplated the dry bed of the
once mighty Aral Sea, emptied by man. The second was when
I read a woman’s private diary. The third was driving over the
waters of Baikal. Each time, the feeling of tearing aside a veil.
The eye spying through the keyhole.
I explain this to Misha. And get no reply.
Tonight we stay at the weather station of Pokoyniki, in the
heart of the reserve.
Sergei and Natasha run the station. They’re as beautiful as
Greek gods, but wearing more clothes. They’ve been living
here for twenty years, tracking down poachers. My cabin is
thirty-one miles to the north of their home, and I’m glad to
have them as neighbours. I’ll find pleasure in thinking about
them. Their love: an island in the Siberian winter.
We spend the evening with two of their friends, Sasha and
Yura, Siberian fishermen who embody two Dostoyevskian
character types. Sasha is hypertensive, with a florid face, full
of vitality. He has the eyes of a Mongol, and a deep, steely
gaze. Yura is sombre, Rasputinian, an eater of bottom-feeding
fish. He’s as pale as the denizens of Tolkien’s Mordor. Sasha
is made for great feats, impulsive action, while Yura is a born
conspirator. He hasn’t set foot in a city in fifteen years.
11 February
In the morning we take to the ice again. The forest streams
past. When I was twelve my family went to see the Mémorial
de Verdun, a museum dedicated to the Great War. I remember
the Chemin des Dames hall, commemorating a trench where
soldiers and their rifles had been engulfed by a flood of mud.
The forest this morning is a buried army, of which nothing
shows but its bayonets.
The ice cracks. Sheets compressed by movement in the
mantle explode; fault lines streak across the quicksilver plain,
spewing crystalline chaos. Blue blood flows from wounded
glass.
‘It’s lovely,’ says Misha.
And nothing else until that evening.
At seven p.m. my cape appears. North Cedar Cape. My
cabin. The GPS coordinates are: N 54º 26´45.12./ E 108º
32´40.32..
The small dark forms of some people with dogs are advancing
along the shore to welcome us. That’s how Breughel painted
country folk. Winter transforms everything into a Dutch
tableau, glossy and precise.
Snow falls, and then night, and all this white turns a dreadful
black.
12 February
Volodya T., a fifty-year-old forest ranger, has lived with his
wife, Ludmila, in the cabin on North Cedar Cape for fifteen
years. He has a gentle face and wears dark glasses. Some
Russians look like brutes; Volodya would care tenderly for a
bear cub. He and Ludmila want to move back to Irkutsk.
Ludmila has phlebitis and needs medical attention. Like all
Russian women steeped in tea, Ludmila has skin that is frog-
belly white, and her veins look like vermicelli beneath its pearly
lustre. Now that I have arrived, the ranger and his wife will
leave.
The cabin smokes in its grove of cedars. Snow has meringued
the roof, and the beams are the colour of gingerbread. I’m
hungry.
With its back to the mountains, the cabin nestles at the bottom
of slopes 6,500 feet high. Coniferous taiga rises towards the
summits, giving up at about 3,300 feet. Beyond lies the realm
of ice, stone and sky. From my windows I can see the shores
of the lake, which lies at an elevation of almost 1,500 feet.
Spaced about nineteen miles apart, the reserve’s stations
are manned by rangers under Sergei’s command. To the north,
on Cape Elohin, my neighbour’s name is Volodya. To the
south, in the hamlet of Zavorotni, another Volodya. Later on,
melancholy, and in want of a drinking companion, I’ll need
simply to trudge north for five hours or south for one day.
Sergei, the head ranger, came with us from Pokoyniki. We
clambered out of the truck and surveyed the splendour before
us in silence. Then, touching his temple, Sergei announced:
‘This is a stupendous place to commit suicide.’ A friend of
mine, Arnaud, has also come along in the truck from Irkutsk,
where he has been living for the past fifteen years. He married
the most beautiful woman in the city, who’d been dreaming
of Cannes and the avenue Montaigne. When she realized that
Arnaud thought only of running around the taiga, she left
him.
