Consolations of the Forest: Alone in a Cabin in the Middle Taiga

^MARCH Time

My father’s birthday. I imagine the dinner back home near Guise, in Picardy. Every year the family gathers in a restaurant remodelled from eighteenth-century stables: the Belgian cousins, beer, wine, meat and the light beaming down from the brick vaults. They must have arrived in the rain and are now dining cosily. The tables are set up beneath the racks where the animals once tucked into their feed. Hundreds of horses that would be warm in these stalls now spend the night outside in northern France. I’m no fonder of stables turned into banquet halls than I am of churches turned into munitions dumps. I pour myself a generous shot of vodka, raise a toast towards the west, and toss it down.

Would my father be happy here? He wouldn’t like all this nature. He loves the theatre, public debate, lively conversation. He is at home in the world of the snappy rejoinder. It’s hard to hold a conversation in the woods of Siberia. There’s nothing to stop a man from expressing himself, of course. He can always roar like the fellow in The Howling Miller, a tale by the Finnish novelist Arto Paasilinna. It’s just that yelling is futile. From a naturalist perspective, the rebellious figure of l’homme révolté is useless. The sole virtue, in these latitudes, is acceptance. Vide the Stoics, animals or (even better!) simple stones. The taiga can offer only two things: its resources, which we blithely plunder, and its indifference. Let’s take the moon, for example. Yesterday it was shining. In my notebook I wrote: The rhinoceros moon that with its horn wounds a night the colour of Africa. Just how much of a damn does the moon give about such sophomoric pseudo-aphorisms?

Tonight I finished a murder mystery. I closed the book feeling as if I’d just eaten at McDonald’s: nauseated and slightly ashamed. The action is hectic – and forgotten the next moment. Four hundred pages to find out whether MacDouglas cut up MacFarlane with a butter knife or an ice axe. The characters are ruled by all-powerful facts. The myriad details paper over a void. Is it because novels like these resemble bureaucratic bumf that they’re called police procedurals?

Midnight; I stroll out on the lake. How can I recover the impression I had when I first arrived on these gleaming coal-grey shores seven years ago? My soul was laid wide open with happiness. Where is the enjoyment of this place that kept me awake those first few nights on the beach? The comfort of my cabin is dulling my perceptions. Too much ease coats the soul with soot. I’ve been here just a few weeks and already I feel like a local. Soon I’ll know every evergreen as well as I know the bistros of my Parisian stomping grounds. Being at home somewhere is the beginning of the end.

A hundred paces from my cabin, the toilet: a hole in the ground in an open shed cobbled together from planks. Going out there tonight, I remember ‘The Apple Tree’, a short story by Daphne du Maurier: a man meets his downfall one freezing night, tripping over the roots of his long-suffering wife’s favourite tree, vengefully cut down by the widower after her death. I imagine myself falling somewhere along the way in −30º. I would die there, about fifty yards from the cabin, with its string of smoke rising from the roof, and the explosions of the lake ice for a eulogy. Ceasing to struggle, I would slowly rejoin the beautiful silence while thinking: No, really, this is too dumb. Oh, those people who’ve got lost and died a few yards from shelter…

Help is there, a mere ten steps away, but the threshold of safety remains out of reach. Kurosawa made a movie about that: a group of mountaineers, freezing in a blizzard some seventy yards from camp. And Scott of the Antarctic! Have we forgotten his agony, not even twelve miles from a supply depot? Out in the Taklamakan Desert of north-west China, where ancient mummies of Caucasoid peoples have been discovered in the Tarim Basin, the explorer Sven Hedin had the opposite adventure: believing himself lost, he prepared to die – and stumbled onto an oasis.

Almost half a mile to the south of the cabin, a granite rise cleaves the forest. Looming 300 feet into the air, the rise dominates the lake; six larches crown the summit, giving it the shape of a pine cone. Lynx tracks mottle the slope leading to the foot of the dome. I toil my way up there; powdery snow covers the scree. I sink in up to my thighs and sometimes lose a foot down a gap between two rocks. From the summit, Baikal: a plain striped with ivory veins. The silence of the forest envelops the world and the echo of this silence is millions of years old. I’ll be coming back here. The ‘pine cone’ will be my crow’s nest for the days when I need a lofty view.

Sasha and Yura, the fishermen I met at Sergei’s two weeks ago, drop in for a visit. I pour the ritual glasses. In this life, sharing a glass with a companion, feeling safe in the warmth of a shelter – this is already something. The stove is drawing well and the atmosphere makes us drowsy. A soft weight falls upon our brows, a sign of biological well-being. The vodka goes down. The spirit is buoyed, the body contented. The air fills with tobacco smoke as conversation dies away. I always find peace in the company of Russian woodsmen: I feel theirs is the human environment in which I would have liked to be born. It’s good not to have to keep a conversation going. Why is life with others so hard? Because you must always find something to say. I think of those days of walking around Paris nervously tossing off ‘Just-fine-thank-yous’ and ‘Let’s-get-together-soons’ to strange people I don’t know who babble the same things to me, as if in a panic.

‘Cold?’ asks Sasha after a moment.

‘S’okay,’ I say.

‘Snow?’

‘Plenty!’

‘Visitors?’

‘Day before yesterday.’

‘Sergei?’

‘No, Yura Uzov.’

‘Ah, that Yura…’

‘Yes, that’s the one.’

There are dialogues like this in Jean Giono’s The Song of the World. At the beginning of the novel, the riverman, Antonio, addresses the forester, Matelot:

‘The less you talk, the longer you live,’ says Yura. I don’t know why but I suddenly think of a certain garrulous French politician. Must tell him he’s in danger.

Sasha leaves me a five-litre keg of beer. In the evening I slowly dispatch two of those litres. Beer or the local dive, the alcohol of the poor. Beer is a sedative that anaesthetizes thought and dissolves all spirit of revolt. With the beer hose, totalitarian states extinguish all of society’s fires. Nietzsche loathed this piss-juice because it fostered ‘the spirit of heaviness’.

With a stick in the snow: The world, for which we are in turn the brush or the brushstroke.

I remember my walking trips in the Himalayas, travelling on horseback in the Celestial Mountains, biking three years ago on the Ustyurt Plateau of Central Asia… That joy, then, at conquering a mountain pass. The carnivorous hunger to cover the miles. The longing to press on even if it kills you. At times I advanced as if possessed, walking into exhaustion, delirium. In the Gobi, I would stop to spend the night right there, crumpling where I stood, and set out again the next day automatically, the moment I opened my eyes. I was aping a wolf; now I’m being a bear. I want to dig in, become the earth after having been the wind. I was obsessively bound to movement, drugged with space. I was chasing after time, believing it was hiding just over the horizon. ‘The vigorous use of time may offset its fast pace’ (Montaigne, Essays, vol. 3), and that’s how I dealt with its swift passage.

