Death, nothingness, insignificance

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.

Intimate hells

Morning walk. I went up through the forest to Hellert... A mixture of deep boredom, painful loneliness, and excitement in front of some landscapes – I say excitement and not wonder, for example, because my mental state in this kind of situation looks like a kind of unhealthy exaltation (related to the fact of taking hundreds of photos, partly) more than a healthy appreciation of a landscape.

There is nothing refreshing, mentally and morally invigorating about the solitary walk for me. On the contrary, wandering and solitude lead me to strange, unhealthy, excessive mental states.

It is dangerous to walk around, to go for a walk outside. One believes to air oneself, to see the world, whereas one never wanders but in one's interior worlds, in the various levels of one's interior hells.

Night routes

For a few months, when I was about thirty years old, I had a curious habit, born from anxiety, insomnia and loneliness; that of making many trips by car, at night, driving at random in the countryside, with a destination chosen at random but always far away and still unknown, with the very precise aim of feeling lost, of feeling far away, of feeling in the middle of nowhere, alone, in the darkness and the cold light of the moon, driving towards a place where nobody was waiting for me and where I had nothing to do.

Now that I think about it, maybe it was a way to act out what was my situation in life in general, and in a way to mimic it: being alone, being lost, being in the dark. Moving towards an unknown and hazardous goal, which I knew in advance I would not find.