For the next few days, we’ll all get me set up in my cabin.
Then my friends will go home, leaving me alone. Task at hand:
unloading the truck.
requisite supplies for six months
in the boreal forest
Axe and cleaver
Tarp
Burlap bag
Pickaxe
Dip net
Ice skates
Snowshoes
Kayak and paddle
Fishing poles, line, weights
Fly-fishing flies and spoons
Kitchen utensils
Teapot
Ice drill
Rope
Dagger and Swiss knife
Whetstone
Kerosene lamp
Kerosene
Candles
GPS, compass, map
Solar panels, cables and rechargeable batteries
Matches and lighters
Mountain backpacks
Duffel bags
Felt carpet
Sleeping bags
Mountaineering equipment
Mosquito net face mask
Gloves
Felt boots
Ice axe
Crampons
Pharmaceuticals (10 boxes of acetaminophen for
vodka hangovers)
Saw
Hammer, nails, screws, file
French flag for Bastille Day
Hand-launched anti-bear flares
Flare gun
Rain cape
Outdoor grill
Folding saw
Tent
Ground cloth
Headlamp
-40º F sleeping bag
Royal Canadian Mounted Police jacket
Plastic luge
Boots with gaiters
Liquor glasses and vodka
90% alcohol to make up for any shortage of the above
article
Personal library
Cigars, cigarillos, incense paper and a Tupperware
container ‘humidor’
Icons (Saint Seraphim of Sarov, Saint Nicholas, the
imperial family of the last Romanovs, Tsar Nicholas
II, black Virgin)
Wooden trunks
Binoculars
Electronic appliances
Pens and notebooks
Provisions (six-month supply of pasta, rice, Tabasco,
hardtack, canned fruit, red and black pepper, salt,
coffee, honey and tea)
It’s funny: you decide to live in a cabin, and envision yourself
smoking a cigar under the open sky, lost in meditation . . .
and you wind up checking off items on supply lists like an army
quartermaster. Life comes down to grocery shopping.
I push open the door of the cabin. In Russia, Formica reigns
supreme. Seventy years of historical materialism have obliterated
the Russian sense of aesthetics. Where does bad taste
come from? Why use linoleum at all? How did kitsch take over
the world? The principal phenomenon of globalization has
been a worldwide embrace of the ugly. If you need convincing,
just walk around a Chinese village, check out the latest decor
in French post offices, or consider what tourists wear. Bad
taste is the common denominator of humanity.
For two days, with Arnaud’s help, I tear off the linoleum,
oilcloth, polyester tarp and adhesive plastic papers that cover
the walls. We crowbar our way through cardboard panels.
Stripped clean, the interior reveals logs pearled with resin
and a pale yellow wood floor, like that of Van Gogh’s room
in Arles. Volodya watches us in consternation. He does not
see that the bare, amber-coloured wood is more beautiful to
the eye than oilcloth. He listens as I explain this to him. I
am the bourgeois defending the superiority of a parquet
floor over linoleum. Aestheticism is a form of reactionary
deviance.
We have brought two yellow pine double-paned windows
from Irkutsk to replace the cabin windows, which shed a dreary
light. Sergei enlarges the embrasures by cutting the logs with
a chainsaw, working hectically, non-stop, without calculating
the angles, correcting the mistakes he makes in his haste as he
goes along. Russians always build things with a sense of
urgency, as if fascist soldiers were about to pour over the hill
at any minute.
In the villages sprinkled around this territory, Russians feel
the fragility of their position. That little nursery-tale pig in his
house of straw was about as vulnerable. Living within four
wooden walls amid frozen marshes calls for modest ambitions,
and these hamlets are not made to last. They’re a clutch of
shacks creaking in the north wind. The Romans built for the
ages; a Russian just wants to get through the winter.
Given the violence of the storms, the cabin is a matchbox.
A creature of the forest, destined to rot; the trunks of the
clearing’s trees furnished the logs for its walls. The cabin will
return to the soil when abandoned by its owner, yet in its
simplicity it offers perfect protection against the seasonal cold
without disfiguring the sheltering forest. With the yurt and the
igloo, it figures among the handsomest human responses to
environmental adversity.
