I 'm walking between a long hedge on my left, and, on my right, a fence that separates me from the railroad.
Beyond the rails: other groves, fields, forests, endlessly it seems. But I can't go there.
On this path, as everywhere else, I am blocked, a prisoner of marked paths; simple corridors from which I cannot leave and which reduce the essence of the landscape, the essence of the world, to just a decor.
I am in the courtyard behind the building where we live, on this street just outside the city, overlooking seemingly endless fields and forests. I see men walking towards the field and the orchards behind the building. Perhaps they are in disguise. Or dressed in a strange way, unusual for the child that I am. I feel that a kind of game is being prepared, a very serious game; something warlike is coming out of all this; that's the feeling that comes over me anyway. I want to join them.
The countryside is decidedly uninteresting, unattractive, a purely utilitarian space in reality, and sometimes, incidentally and accidentally, beautiful. Paradise is not "the countryside", but a garden, that is to say nature staged, arranged, humanized.
There is a topos of the hero who goes wandering in snowy and photogenic forests to forget an intimate drama, and who finds himself there or loses himself there definitively.
All this obviously does not exist in reality. In reality, in real life, when one goes alone in the forest, whether in summer or in winter, whether to forget or to remember, one finds only breathlessness, the banality of nature and boredom. There is no wandering or poetic or saving perdition.
*
When I was younger I liked to walk in nature. But, to my painful discovery, the more time passes the more unbearable it is for me.
When I walk on a country road, along a canal, or on a forest path, I don't feel in nature; I just feel nowhere. This feeling is even more distressing when I go deep into the real wilderness.
I realized over time that I like landscapes where you can see the human presence, landscapes shaped by man; the garden rather than the forest. In the wilderness I feel like a stranger lost in a landscape that has nothing to tell me and where I have nothing to do. I assimilate it more and more to death, to nothingness, to insignificance.