A free man possesses time. A man who dominates space is merely powerful. In cities, the minutes, hours and years are the flowing blood of wounded time, and they escape us. In the cabin, time grows calm. It lies at your feet like a good old dog and suddenly, you’ve even forgotten it’s there. I am free because my days are.

As I do each morning while the stove is heating up, I go down to the water hole thirty yards out from the shore. The opening freezes over during the night and must be chopped free again. I stand there a moment, gazing at the taiga. Out of the hole flashes a white hand that grabs my ankle in a blinding hallucination – these waters have swallowed so many drowned bodies! – and I recoil, dropping the ice axe. My heart is racing. Sleeping waters are wicked: lakes exhale a melancholy atmosphere because spirits prowl there bottled up, brooding on their grief. Lakes are burial vaults, where silt gives off a noxious odour and vegetation clumps in dark reflections. Out at sea, the currents, salt and ultraviolet light dissolve all mystery in limpid waters.

What happened in this bay? Was there a shipwreck, or some settling of scores? I have no intention of cohabiting for six months with a soul in torment. I’ve got my hands full with my own. Lugging my two buckets, I return to the warmth of the cabin; through the window, the water hole makes a black stain on the pale ice sheet, a dangerous spy-hole between two worlds.

Every afternoon I put on my snowshoes. After a ninety-minute tramp into the trees, I reach the upper skirt of the forest.

I like entering the woods. Sounds soon fade away. When I step inside a Gothic cathedral in France or Belgium, I feel the same soothing calm, a sweetness of being that diffuses its warmth behind the brow and makes eyelids heavy. Something in me reacts to the glow of both limestone and conifers. At present, I prefer old-growth forests to the stone naves of churches.

Beneath the trees, forever sheltered from the wind, the snow lies thick. I sink deeply into it in spite of my snowshoes. Lynxes, wolves, minks and foxes roam at night. The tracks tell stories of tragedy in the wild. Some are beaded with blood; they are the words of the forest. The animals tread lightly on their paws in proportion to their weight, whereas man is too heavy to walk atop snow. Now and then, the cries of jays; otherwise, silence. They call from the crowns of firs, feathered sentinels on needle-thin towers. They call because I have invaded their home. No one ever asks animals permission to cross their domain.

Lichen hangs from the trees. Long ago I read a tale in which the author imagined a god who roamed the understorey of the forest, where his coat would catch on branches, leaving shreds that became lichen.

The sadness of the pines: they look cold. After an hour of climbing, I check my altimeter: 2,461 feet. Another effort, and beyond about 2,950 feet the forest will lay down its weapons. Up there, snow polished by tempests presents a hard surface. The snowshoes grip well; I progress quickly and choose to go up one of the narrow valleys. A few larches survive beyond the timber line. They are solitary here, with contorted branches that stand out against the blue background of Baikal, starred with fractures. The gold branches, the lapis lazuli of the lake, the white, crazed ice: the palette of the Japanese artist Hokusai.

Sometimes the ground gives way. The snow, mounded over a thicket of dwarf pines, collapses beneath my weight, dumping me into a net of branches where my snowshoes get caught in the tangles. I curse fiercely down in my hole. In Kolyma Tales, Varlam Shalamov, a former prisoner in a gulag in Siberia, remembers the dwarf pines that surrounded the camp. When the temperature moderated in May, the trees would free themselves from their blanket of snow: standing up straight again, they were harbingers of spring, and hope.

At an altitude of 3,280 feet, I climb towards the rocky crests that flank the thalweg, that line connecting the lowest points along the length of a valley. Looking down, I see ridges serrated like dorsal fins against the lake. Some of my friends live for this alone: gaining altitudes where the odourless air stings the nose, where life hangs between earth and sky in a realm of abstract forms. When they descend into the valleys once again, they find that life smells bad. Mountaineers are unhappy in cities.

Among the boulders that protrude above the snow, I build a fire to make tea. Side by side, we smoke, the fire and I, offering our spiralling fragrant curls to the ancient lake. During such days up here, I dedicate myself to the pure joy of being: taking a drag, alone, high above the lake; hurting nothing, taking orders from no one, desiring no more than what I experience and knowing that nature does not reject us. In life, three ingredients are necessary: sunshine, a commanding view and legs aching with remembered effort. Plus some little Montecristos. Happiness is as fleeting as a puff of cigar smoke.

It’s −22°F. Too chilly for more contemplation. I select a couloir in which to slide down again, braking by grabbing at ash saplings and dogwood branches. Back in the forest of pines and birches, I plunge into the slumbering snow, take a guess as to the appropriate heading, and regain the lakeshore in an hour, winding up not far from the cabin. When I see it again, I feel welcome and go happily home. I close the door and light the stove. In May, I simply must climb all the way to the summits of my domain.

Hölderlin’s epigraph for Hyperion, or, The Hermit in Greece is taken from the epitaph on the tombstone of St Ignatius of Loyola: Not to be confined by the greatest, yet to be contained within the smallest, is divine. In short, after an outing, after gorging on the grandeur of the lake, remember to give a little wink to a small servant of beauty: a snowflake, some lichen, a tit.

The sun’s caress on the window pane approaches the sensual delight in the touch of a loved one’s hand. When you’re off playing hermit in the woods, only the sun is allowed to intrude.

To get the day off to a good start, it’s important to remember one’s duties. In order: greetings to the sun, the lake, the little cedar growing in front of the cabin and on which, every evening, the moon hangs up its lantern.

I live here in the realm of predictability. Each day goes by, a mirror of the one before, a rough draft of the one to come. The passing hours bring variations in the sky’s coloration, the comings and goings of the birds, and a thousand almost imperceptible things. When the world of men goes silent, a fresh tint in the feathery foliage of the cedars or a glinting reflection off the snow becomes a considerable event. I will no longer look down on folks who discuss the rain and sunny skies. Talk about the weather has a cosmic dimension. The subject is no less profound than a debate about Salafist militants infiltrating Pakistani intelligence agencies.

What is unexpected in the lives of hermits is their thoughts, which alone interrupt the course of monotonous hours. To surprise yourself, you must dream.

I remember when I embarked, two years ago, on board the Jeanne d’Arc, a training vessel of the French navy. We were returning from Suez, moving slowly through the Mediterranean. Islands and capes drifted by, watched in silence by officers up on the bridge, all rejoicing inside to see each fresh nuance appear in the coastline. Today, I look out of my window with the same watchfulness as I did aboard the Jeanne, attentive now to the shifting shadows and trembling light instead of to changes ashore. Up on the bridge, we asked movement in space to provide us with distraction, while in the cabin, time’s tiny precipitations are enough. Immobile, becalmed, I sail on. If anyone asks me what I did during my months here, I will reply: ‘I went on a cruise.’