13 February
Ten more hours spent ridding the clearing of rubbish, sprucing
the place up to lure back the genius loci. Russians make a
clean sweep of the past, but not of their refuse. Throw something
away? I’d rather die, they say. Why toss out a tractor engine
when the piston might make a good lamp base? The territory
of the former Soviet Union is littered with the crud of Five-
Year Plans: factories in ruins, machine tools, the carcasses of
planes. Many Russians live in places that resemble building
sites and car scrap yards. They do not see rubbish, ignoring the
spectacle before them. When you live on a dump, you need to
know how to edit things out.
14 February
The last crate contains books. If asked why I’ve come to shut
myself up here, I’ll say I was behind in my reading. I nail a pine
plank up over my bedstead to hold my books. I’ve got at least
seventy. Back in Paris I took pains to put together an ideal list.
When you have misgivings about the poverty of your inner
life, it’s important to bring along good books to fill that void
in a pinch. The mistake would be to choose only difficult reading
on the assumption that life in the woods would keep your
spiritual temperature at fever pitch, but time drags when all
you’ve got for snowy afternoons is Hegel.
Before I left, a friend advised me to take along the Memoirs
of Cardinal de Retz, a classic of seventeenth-century French
literature, and Paul Morand’s biography of Nicolas Fouquet,
the ill-starred Superintendent of Finances under Louis XIV.
I already knew that one must never travel with books related
to one’s destination; in Venice, read Lermontov, but at Baikal,
Byron.
I empty the crate. I have the novelists Michel Tournier for
daydreaming, Michel Déon for melancholy, D. H. Lawrence
for sensuality and Yukio Mishima for steely coldness. I have
a small collection of books on life in the woods: Grey Owl
for his radical stance, Daniel Defoe for myth, Aldo Leopold
for ethics and Thoreau for philosophy, although I find his
sermonizing a touch wearing. Whitman – he’s enchanting: his
Leaves of Grass is a work of grace. Ernst Jünger invented the
expression ‘recourse to the forest’; I have four or five of his
books. A little poetry and some philosophers as well: Nietzsche,
Schopenhauer, the Stoics. Sade and Casanova to stir up my
blood. Some crime fiction, because sometimes you need a
breather. A few nature guides for birds, plants and insects
published by Delachaux and Niestlé. When you invite yourself
into the woods, the least you can do is know the names of
your hosts; indifference would be an affront. If some people
were to install themselves in my apartment by force, I should
at least like them to call me by my first name. The section of
my Pléiade volumes in their glossy covers gleams in the candlelight.
My books are icons. For the first time in my life, I’m
going to read a novel straight through.
list of ideal reading material carefully
composed in paris for a six-month stay in the
siberian forest
Hell Quay, Ingrid Astier
Lady Chatterley’s Lover, D. H. Lawrence
The Sickness unto Death, Kierkegaard
Tales of a Lost Kingdom: A Journey into Northwest Pakistan,
Erik L’Homme
Un théâtre qui marche [An Itinerant Theatre], Philippe
Fenwick
Lost in the Taiga: One Russian Family’s Fifty-year Struggle for
Survival and Religious Freedom in the Siberian Wilderness,
Vasily Peskov
Indian Creek Chronicles: A Winter Alone in the Wilderness,
Pete Fromm
Men Possessed by God: The Story of the Desert Monks of
Ancient Christendom, Jacques Lacarrière
Friday, or, The Other Island, Michel Tournier
Un taxi mauve, Michel Déon
Philosophy in the Boudoir, Sade
Gilles, Drieu La Rochelle
Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe
In Cold Blood, Truman Capote
Un an de cabane [A Year in a Cabin in the Yukon], Olaf
Candau
Nuptials [second collection of essays], Camus
The Fall, Camus
An Island to Oneself, Tom Neale
The Reveries of the Solitary Walker, Rousseau
The Story of My Life, Casanova
The Song of the World, Giono
Fouquet, Paul Morand
Carnets [Notebooks], Montherlant
Journal Vol. 1, 1965–1970, Jünger
The Rebel’s Treatise, or, Back to the Forest, Jünger
The Gordian Knot, Jünger
