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

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.

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 scrapyards. 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.

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.

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.