Inside and outside the cabin, the feeling of time’s passage is not the same. Indoors: a rippling of cosy hours. Outdoors: −22°F, the slap of every second. On the ice, the hours drag. The cold numbs their flow. So, the threshold of my door is not a wooden slat separating heat from cold and comfort from hostility, but a throttle valve connecting the two halves of an hourglass in which time does not pass at the same speed.

A Siberian cabin is not built to the specifications of the civilized world. Here there are no requirements for security, government assistance, insurance. Russians make a point of never taking precautions. Within a space of ninety-seven square feet, the body moves among the searingly hot stove, the saw hanging from a rafter, the knives and axes planted in the beams. In the Europe of Safety First, these cabins would be razed.

I spend the afternoon sawing up a cedar trunk. Chain-gang work: the wood is dense, the metal teeth don’t bite well. A glance towards the south, to catch my breath. The landscape is at rest, perfect, structured: the grand curve of the bays, the sulphurous streaks in the sky, the stilettos of the pines, the majesty of the granitic drapery. The cabin is at the heart of a tanka poem, in contact with the lacustrine, mountainous and woodland worlds, symbolizing respectively death, the eternal return and divine purity.

The cedar is slender but must be 200 years old: here, what living things lose in abundance they gain in intensity; the trees don’t explode in luxuriant foliage, but their flesh is as hard as marble.

Another pause. Last year, on the flanks of the Samarga valley in the Russian Far East, I visited some lumberjack camps. Moscow is selling its taiga to the Chinese. Chainsaws lacerate the silence around the camps, dismembering the forest acre after acre. The invaders slice up the trunks as meticulously as wood-eating insects. Some of these trees are destined for a strange fate: sprung from the soil of a wilderness valley ridge, having weathered a hundred, maybe a hundred and fifty Siberian winters, these cedars will find themselves chopped into chopsticks condemned to stuff soup noodles down the gullets of Shanghai labourers building a shopping mall for expats. Times are hard for fir trees. Sergei told me that up behind the rocky ridges flanking Baikal, deep in the Baikal-Lena Nature Reserve, lumberjacks are already at work.

Russians, so proud of the integrity of their national territory, pay no attention to this underhanded plot. Puffed up with the illusion of living in a limitless country, they imagine their nature to be inexhaustible. One becomes an ecologist faster in the patchwork mountain pastures of the Swiss Alps than dying of angst in the vastness of the Russian plains.

I also cut down a dead birch; its bark will be useful tinder to get the stove going. The tree’s skin is striped with nicks: has a forest spirit been marking off the passing days?

By the time I turn homeward, large snowflakes blanket the bristling ranks of stumps and roots parading along the profile of the scree.

Another incursion into the upper realm. I’m looking for the waterfall Sergei told me about: ‘An hour and a half on foot, elevation around 3,300 feet.’ I’m wandering in my snowshoes along the edge of the scree slope, above the cedar line. At the top of one of the canyons in the mountainside – elevation 3,000 – I chance upon the waterfall. The thin ribbon of ice falls from a notch in the summit of a schistose wall, hurling itself into the void and covering the black rock with mother-of-pearl.

Not a single bird calls. Winter has petrified life. The world waits to awaken. The snow, waterfall, clouds, even the silence: all held in suspense. One day, things will get going again. Warmth will come down from the sky and nature’s tissues will swell with the springtime flood. New blood will beat in the animals’ veins, the thalwegs will fill with water, sap will flow in the trees. Leaves will pierce the scales of their buds; the snows will murmur their desire to rush down to the lake; larvae will hatch and insects will emerge from the soil. A tremendous rushing sound will course down the mountainsides. Life will move along the slopes. Animals will head for the lake to drink as summer clouds make their way north. For the moment, though, I am the only creature floundering through the deep powder to get home.

In the evening, ice skating. An hour gliding along the lacquer. Visions slip past: plaques of obsidian, stripes as blue as a lagoon, like a perfume ad from the 80s.

Out on the ice, a tiny island of snow spared by the wind. I collapse there for a cigarillo. The cracking of Lake Baikal sends shudders through my bones. It’s good to live near a lake. A lake offers the spectacle of its symmetry (the shores and their reflections) and a lesson in equilibrium (the equation between its affluents and effluents). Miraculous precision is necessary to maintain its hydrographic levels, since each drop entering the basin must be redistributed.

Living in a cabin means having the time to take an interest in such things, the time to write them down, the time to read them over. And what’s more, once all that is done, you still have time left over.

At the window this evening, la mésange, mon ange: my angel the tit.

I stay in bed this morning. Peeping out from under the comforter, I can see through the window the fat peach hoisting itself over the mountains of Buryatia. One day, the sun will reveal to us where it finds the strength to get up at dawn.

A gust of wind shoves an icy draught under the door. A hermit, isolated? But from what? Air slips through the beams, sunshine floods the table, water flows within a stone’s throw, humus lies beneath the wooden floor, snow filters in via the pores of the cabin, the scent of the forest percolates through gaps, an insect invites itself in to check out the parquet. In the city a layer of asphalt protects the foot from all contact with the earth, and people are hemmed in by walls of stone.

The lake is booming horrendously. Sitting with my tea, I open my volume of Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation in the PUF edition with its orange cover. Back home in Paris, it sat in splendour on my table, where I never dared open it. There are books one circles warily. Basically, I’ve retired to the woods to finally do what has always intimidated me. In chapter 39 on ‘The Metaphysics of Music’ I read these lines:

When the lake plays its composition of diffused crackings and detonations, this is what it is: the music of the inorganic and undifferentiated, a melody from the lower depths, the symphony of the world making its long-ago debut. A nameless something bubbles and gurgles, while over the basso continuo of its convulsions, a snowflake or a tit tries out a little tune.

The temperature drops precipitously. I chop down some wood in −31°F and when I get home, the heat seems like a supreme luxury. 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.

It’s noon, quite windy, and I’m off. I’m setting out on foot for the island of Ujkani, eighty-one miles away. I’m allowing three days to reach Sergei’s ranger station, then a day to get to the island, a second to stay overnight, a third to get off the island – and three more days to get home. I’m pulling a child’s sledge loaded with a bag of clothing, some provisions, my skates, Rousseau’s Reveries, and Jünger’s journal, which I began reading yesterday. A humanist philosopher and a Swabian entomologist: serious company.