Approaches, Drugs, and Intoxication, Jünger
African Games, Jünger
The Flowers of Evil, Baudelaire
The Postman Always Rings Twice, James M. Cain
The Poet, Michael Connelly
Blood on the Moon, James Ellroy
Eve, James Hadley Chase
The Stoics, Pléiade edition
Red Harvest, Dashiell Hammett
On the Nature of Things, Lucretius
The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History,
Mircea Eliade
The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer
Typhoon, Conrad
Odes, Victor Segalen
Life of Rancé, Chateaubriand
Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu
The Marienbad Elegy, Goethe
The Complete Novels, Hemingway
Ecce Homo, Nietzsche
Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche
Twilight of the Idols, or, How to Philosophize with a Hammer,
Nietzsche
The Stars, the Snow, the Fire: Twenty-five Years In the Alaska
Wilderness, John Haines
The Men of the Last Frontier, Grey Owl
Traité de la cabane solitaire [Treatise on Solitary Cabins],
Antoine Marcel
At the Heart of the World, Blaise Cendrars
Leaves of Grass, Whitman
A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold
The Abyss, or, Zeno of Bruges, Marguerite Yourcenar
The Thousand and One Nights
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare
The Merry Wives of Windsor, Shakespeare
Twelfth Night, or, What You Will, Shakespeare
Arthurian Romances, Chrétien de Troyes
American Black Box, Maurice G. Dantec
American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis
Walden, Thoreau
The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, Yukio Mishima
Promise at Dawn, Romain Gary
Out of Africa, Karen Blixen
The Adventurers, José Giovanni
Six days after I left Irkutsk, my friends vanish over the
horizon in the blue truck. No sight is more poignant to a
castaway than the disappearance of a ship’s sail. Volodya and
Ludmila are off to Irkutsk and their new life. I wait for the
moment when they’ll turn around for a last look at the cabin.
They don’t turn around.
The truck dwindles to a dot. I am alone. The mountains
seem harsher now. Intense, the landscape reveals itself. The
land is in my face. It’s incredible how much mankind hogs its
own attention. The presence of others makes the world fade
out. Solitude is this reconquest of the enjoyment of things.
It’s -27º F. The truck has dissolved into the fog. Silence falls
from the sky in little white shavings. To be alone is to hear
silence. A blast of wind; sleet muddles the view. I let out a
scream. I open my arms, raise my face to the icy emptiness,
and go back inside where it’s warm.
I’m poised on the gangway.
I will finally find out if I have an inner life.
15 February
My first evening on my own. In the beginning, I don’t dare
move around much, anaesthetized by the perspective of the
days ahead. At ten o’clock, explosions shatter the stillness’s,
the air has warmed up to 10º F, and the sky looks like snow.
The cabin couldn’t shake any harder if Russian artillery were
pounding the lake. I step outside into the mild flakes to listen
to the staggering blows. Currents are heaving at the lake ice.
Imprisoned, the water pleads for release. Setting a screen
between life and the stars, the ice separates creatures from the
sky: fish, seaweed, micro-organisms, marine mammals, arthropods.
The cabin measures ten feet by ten feet. Heat is supplied
by a cast-iron stove, which will become my friend. I put up
with the snoring of this particular companion. The stove is
the axis of the world, around which everything is organized.
It’s a little god with its own life, and when I offer it wood, I
honour Homo erectus, who mastered fire. In his The Psychoanalysis
of Fire, Gaston Bachelard imagines that the idea of
rubbing two sticks to kindle a spark was inspired by the frictions
of love. While fucking, man intuited the creation of fire.
Nice to know. To dampen the libido, remember to stare at
dying embers.
I have two windows. One looks southward, the other to the
east. Through the latter I see, some sixty miles away, the snowy
crests of Buryatia, an autonomous republic within the Russian
Federation, while through the other window I can trace, behind
the branches of a fallen pine, the line of the bay as it curves
away to the south.
