pg. 52
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.
pg. 55 March 4
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, and the little cedar growing in front of the cabin, on which, every evening, the moon hangs up its lantern.
pg. 91 March 25
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 arousing them. It imposes responsibility. I am the ambassador of the human race in a forest devoid of men. Solitude fosters thought...It binds the hermit in friendship with plants and beasts and perhaps a little god just happening by.
pg. 115 April 8
Outdoors, chaos. The wind is carving the snowdrifts with its teeth. Gusts are giving the edge of the forest a whipping. The cedars are in the front line, taking their punishment.
April 9
Still storming. Inexhaustible, the wind, leading the assault against the forest....The lake, perfectly polished, gleams, stripped of all snow. I go for a little walk on the ice, pushed along by the wind...I'm almost two miles out on the lake...I hadn't anticipated having so much trouble getting back to the shore without crampons, going against the wind. I have to get down on my knees to offer less resistance. I progress by wedging my feet into the edges of cracks. Crawling across a frozen lake, bowed down before a storm, is a lesson in humility.
With a few more miles per hour, the wind would sweep me off to the middle of the lake like a hockey puck, forcing me to go ask for help on the other shore, fifty miles away...
pgs. 128, 129 April 19
We're stopped short by a crevasse…
The two edges of a fracture are not always on the same level. As it shifts, the ice may raise one of the lips, and by using this discrepancy, drivers sometimes succeed in launching their vehicles over such obstacles. I have confidence in Sergei, but I feel a twinge when, going full blast from a head start of a good 160 feet, he crosses himself.
We make it.
pg. 159 May 19
Wind flurries roil the waters. A rainbow, born at the tip of the cape, touches down in the middle of the lake, framing beneath its curve ebony clouds massed in the north. Lightning bolts strike just as the sky closes down, leaving only one shaft of light to turn the Buryat peaks blood-red as their range bears up under a ceiling of ink. I have just watched in the space of ten minutes, the death of winter.
He has done other interesting things:
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvain_Tesson
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In 1991, he crossed central Iceland on a motorcycle, and then took part in a cave exploration in Borneo. In 1993 and 1994, he toured the world by bicycle with Alexandre Poussin, whom he had known since secondary school. The two friends then completed their studies in geography. He wrote about the trip in 1996, in the book On a roulé sur la terre, for which he received the youth IGN prize.
Again with Poussin, in 1997 he crossed the Himalaya by foot, a five-month journey of 5000 kilometers from Bhutan to Tajikistan. He and Poussain then collaborated on the book La Marche dans le ciel: 5000 km à pied à travers l'Himalaya in 1998. In 1999 and 2000, he and photographer Priscilla Telmon crossed the steppes of central Asia from Kazakhstan to Uzbekistan on horseback. That trip led to two books: La Chevauchée des steppes in 2001, and Carnets de Steppes: à cheval à travers l'Asie centrale in 2002. In 2001 and 2002, he participated in archeological expeditions in Pakistan and Afghanistan...
In 2010, Tesson undertook a project to live alone for six months on the shores of Lake Baikal in a rustic cabin during winter, about 50 km south of Irkutsk. In his own words, "the recipe for happiness: a window on Baikal, a table by the window." He recounted his time in Siberia in a book, The Consolations of the Forest: Alone in a Cabin on the Siberian Taiga. It won the 2014 Dolman Best Travel Book Award. He also released a film titled Alone, 180 days on Lake Baikal (2011), directed by Tesson and Florence Tran.