I traverse chaotic jumbles of ice. Snow has spread white cream over the blue slices; I’m walking on a cake for a boreal god. At times the sun illuminates the tips of icicles, lighting up stars in broad daylight. On the dark, glassy sections, the fault lines run through the obsidian masses in a recurrent pattern, a kind of arboreal schema in right angles, branching out in the manner of genealogical trees, or the roots of certain plants. Might that correspond to a mathematical structure, a writing determined by the laws of the universe? Water has a memory; perhaps ice possesses a form of intelligence (a cold one, of course)?

After six hours of walking, I round a cape and see the hamlet of Zavorotni, a few wooden houses nestled in a bay. Only one is occupied year-round, by a ranger named Volodya E. This place is an enclave about six miles by twelve within the reserve, a free zone where Russians can indulge in their favourite activity: doing whatever they want. The village served as a rear base for the teams of men who worked a microquartz mine in the local mountain at an elevation of 3,300 feet. Microquartz was used in the manufacture of diamond styluses for stereos and the needles in some oscillators. I owe my knowledge of these fascinating things to V.E., who welcomes me into his izba.

His kitchen is basically a pigsty. Grease coats the walls. The floor is dangerous: a person might slip on some fish guts and tip over one of the pots full of simmering seal grease intended for the dogs who run riot here. V.E. was for a long time the head of the weather station at Solnechnaya, twenty-five miles to the south. He’s a former alcoholic who stopped drinking after a heart attack; he is doing better these days, but his teeth are gone.

He shows me a chunk of lava, a present from some geologists.

‘These are the oldest minerals in the world,’ he tells me.

‘How old?’

‘Four billion years. I put it under my pillow to inspire my dreams.’

‘And?’

‘Nothing yet.’ He adds: ‘You hungry?’

‘Yes.’

‘You want some fish?’

‘Sounds good.’

The sight of V.E. busy whacking a frozen fish with a hammer while standing at a kitchen table that hasn’t been cleaned since the end of the Soviet Union delights me. Russians never put on airs and the fish is delicious.

‘Anything happen in the world over the last three weeks?’ I wonder.

‘No, it’s quiet, the Muslims are hibernating.’

A day on the lake, fascinated by the designs in the icy mantle. Into that frozen body the cracks and fissures weave electric layers whose current spreads with hectic abandon: the lines retract, join up, veer away. The ice has absorbed the energy of the shocks by distributing it along sheaves of ‘wiring’. Staggering blows rend the silence and are borne along as the echo of an explosion dozens of miles away. The noise vents itself through these networks of veining. As the sun’s rays are refracted in the cross-connections, the skein begins to glow. Light irradiates the veins of turquoise, infusing them with trails of gold. The ice convulses. It is alive and I love it. The pearly coils trace knots resembling neuronal tissues or photos of stardust clouds. The map of this meshing would be psychedelic. Without drugs or wine, my brain perceives hallucinatory sequences as the world offers glimpses of an unknown writing. The patterns stream by as if born in an opium dream, for nature refuses us even the consolation of projecting our own brand-new images on this psychedelic screen.

This oeuvre will vanish in May, engulfed by the thaw. The ice of Baikal is a mandala that will lose its patient design to warmth and the wind.

Twelve and a half miles south of Zavorotni, I spend the night in the cabin of Bolshoi Solontsovi. It’s a dilapidated shelter used when needed by the foresters of the reserve. Three years ago I spent two days here with Maxim, an ex-convict to whom the authorities had given a second chance. They’d made him an inspector. He had the face of a brute and a gentle, sweet smile. He was moping terribly in his cabin, and his life was no picnic. A bear had been prowling the clearing for days, trapping him inside the cabin. ‘I’ve been reduced to peeing in my teapot,’ he’d complained. His superiors hadn’t wanted to risk issuing a rifle to a former drug addict fresh from the jails of Irkutsk. In the evening, the bear had come and stared at us from the door. ‘Fucking hell, I was safer in prison,’ Maxim had fumed.

Since then, the bear has been murdered, Maxim has relapsed, is serving out a new sentence, and the cabin of Bolshoi Solontsovi is empty once more.

I play chess with myself. The last streak of daylight shoots through the window, ricocheting off a knife blade. In spite of a mad, heroic charge, White loses. On the wooden beams, photos: nude girls with smooth white skin and hefty breasts pose in positions a bit too overdone to inspire any conversation. Already it’s impossible to see a thing; nightfall has won out.

On the ice. I reach the weather station at Solnechnaya during the afternoon. Back in the time of the defunct USSR, a trim little village stood on a deforested shoulder of the mountain. Today the remains of the hamlet harbour two people: Anatoli, an inspector, and Lena, his ex-wife. They recently separated and live in two neighbouring izbas, like a set of porcelain dogs at the end of the world. A chaotic mess of jagged ice makes it hard to reach the station, and, when I knock on Anatoli’s door, there is no answer. I push the door open. Sunlight floods into the room. There are empty tin cans on the floor, empty bottles beneath the table and a body on the couch. I had forgotten it was 8 March, Women’s Day in Russia. Anatoli has been celebrating. Lena will later tell me that he banged on her door all night shouting: ‘You’re gonna open up!’ A gentleman should always observe Women’s Day.

I wake him up. He smells of formaldehyde, ether and cabbage. He stands up and falls down.

‘It’s my rheumatism,’ he says, to save face. ‘Very painful.’

‘Yes, the damp weather,’ I agree.

Anatoli spends the afternoon drifting along the steep flank of the mountain. These weather stations are launching pads to psychiatric wards. Ever since Stalin’s time, they stud the territory from Belarus to Kamchatka. Spreading such posts around was a way to both occupy the emptiness and maintain a supply of citizens who would warn Moscow if a fascist turned up… or if anyone else felt an itch to protest against something. In izbas all kitted out with the same recording equipment, meteorologists live in couples or groups of four or five. Every three hours, they go outside to record the data they will radio to their base. Their time is not their own, and the inflexible routine fosters mental confusion. This no-exit situation becomes a circus of disorders: the sufferers drink, tear into one another, develop mental pathologies. Once in a while, a disappearance interrupts their routine. On an island station in the Laptev Sea north of Siberia, a meteorologist’s felt boots were found. Conclusion: wool gives polar bears indigestion. A few decades ago, here in Solnechnaya, a station master hated by his men vanished into thin air one winter’s night out in the forest. The administration hushed the matter up.

I leave Anatoli when Lena invites me to tea at her place. She has the handsome face of a Flemish fishwife, with blue, almond-shaped eyes and a pert nose. We have three hours before I must set out again. The tea steams and Lena holds forth. She arrived at the station when she was sixteen and wouldn’t leave here for anything.

‘I don’t like asphalt. In the city the tar makes my feet hurt and money evaporates.’

‘And the job?’

‘I like it. Except for the wild animals. The recording equipment is fifty yards from the house and at night, that’s a really long way, so I run. But I’m not complaining.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because there are stations where the equipment is more than half a mile away!’

