Consolations of the Forest

We alone are responsible for the gloominess of our lives. The world is grey because of our blandness. Life seems pallid? Change your life, head for the cabins. In the depths of the woods, if life remains dreary and your surroundings unbearable, the verdict is in: you can’t stand yourself! Make the necessary adjustments

Amorous geography: I prefer shingle beaches where people shiver in wool sweaters to those deep-fryer sandy strands littered with oily bodies. Baikal’s stony shores fall into the first category.
The plugs of slushy ice blocking the bay for several days have been dispersed by the storm; the wind punished the innocent cabin all night long.
2 JUNE

Zen monks called lingering in bed in the morning ‘forgetfulness in sleep’. My forgetfulness lasts until noon.
I assemble my kayak of blue canvas, but slowly, due to my lack of technical expertise. The instructions say the assembly should take two hours. I put in five, and it’s a major victory when I glide out onto the water this evening. With a few strokes of the paddle, I regain what the breakup of the ice had cost me: the possibility of seeing the mountain whole. It has turned green. The larches have got dressed again. Up to their chests in water, Aika and Bek, in a panic, can’t figure out how to follow me and let out keening moans. Then Aika realizes that I’ll eventually come back to the beach, so they need only run beside the lake in the same direction as I’m paddling.
‘Never go more than 300 feet from shore.’ This was Volodya’s injunction up at Elohin the last time I was there. The lake water is so cold that if you capsize, you will die. No one can survive in 37°F water, and fishermen have drowned here within shouting distance of the shore, even though Jules Verne mentions the legend of this lake in Michael Strogoff: ‘No Russian has ever drowned in Baikal.’
There is water, and there are winds. Both are treacherous. Born in the mountains, the sarma can awaken in minutes and whip up waves nine feet high. Boats are swept out and overturned. The lake takes payment in men for what they take away in fish: death pays the debt. I learned recently that Volodya lost his son to the lake five years ago, and then I understood why he spent hours staring out through the clear glass. Sometimes one contemplates a landscape while thinking of the people who once loved it; the atmosphere is steeped in remembrance of the dead.
The dogs slaver their joy when I return to shore. Avian squadrons streak through the sky. Reflections offer the chance to admire Baikal’s glory twice over.
3 JUNE

Addressing the young poet Franz Xaver Kappus, Rainer Maria Rilke writes in his letter of 17 February 1903: ‘If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it, blame yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches…’

Amorous geography: I prefer shingle beaches where people shiver in wool sweaters to those deep-fryer sandy strands littered with oily bodies. Baikal’s stony shores fall into the first category

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

Retreating to the forest cannot be everyone’s course. Eremitism is elitism

Robert Baden-Powell’s advice should be made a universal principle: ‘When through with a campsite, take care to leave two things behind. Firstly: nothing. Secondly: your thanks

I already knew that one must never travel with books related to one’s destination; in Venice, read Lermontov, but at Baikal, Byron

The Romans built for the ages; a Russian just wants to get through the winter

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

Volodya watches us in consternation. He does not see that the bare, amber-coloured wood is more beautiful to the eye than oilcloth. He listens as I explain this to him. I am the bourgeois defending the superiority of a parquet floor over linoleum. Aestheticism is a form of reactionary deviance.