My table, set right up against the eastern window, occupies
its entire width, in the Russian fashion. Slavs can sit for hours
watching raindrops on window panes. Once in a while they
get up, invade a country, have a revolution, and then go back
to dreaming at their windows in overheated rooms. In the
winter they sip tea interminably, in no hurry to go outside.
16 February
At noon, outdoors.
The sky has powdered the taiga, shaking velvety down over
the vert-de-bronze of the cedars. Winter forest: a silvery fur
tossed onto the shoulders of the terrain. Waves of vegetation
cover the slopes. This desire of the trees to invade everything.
The forest, an ocean swell in slow motion. At every fold in
the relief, black streaks darken the egg-white crowns of the
trees.
How can people adore abstract fancies more than the beauty
of snow crystals?
17 February
This morning the sun hoisted itself over the peaks of Buryatia
at 8.17. A sunbeam came through the window, striking the
logs of the cabin. I was in my sleeping bag. I thought the wood
was bleeding.
The last flickers in the stove die at around four a.m. and by
dawn, the room is freezing. I have to rise and light the fire:
two actions that celebrate the passage from hominid to man.
I begin my day by blowing on embers, after which I go back
to bed until the cabin has reached the temperature of a new-
laid egg.
This morning I grease the weapon Sergei left with me, a
signal flare pistol like the one used by sailors in distress. The
barrel launches a blinding charge of phosphorus to squelch
the ardours of a bear or an intruder.
I have no gun and will not be hunting. To begin with, hunting
is not allowed in the nature reserve. Secondly, I would
consider it a dirty trick to shoot down the living creatures of
these woods in which I am a guest. Do you like it when strangers
attack you? It doesn’t bother me that creatures more noble,
well made and far more muscular than I roam freely in the
open forest.
This place isn’t the Forêt de Chantilly. When poachers run
into the gamekeepers, guns are drawn. Sergei never patrols
without his rifle. Along the shores of the lake lie tombs bearing
the names of rangers: a simple cement stele decorated with
plastic flowers and every so often, the guy’s photo engraved
on a metal medallion. As for the poachers, they have no graves.
I think about what happens to minks. Being born in the
forest, surviving the winters, falling into a trap – and winding
up as coats for old hags who wouldn’t last three minutes out
in the taiga. If at least they were as graceful as the mustelids
that are skinned for them . . . Sergei told me a story. The
governor of the Irkutsk region was hunting bears from his
helicopter in the mountains overlooking Baikal. Destabilized
by the wind, the M18 crashed. Tableau de chasse: eight dead.
Sergei: ‘The bears must have danced a polka around the
bonfire.’
My other weapon is a dagger made in Chechnya, a handsome
knife with a wooden handle, which never leaves my side
all day. In the evening, I stick it into the beam over my bed.
Deeply enough so that it doesn’t fall down while I’m dreaming
and slice open my belly.
18 February
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. Frantic with restlessness, I required fresh
horizons and conceived a passionate interest in airports, where
everything is an invitation to departure. I dreamed of ending
up in a terminal. My trips began as escapes and finished in
track races against the hours.
Two years ago, I chanced to spend three days in a tiny izba,
a traditional Russian log cabin. A ranger, Anton, had welcomed
me into his home on the eastern shore of Lake Baikal. Anton
was so farsighted that, behind his glasses, his goggle-eyes gave
him the look of a gleeful toad. At night we played chess, and
during the day I helped him haul in the nets. We spoke hardly
at all but we read a lot: for me, the ‘decadent’ nineteenth-
century novelist Huysmans, and for him, Hemingway (which
he pronounced ‘Rhaymingvayee’). He sloshed down gallons
of tea; I went walking in the woods. Sunlight flooded the room.
Geese were fleeing the autumn, and I thought about my dear
ones. We listened to the radio. Whenever the female announcer
reported the temperatures in Sochi, Anton would say: ‘It must
be nice, down at the Black Sea.’ From time to time he’d toss
a log into the stove, and at day’s end, he’d get out the chessboard.