‘No animal attacks?’

‘Yes, wolves.’

‘When?’

‘The second time I saw the wolf, here, was 6 June. I go out to the field at eight o’clock and see the cows running home past me. I thought the ox had frightened them. While I’m coming back, off in the distance I think I see our dog Zarek. I turn around – Zarek is right there. So it’s a real wolf, up ahead of me! The cows had already gone around behind me again, so I run at the wolf with a big stone. The wolf comes closer, I see its grin. I’m throwing stones at it. So the cows, maybe they felt ashamed, they do another U-turn and come back to me!’

‘The cows came back!’

‘And the ox as well. So then the wolf begins to retreat, still grinning, as if it were urging me to follow it. And I do, throwing more stones: I pluck up my courage, and I have a whole herd behind me!’

‘Good for the cows.’

‘Yes, but another year, we had losses.’

‘More wolves?’

‘No, the bears.’

‘Bears?’

‘I hear the dogs howling. Like you wouldn’t believe. I run outside to see. Afterwards, some women said I was crazy to have gone out alone. If the bear had still been there it would have killed me. So I go out, I see the ox lying on the ground, dying. His legs were broken, gashes on the muzzle, and a big chunk of flesh torn from around the spine. The bear had broken his legs so he couldn’t run away.’

‘The poor ox!’

‘I turned straight around and ran home. I called Palitch, a friend who’d happened by. We had to do something. Palitch finished off the ox with a knife. Me, I didn’t eat any of that meat. The next day, we found the cow…’

‘The cow?’

‘The bear had already stashed her before I arrived. A few hundred yards from where it attacked the ox. It had made a tomb for her… Her belly was slashed open. She’d been pregnant. You could see the calf spilling out, and the cow’s muzzle was torn off. Cows, well, I get attached, as if they were children. I had a nervous breakdown that year.’

Lena stands up to send a message on the radio, saying: ‘If I miss three check-in times in a row, it means I’m dead.’

I leave her, fortified in my love for Russia, a nation that sends rockets into space and where people fight off wolves with stones.

After walking a good mile over sheets of lunar ice that resemble huge jellyfish veined with turquoise, I reach the station at Pokoyniki, where Sergei and Natasha live. Sergei has prepared a banya. We suffocate there for an hour. Then we empty a bottle of honey-flavoured vodka, not forgetting to toast the ladies, because 8 March, that’s the day men buy themselves a good conscience on the cheap.

At noon, Sergei opens a three-litre bottle of beer. On the label, it says Siberian Size.

For five years I dreamed about this life. Today, it feels like an ordinary accomplishment. Our dreams come true but only as soap bubbles fated to burst.

I set off for Ujkani. The island lies nineteen miles east of Pokoyniki, out in the middle of the lake. From a distance, it looks like a felt hat sitting on the horizon. The wind is from the north-west. I push on like a maniac, eating up the miles on this lake of frosted glass. A fish swims beneath the ice. We are a world apart. To me, the fish seems imprisoned, cut off from the sky by an impenetrable lid; it’s heartbreaking. Sometimes I lie down on a snow bank to look at the hygienically blue sky through the oval frame of my furry hood. My little sledge holds me back, but when boosted by a gust of wind it shoots past me and I have to lean back to stop it. I reach the island in six hours.

The lord and master around here is Yura. He lives with his wife in a weather station on a steep flank of the island: four large izbas, facing west. He has the despotic character of island hermits, the ‘King of Clipperton syndrome’,[6] which becomes tinged with madness when vodka lights its fire in his eyes. He reigns unchallenged in his satrapy. In the outposts of Baikal the authority of Moscow holds hardly any sway. A tacit contract does link the government to its reclusive citizens: the former sends not a single rouble in subsidy payment, while the latter cheat, lie and scrounge all they can.

I spend a whole day on Ujkani Island half asleep. The Siberian sun warms the façade of the izba and light pours into my room. Lying on my bed, I read a French translation of Jünger’s Journal Vol. 1, 1965–1970. The old magus would not have liked the brightness here; too raw, it kills the mystery of things. The faded eyes of seers are more at home in half-tones. I gather images from every page, flashes, visions. Jünger expresses through symbols the metaphysics of the physical world:

Where does it come from, my love for aphorisms, witticisms and a nicely turned phrase? And my preference for the particular over the collective, individuals over groups? From my name? Tesson: ‘shard’, a fragment of something that once was. Its shape conserves the memory of the bottle. A ‘Tesson’ would be a creature nostalgic for a lost unity, seeking to rejoin the All. Which is what I’m doing here, getting drunk in the woods.

Yura is tending to his chores. He will never return to the city. On the island, he enjoys the two ingredients necessary for an unencumbered life: space and solitude. In the city, the human crowd can survive only if its excesses are curbed and its needs regulated by law. When men crowd together, administration is born. An equation as old as the first Neolithic hamlet and illustrated in every human collectivity. For the hermit, administrative rule begins with another person. Then it’s called marriage.

Men of the forest are very sceptical about projects for ‘citizen cities’, self-governed, no prisons or police, where triumphant liberty shall suddenly reign among crowds now perfectly well behaved. These loners detect a grotesque paradox in such utopias: the city is an inscription in space of culture, order – and their natural child, coercion.

Only withdrawal to a boundless and barely populated wilderness validates a pacifist anarchy founded on this simple principle: in contrast to urban life, danger in the woods arises from nature, not man. The idea of majority rule that governs human relations may therefore fail to reach such distant regions. Let’s daydream a little. We might imagine for our Western societies small groups of people, like those in Pokoyniki or Zavorotni, who are eager to peel off from the parade of progress. Tired of overpopulated cities where governance implies the promulgation of ever more abundant rules, hating the administrative hydra, outraged by the intrusion of new technologies into every aspect of daily life, anticipating the spread of social and ethnic chaos fostered by the growth of mega-regions, these groups decide to abandon urban zones and return to the woods. They would re-create villages in forest glades among towering trees. They would invent a new life. This impetus would be related to the hippie movement, but draw strength from different motives. The hippies fled an order that oppressed them. The neo-foresters will flee a disorder that demoralizes them. As for the woods, they are ready to welcome pilgrims, being used to the eternal return.

To attain a sense of inner freedom, one must have solitude and space galore. Add to these the mastery of time, complete silence, a harsh life and surroundings of geographic grandeur. Then do the maths, and find a hut.

I leave the island behind. I sleepwalk the nineteen miles back to Pokoyniki in seven hours. I spend the afternoon on a bench near Sergei’s cabin, motionless and muffled up like a little old man. A little old man who just tossed off nineteen miles in twenty-four-below-zero weather.

Sergei joins me and we talk about the people – English, Swiss, German – who visit the lake in the summer.

