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

If he wishes to safeguard his mental health, an anchorite cast up on the shore must live in the moment. Let him begin to elaborate plans, and he will descend into madness. The present: a protective straitjacket against the sirens of the future.

The evening clouds put cotton nightcaps on the drowsy mountains.

Wild roses cluster at the feet of trees along the edge of the forest, turning their corollas towards their god, the Sun. I think of the description of the garden on the rue Plumet in Les Misérables . Jean Valjean has let it lie fallow, and Hugo makes a profession of pantheistic faith: ‘Everything toils at everything… No thinker would dare maintain that the scent of the hawthorn is useless to the constellations… Between beings and things, there are marvellous relations…’

Taking Hugo’s question even further: who would claim that the fawn never dreams of tumbling surf, that the wind feels nothing when it strikes the wall, that dawn is unmoved by the trilling of titmice?

Figure it takes one day to split a supply of wood, catch four char, feed the dogs, repair the boards of a shed somewhat battered by a storm, and read Typhoon . Conrad’s Captain MacWhirr is an anti-Ahab: he stands on the threshold of destiny, accepts the typhoon, does not seek to escape what is unavoidable. Why should we be moved by what is not of our own making? No white whale is worth getting worked up about. Carried to an extreme, indifference makes men seem obstinate, and Conrad’s MacWhirr begins to seem a brute. The captain would make a good Russian hero. In Russia, to indicate that one doesn’t give a damn, one says ‘ mnyeh po figou ’. And ‘pofigism’ is a resigned indifference to all things. Russians boast of facing the convulsions of history, the challenges of the climate, and the villainy of their leaders with their own inner pofigism, which is not dependent on Stoic resignation or Buddhist detachment. Pofigism has no ambition to guide mankind to the virtue of Seneca or to hand out karmic merit badges. Russians ask simply that they be allowed to empty a bottle today because tomorrow will be worse than yesterday. Pofigism is a state of inner passivity corrected by a vital force. The deep contempt in which he holds all hope does not prevent the pofigist – whose event horizon is the end of the day – from snatching as much enjoyment as possible from the passing hours. MacWhirr, sweating on the bridge of his ship as he awaits the typhoon, might be one of the faithful in this Church of No Hope.

The fog surprises me as I’m cutting from cape to cape in the kayak. The sun manages to deploy its glories, lining breaks in the mist with spiky crowns like blindingly bright sea urchins. It’s weather for being attacked by the Monster of Baikal. I go ashore in front of the abandoned cabin and plunge into the forest towards the marshes, seeking wild onions, rhubarb and bear’s garlic. The mosquitoes mob me. I’d like to drag the people who write ads for mosquito repellant through here stark naked, so they’ll tone down the bull on their labels. The ponds sparkle. The cedars darken the shores, and the wild roses brighten them. I return to the cabin laden with aromatic herbs. The lake is turning pink as clouds mottle the sky, now covered with lavender bruises and streaked with cyan blue. You’d need to be a forensic pathologist to fully appreciate a Baikalian sunset.

A shower on the beach. I’m washing with buckets of lukewarm water when Volodya arrives from Elohin in his little boat, bearing gifts of smoked fish. He has come to discuss a problem that enthrals Russians. ‘There are riots in your French cities! The Arabs are in revolt! Everything’s going up in flames.’ My Russian vocabulary is too small to tell him that things are less serious but more complicated than that. And anyway, are they really? I’d have to explain that these movements are expressions of social anger and that the ethnic origins of the demonstrators may well impress the Russians, but are not stressed by French commentators. I’d have to show him that this is not a revolution. These public disturbances don’t aim to overthrow bourgeois society but to break into it. Are these young people demanding liberty, power and glory? Why are they burning cars in those pockets of poverty? To protest against the savaging of society by technology and the market? Or in despair at not owning the biggest and most beautiful cars themselves?

I remember my forays into such ‘sensitive’ neighbourhoods – an adjective applied to places marked by a certain odour of brutality. The little kids were quite lively and did me the honour of listening to what I had to say, but they made fun of my equipment, how I was dressed and the way I talked. What I took away from such encounters was that they invest enormous tribal significance in clothing and conformist behaviour, cultivate a sense of neighbourhood loyalty, love expensive things, demonstrate an unhealthy obsession with appearance, believe that might makes right, show little curiosity about the other , and have their own linguistic codes: the distinctive signs of bourgeois society.

Ye gods of the woods – to live out here and insult these mountains by paying any attention to such things! As soon as Volodya takes off, I chase away such concerns and get back to my chores and my books.

Today I scale rugged terrain to 5,250 feet and clamber back down again: so much for the statistics. I’d decided to tackle the peak directly behind the cabin. First comes the long and difficult climb through the taiga. I get into the underbrush after 2,800 feet. The far edge of the forest marks the threshold of the upper world, where boulders torn from the summits have rolled all the way down to the ramparts of the trees. The silence is vast and still. The dogs pant in the heat. We drink straight from the cascading torrent. The canyon is growing tighter, giving Aika and Bek trouble with its rock steps and ledges. I sit down by clumps of mountain anemones to study the slow collapse of woods and scree slopes down to the lakeshore below.

It seems that some men check out women’s hips to assess whether they will bear children easily. Others consider their eyes for signs that they will prove captivating lovers, or think the length of their fingers will reveal something about their sensuality. And some men study geography in the same ways.

These mountains offer nothing but a host of immediate sensations. Man will never improve on these ranges. Calculating souls will get nothing for their pains in this unpromising landscape wracked with grandeur, for it is unconquerable. Here nature relaxes for the sole appreciation of minds free from all ambition. The taiga is not a good playground for dreams of cultivation. Developers, buzz off back to Tuscany! Under temperate skies, there the land waits for man to mould it into countryside. Here, in this amphitheatre, the elements reign for eternity. There were epic battles in volcanic periods, but now all is calm. The landscape: geology in repose.

At an elevation of 5,600 feet, I cut across scree slopes towards the peak. Up there, along the ridge dividing the basins of Lake Baikal and the River Lena, I have lunch with the dogs: three smoked fish and some wild onion. Another hour’s march across dried lichens to the top at 6,890 feet, where the dogs and I nestle together for a nap. Until we’re driven off by mosquitoes, the guardians of the summit, who defend it against all comers. Nature, in its genius, has deployed not armies of monstrous creatures, vulnerable to rifle fire, but tiny flying syringes whose buzzing drives one insane.

We beat a retreat down the north-eastern versant and scramble down a scree slope, dislodging mini-avalanches with every step. I pass through a firn field – old snow not quite hardened yet into glacier ice – canted at a 40º angle, using two fine slabs of schist to cut out steps. The dogs howl before resigning themselves to going around the obstacle, and when the slope moderates, we start sinking into the snow. At 3,000 feet, confronted with a suspicious transverse fault, I instinctively leave the firn for its rocky edges, where a stream appears; the river beneath the snow briefly shows itself again before vanishing into a gulf a hundred feet below.