We’d sip at some Siberian vodka from Krasnoyarsk and
push the pawns around: I was always white and often lost. The
endless days passed quickly, and when I left my friend I thought,
This is the life for me. All I had to do was ask of immobility
what travel no longer brought me: peace.
That was when I promised myself I would live alone in a
cabin for a few months. 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. Over 900 miles to the south, China is humming
with a billion and a half human beings running out of water,
wood and space. Living in the forest next to the world’s largest
reserve of fresh water is a luxury. One day, the Saudi oilmen,
the Indian nouveaux riches and the Russian businessmen who
drag their ennui around the marble halls of palaces will understand
this. Then it will be time to go a step up in latitude to
the tundra. Happiness will lie beyond the 60th parallel north.
Better to live joyfully in a wilderness clearing than languish
in a city. In the sixth volume of The Earth and Its Inhabitants,
the geographer Élisée Reclus – a master anarchist and antiquated
stylist – proposes a superb idea. The future of
humanity would lie in ‘the complete union of the civilized with
the savage’. There would be no need to choose between our
hunger for technological progress and our thirst for unspoilt
places. Life in the forest offers an ideal terrain for this reconciliation
between the archaic and the futuristic. An eternal
existence unfolds beneath the treetops, literally at one with
the earth. There we can reconnect with the truth of moonlit
nights, submitting to the doctrine of the forests without
renouncing the benefits of modernity. My cabin shelters the
happy union of progress and the past. Before I came here, I
selected from the department store of civilization a few products
indispensable to happiness: books, cigars, vodka, and I
will enjoy them in the rugged surroundings of the woods. I
followed the intuitions of Reclus so faithfully that I’ve equipped
my home with solar panels, which run a small computer. The
silicon of my integrated circuits feeds on photons. I listen to
Schubert while watching the snow, I read Marcus Aurelius
after my wood-chopping chores, I smoke a Havana to celebrate
the evening’s fishing. Reclus would be pleased.
In What Am I Doing Here? Bruce Chatwin quotes Jünger
quoting Stendhal: ‘The art of civilization consists in combining
the most delicate pleasures with the constant presence of
danger.’ An observation that echoes Elisée’s injunction. The
essential thing is to live one’s life with a brave hand on the
tiller, swinging boldly between contrasting worlds. Balancing
between danger and pleasure, the frigid Russian winter and
the warmth of a stove. Never settling, always oscillating from
one to the other extremity on the spectrum of sensations.
Life in the woods allows us to pay our debts. We breathe, eat
fruit, pick flowers, we bathe in a river’s waters and then one
day, we die without paying the bill to the planet. Life is sneaking
a meal in a restaurant. The ideal would be to go through
life like the Scandinavian troll who roams the moorland without
leaving any tracks in the heather. Robert Baden-Powell’s
advice should be made a universal principle: ‘When through
with a campsite, take care to leave two things behind. Firstly:
nothing. Secondly: your thanks.’ What is essential? Not to weigh
too heavily on the surface of the globe. Shut inside his cube
of logs, the hermit does not soil the Earth. From the threshold
of his izba, he watches the seasons perform the dance of the
eternal return. Possessing no machines, he keeps his body fit.
Cut off from all communication, he deciphers the language of
the trees. Released from the grip of television, he discovers
that a window is more transparent than a TV screen. His cabin
provides comfort and brightens up the lakeshore. One day, we
tire of talking about ‘de-growth’ and the love of nature: we
want to get our actions in sync with our ideas. It’s time to leave
the city and close the curtains of the forest over speechifying.
The cabin, realm of simplification. Beneath the pines, life
is reduced to vital gestures, and time spared from daily chores
is spent in rest, contemplation, small pleasures. The array of
tasks to be done has shrunk. Reading, drawing water, cutting
wood, writing, pouring tea: such things become liturgies. In
the city, each action takes place to the detriment of a thousand
others. The forest draws together what the city disperses.