‘I love the Germans,’ says Sergei.

‘Ah, yes: the philosophy, and their music…’

‘No, the cars.’

In the evening, by my bed, I light a candle for the icon of Seraphim of Sarov that I carry with me everywhere. And I write on a piece of paper, which I place before the image, this passage written by Jünger and dated December 1968:

Next, to reward myself for having sent a sign to the universe, I down two and a half litres of beer. This relaxes my legs no end.

I had a clutter of weird dreams last night. Never happens in Paris. The standard explanation would hinge on the quality of my sleep, conducive to hallucinatory fantasizing. I tend towards the idea that the genius loci visits me secretly at night and, shining softly into the arcana of my psyche, shapes the substance of my dreams.

At dawn, a car from Irkutsk brings good old Yura, the pale-eyed fisherman who visited me not so long ago. He lives in a small log cabin at the station of Pokoyniki. He lives by fishing and helps Sergei with the more demanding chores. He has just spent two days in Irkutsk renewing his papers, stolen during the collapse of the Soviet Union.

‘For three presidents, I hadn’t left the woods: Yeltsin, Putin and Medvedev!’

‘What struck you the most, in Irkutsk?’

‘The stores! They’ve got everything. And it’s so clean!’

‘What else?’

‘The people: they’re speaking nicely to one another.’

At noon, farewells to Yura, Sergei and Natasha. I’ll be home in three days. To the north of Pokoyniki Bay lies a frozen swamp; in winter one can take a certain revenge on terrain that in summer demands herculean efforts.

I retrace my steps. An evening halt at the cabin of Bolshoi Solontsovi. The stove takes a long time to start drawing. The cabin heats up slowly and I stay by the fire. Cats have figured everything out. Must remember to check, when I get back to France, if a ‘psychoanalysis of the cabin’ has been published or not, because this evening, I feel as comfy as a foetus.

In the beginning there was the organic womb where life put itself together. In the marshes, coal beds and peat bogs, bacteria macerated, and from the primordial soup would spring more complex life forms. Then the Earth delegated the task of maintaining warmth: uteruses, marsupial pouches, eggs provided their hot-house environment, while primitive habitats in turn acted as incubators. Men lived in caves, in the very womb of the Earth. Later, round igloos and yurts, wooden cabins and woollen tents were our homes. In the Siberian forest, the hermit expends a huge amount of energy on heating his shelter, the guarantee of bodily security and well-being. Only then is the solitary woodsman free to roam the forests and climb mountains despite the cold and other privations. He knows that his haven awaits him. The cabin fulfils the maternal function. The danger comes from constantly craving the comfort of this lair and vegetating there in a kind of semi-hibernation. This temptation threatens many Siberians, who can no longer manage to leave their cabins, where they regress to an embryonic state and replace the amniotic fluid with vodka.

It’s nice out today: zero degrees. I knock off twelve and a half miles. Lava and ice are magical elements. Both have undergone the metamorphic influence of another element: cold air freezes water, fiery temperatures produce molten rock – and both will be transformed again when warm air melts the ice and cold water petrifies the lava. Walking on a frozen surface is not a trifling thing. Our footsteps land on something in the making. Ice is one of the alchemical wonders of our world.

I’m a little more than six miles from Zavorotni, dragging my sledge northwards, when a snowmobile catches up with me and the driver cuts the engine. He and his passenger seem numb with cold. Mika and Natalia own one of the izbas at Zavorotni; they saw me from way off and headed for my silhouette advancing along the coast. Within seconds, Natalia spreads out a blanket on the black linoleum of the lake and sets out cognac, a fish pie and a thermos of coffee. We stretch out around this bounty. Russians have a genius for instantly producing the setting for a feast. How many times have I run into them, these muzhiks who hail me from the roadside? Gesturing, they invite me to sit down. In these situations, the new companions inevitably lean back onto their elbows, with legs crossed and furry shapkas pushed up on their foreheads. Sometimes a fire pops up, items leap out of bags, someone opens a bottle of vodka, there are bursts of laughter, glasses are filled. We share a loaf of bread, slice the rest of some elk liver. The conversation grows lively, addressing essentially three subjects: the current weather, the state of the track and terrain, the relative value of various modes of transport. Occasionally someone touches on the theme of the city and everyone agrees: you have to be nuts to live cheek by jowl like that. But out here, where there had been nothing, an oasis has sprung up within the borders of the blanket, and the secret of such transmutations is known only to peoples of nomadic blood. Perov[7] has painted such a scene in his celebrated The Hunters at Rest. We see three shabby men lounging on the ground; in front of them lie the ducks and hare they have just bagged. One of the hunters is smoking, and they’re all laughing as they chat about life. The light is soft, the grass velvety. This painting fascinates me: it says nothing about hope. It’s a snapshot of immediate happiness. The sky could fall and the three friends wouldn’t give a damn: they’re sitting there, on the grass, lords of all they survey. Like the three of us on the ice.

Natalia and Mika roar off again. We’ve taken the time to empty the small bottle of cognac in seven toasts. The sun is already setting as I struggle on towards Zavorotni. With my habits, I would have been better off living on the eastern shore of Baikal, where the sun rises later and the afternoons last longer.

I have thirteen and a half miles to go across the lake to reach home. As I’m preparing to leave Zavorotni, a squad of 4×4s appears on the horizon, their emergency roof lights flashing. Taking advantage of the statute exempting Zavorotni from the reserve regulations, V.M., a businessman from Irkutsk, is constructing an izba in the enclave. He’ll use the place for country parties, and invite his friends or clients out next year to fish, drink and shoot at animals. This morning he has come with his entourage to inspect the work site. Sergei and Yura are with him. The General, as he is called here, distributes his largesse to the guardians of the reserve. In front of the slope where the foundations of the large izba are rising, there’s a mob scene out on the ice. Everyone is drunk. Crates are being unloaded. One of V.M.’s lieutenants shows me his Saiga MK 7.62, which he always keeps handy to be ready if the fascists or the Yellow Peril show up on the ice. This is why Russian newspapers are full of stories about outings like these that go wrong. In Afghanistan, the Americans provide a finale for village festivities by shelling guests who celebrate by shooting into the air; Russians just shoot themselves up on their own.

A troop of drunken men, military weaponry, vodka, big vehicles and technology: a recipe for death. Yura watches the goings-on with weary resignation. A malignant energy is gathering in the bay; all Russia is here in miniature: the dangerous overlords, the faithful Tolstoyan servant, Sergei the woodsman. And the humble attendants, knowing what profit they will reap from hanging around the powerful, swallow their disgust. This country in which the bonds of vassalage still survive was the laboratory of communism. I long for one thing only: to get back to my desert.

V.M. offers to drive me home in his Mercedes. I climb into the enormous car with Sergei and two other Russians, one of whom falls instantly asleep, while the other shouts into a walkie-talkie for three minutes before realizing that the thing is dead. The radio spits out a rap song. Sergei doesn’t say a word. Some patronage comes at a heavy cost.

We are now having a drink at my place. Pointing to the window, V.M. says: ‘I lived in the USA for a year; I don’t like the Americans’ mentality. This is what I want: liberty, anarchy, the lake.’ We have more drinks. In the end, these guys are touching. They’ve got the mugs of fellows who’d tear Chechens limb from limb, and they delicately share their crackers with the tit. They and I are staying by this lake for the same reason, but in different ways. When they leave, I can breathe again. They have turned on the emergency light on the roof of the Mercedes, in case they hit a traffic jam.

Silence comes back to me, the immense silence that is not the absence of sound but the disappearance of any interlocutor. I feel love welling inside me for these woods harbouring deer, this lake gorged with fish, this sky crisscrossed by birds, and the intensity of my great beatnik love is proportional to the increasing distance between V.M.’s gang and my cabin. As they disappear, so does everything I fear: noise, the herd mentality, the urge to hunt – in short, the fever of the human mob.

I’m drunk and I need water. In the ten days I’ve been gone, my water holes have frozen over. I attack the lake with the ice axe, spending an hour and a half chopping out a handsome basin a yard wide and four feet deep. Water gushes up suddenly, and I dip into it with pleasure. This feeling of having earned one’s water. My arm muscles ache. Once upon a time, in the fields and forests, living kept us in shape.

In the world I left, the presence of others has some control over our actions, and maintains discipline. In the city, when shielded from the eyes of our neighbours, we behave less elegantly. Who has never eaten alone, standing in the kitchen, happy not to have to set the table, eagerly devouring a tin of cold ravioli? In a cabin, standards are always at risk of slipping. How many solitary Siberians, delivered from all social imperatives, knowing that there is no one to judge them, wind up flopped on a bed of cigarette butts, scratching their rashes? Crusoe was aware of this danger and decided, so as not to debase himself, to have supper every evening at a table and properly dressed, as if he had invited a guest.

Our fellow men confirm the reality of the world. If you close your eyes in the city, what a relief it is that reality doesn’t erase itself: others can still perceive it! The hermit is alone in the face of nature. As the sole consciousness contemplating reality, he bears the burden of the representation of the world, its revelation before the human gaze.

Boredom doesn’t frighten me in the least. There are worse pangs: the sorrow of not sharing with a loved one the beauty of lived moments. Solitude: what others miss out on by not being with the person who experiences it.

In Paris, I was warned before I left. Boredom would be my deadly enemy! I’d die of it! I listened politely. People who said such things assumed that they themselves were a superb form of entertainment. ‘Reduced to myself alone, I feed, it is true, on my own substance, but it does not run out…’ writes Rousseau in the Reveries.

Rousseau becomes aware of the challenge and ordeal of loneliness in the Fifth Walk. The solitary man must strictly devote himself to virtue, he says, and must never indulge in cruelty. If he behaves badly, the experience of his hermit’s way of life will impose a double penance on him: on the one hand, he will have to endure an atmosphere corrupted by his own baseness, and on the other, he’ll be forced to admit his own failure as a human being. In opposition to the natural man stands the civil man: ‘The civil man desires the approval of others; the solitary man must of necessity be content with himself, or his life is unbearable. And so the latter is forced to be virtuous.’ Rousseau’s solitude generates goodness, and through a feedback effect, it will dissolve the memory of human wickedness. Solitude is the balm applied to the wound caused by the distrust of one’s fellow men: ‘I would rather flee them than hate them,’ he writes in the Sixth Walk.

It is in the interest of the solitary man to treat his surroundings well, to rally to his cause all animals, plants and gods. Why should he increase the austerity of his state with the hostility of the world? The hermit refuses to brutalize his environment. It’s the ‘Saint Francis of Assisi syndrome’. The saint speaks to his brothers the birds, Buddha soothes the mad elephant with a gentle pat, Saint Seraphim feeds the bears, and Rousseau seeks consolation by botanizing.

At noon, I study the snow falling on the cedars. I try to let the sight sink into me so that I can follow the paths of as many snowflakes as possible. An exhausting exercise. And some people call this laziness!

This evening, the snow is still falling. Watching it, the Buddhist says, ‘Let’s not expect any change’; the Christian, ‘Tomorrow will be better’; the pagan, ‘What does all this mean?’; the Stoic, ‘We’ll see what happens’; the nihilist, ‘Let it bury everything’; and I say, ‘I’ll have to cut some wood before the woodpile gets snowed under.’ Then I put another log in the stove and go to bed.

Questions to clarify over the coming months:

The sky is still churning out snow. A morning at the window. In a cabin, life revolves around three activities:

If I wanted to flatter myself, I’d say that these tasks make me something of a sentinel and my cabin a lookout post for the empire of trees. Actually, I’m a concierge and the cabin is my loge. Next time I head off to the woods, perhaps I’ll hang out a sign that says Back soon.

Towards evening, the slanting sunlight gives the snow a steely glint. The flat white tints now gleam like mercury. I try to take a photo of this phenomenon but the image catches nothing of its brilliance. The vanity of photos. The frame reduces the real to its Euclidian value, killing the substance of things, compressing their flesh. Reality gets squashed against the screen. A world obsessed with images can’t taste the mysterious emanations of life. No photographic lens will capture the memories unfolded by a landscape in our hearts. And what a face sends us in the way of negative ions or impalpable invitations – what camera could show them to us?

My provisions are getting low. I have to figure out a way to fish. At Baikal the Siberians use a simple method: they dump a handful of what they call bormash, living water fleas collected in the marshes, through a hole in the ice. Attracted by this manna, fish gather at the hole, and the fisherman need only toss in his line. Having neither marshes nor bormash at hand, I borrow an old technique from the foresters: cutting quite a large hole in the ice fairly close to shore, where the lake is nine feet deep, I pile in cut cedar boughs and leave them to soak. In a few days, thousands of tiny organisms will have collected around the needles, ready to be harvested and used for bait.

The wind, still southerly, still smells like snow. The whiteness absorbs all sound. A rare silence reigns, and the air is pleasant. The thermometer shows 5°F.

Last night, the cracking and booming woke me up. A colossal blow stronger than the rest shook the rafters of the cabin. Rebelling against its incarceration, the mass of water is banging on the lid.

Still snowing. More stillness. Before, I was travelling around like an arrow from a bow; now I’m a stake driven into the ground. And I’m vegetalizing. My being is taking root. I’m slowing down, drinking lots of tea, becoming hypersensitive to variations in the light. I’m not eating meat any more. My cabin: a hot-house.

Spent a long time on firewood duty. Another tree cut down and up and stacked away. Then I cut paths with a shovel through the snow to the lakeshore, the banya and the woodpile. Tolstoy recommended working four hours a day to earn the right to shelter and sustenance.

Tonight, insomnia. I imagine the animals prowling or sleeping near the cabin at this moment. Minks no one wants to turn into coats, deer no one dreams of baking into pâtés, bears no one wants to kill to prove his virility.

These days, titmice tap at the window every morning. Their beaks sound my wake-up alarm. Mild weather; I set out a stool a mile or so from the shore and smoke a Romeo y Julieta No. 2 (a bit dry) while admiring the view. The mountains, until now, have been something I’ve learned to climb, descend, navigate and survey. I have not yet ever looked at them.

In the evening, Casanova. Locked up in Venice ‘under the Leads’, a small prison in the Doge’s palace for detainees of high status and named for the lead plates on the roof, Casanova writes: ‘Believe that in order to be free, you need only believe that you are.’ His liking for sugar-coated sweets filled with a powder made from the beloved’s hair. (I should have brought some of those with me.) His critique, made to Voltaire, of human utopias: ‘Your premier passion is the love of humanity… but you can only love it as it is. It does not deserve the blessings you would bestow upon it… I have never laughed so heartily as at Don Quixote having a hard time defending himself from the galley slaves he has just generously set free.’

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.

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.

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.

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 organisms 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.

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.’

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.

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!

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…’

I go to bed thinking there’s no point in keeping a journal when others can sum up their lives in thirty-one words!

This morning, 27°F. First spring-like day. The titmice are flocking beneath the southern window. Suddenly, gusts shake the cedars and snow falls. The landscape is striped with grey gossamer.

I read Chinese verses while sipping vodka. If the world collapsed, would I hear any echo? A cabin is a wooden bunker. The logs are such a handsome protective barrier! The pine beams, alcohol and poetry form a triple carapace. ‘My cabin is far away and me, I know nothing’ – a Russian proverb born in the taiga.

Poles apart are the diktats of Paris: ‘You will answer the telephone! You will be reachable at all times! You will have an opinion on everything! You will be indignant!’

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.

The wind strengthens. The world bangs on the window pane to be let in. Defend me, my books! Protect me, my bottle! Shield me, my cabin, from this north-east wind determined to distract me. If someone brought me a newspaper hot off the press right now, I’d take it for an earthquake.

I was almost certain they’d turn up: I happen across these verses by Du Mu, a ninth-century poet:[10]

I hot-footed it up to the ice waterfall today via a new route. I take the first valley to the south of my cabin and at 3,280 feet I begin working my way all around the shoulder. I pass the ridge and a few sentinels of rotten granite looming up through the snow. I continue along the flank of the slope on the hard snow, occasionally tripped up by a stretch of dwarf pines. It takes me five whole hours of hard labour to reach the left bank of the notch cradling the ice waterfall. My secret hope, in staying so long above the treeline, is to catch sight of a deer, but aside from some wolverine tracks disappearing into the woods and which fill me with joy, there is nothing.

Back at the lake, I catch my first fish at five o’clock. A second one three minutes later, and a third an hour and a half after that. Three quicksilver char, electric with fury, gleam on the ice. Their skin is shot through with quivers of energy. I kill them and look out at the plain, murmuring the words of thanks Siberians once addressed to the animal they had destroyed or the world they had just made a little poorer. In modern society, the carbon tax has replaced this ‘Thank you, I’m sorry.’

The happiness of having on your plate the fish you’ve caught, with a glass of water you’ve fetched, and the wood you’ve chopped in the stove: the hermit goes to the source. The flesh, water and wood are still fresh.

I remember my days in the city. I’d go down to shop for supper and wander along the aisles of a supermarket, glumly tossing items into my trolley. We’ve become the hunter-gatherers of a denatured, unnatural world.

The urban liberal, leftist, revolutionary and upper-middle-class citizen all pay money for bread, gas and taxes. The hermit asks nothing from the state and gives nothing to the state. He disappears into the woods and thrives there. His retreat constitutes a loss of income for the government. Becoming a loss of income should be the objective of true revolutionaries. A repast of grilled fish and blueberries gathered in the forest is more anti-statist than a protest demonstration bristling with black flags. Those who dynamite the citadel need the citadel. They are against the state in the sense that they lean against it. Walt Whitman: ‘I have nothing to do with this system, not even enough to oppose it.’ On that October day five years ago when I discovered old Walt’s Leaves of Grass, I had no idea that reading it would lead me to a cabin. It’s dangerous to open a book.

A retreat is a revolt. Entering one’s cabin means vanishing from surveillance screens. The hermit erases himself. He sends no more numeric traces, no telephonic signals, no banking data. He divests himself of all identity. He effects a kind of reverse hacking, and leaves the Great Game. No need, moreover, to head for the woods. Revolutionary asceticism can adapt to an urban milieu. 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 Hungarian lady who raised me taught me such things and I often think of her. 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.

At seven this evening, I attempt to make myself blini with my stash of flour kept in watertight bags. An hour later I place on my wooden plank a single charred pancake. I spend a half-hour outside until the smoke is gone from the cabin, then open a packet of Chinese noodles.

For a few days now, I’ve been conducting a Pavlovian experiment that is beginning to bear fruit. At nine in the morning, I play a tune on my flute at the window before tossing some crumbs to the titmice. This morning they arrived at the first notes, well before I’d set out their ration. I breathe deeply of the dawn air, surrounded by birds. The only thing missing is Snow White.

A day up in the heights. I head back up the ‘white valley’, a large combe filled with Japanese larches to the north of my cabin. After five hours of struggle in the deep snow I reach 5,250 feet. Sometimes I feel like a moose stuck up to the chest in glue. I think I’m about 980 feet from the summit, but it’s very cold and getting late. I head down to North Cedar Cape. Some lynx tracks cross my own. The animal must have passed by one or two hours earlier and still be somewhere in the vicinity. I bend down to sniff the paw prints but can’t smell a thing. I feel less alone. There were two of us traipsing around the neighbourhood today.

This evening, I split some wood in the clearing. First you must put the cleaving axe deep into the wood with a powerful blow. Once the metal is deeply set, you raise the axe and the log it’s stuck in – and whack the whole thing with all your strength down on the chopping block. If the blow is well struck, the log splits in two. Then all you have to do is lop off smaller pieces with a hatchet. My aim is true; I’m no longer missing my target. A month ago, it took me three times as long to prepare the necessary firewood. In a few weeks, I’ll be a chopping machine. When the metal strikes exactly where it should and the logs split with a ripping sound, I convince myself that cutting wood is a martial art.