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.
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.
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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.
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.
Stroll on the heights of Neunkirch, this afternoon – as often these days. When I turned off, after the airfield, to go to the forest, along these endless and inextricable thickets permanently flown over, it seems, by whole nations of crows, I noticed a strange grove. By some chance or necessity, it was exactly on a corridor. It seemed as if a strong draught was coming out of it. And there was something cheerful and lively about this draught, which, I don't know why, evoked adventure, travel, novelty.
I visited, this weekend, in Alsace, with Laurence, several castles, intact or in ruins, but always in height, that goes without saying, and surrounded by a sea of fir trees. Winter sun. Many tourists. There is obviously a real popular fascination for these places. A sentimental, cultural attachment. And even stronger than that: atavistic. I had the impression while wandering in these places that the crowd came there obscurely to seek a lost natural environment, a social organization of which it drags the nostalgia without being able to name it; and that perhaps also these old stones would have a new role to play in the new Middle Age which announces itself.
Yesterday I thought about a school trip I took when I was about sixteen or seventeen. I was in high school. We went by bus as usual. I can't remember what we were going to visit or where exactly; it was some kind of eco-museum in Germany. Near Freiburg perhaps? I know I visited that town at the time, although I can't remember what it was.
We drove through a huge, endless forest; it seems to me now that we spent hours there. It was as if this forest was the end of the world and a border with... something else.
Then there were fields; a straight plain, which seemed equally endless. The eco-museum stood there, a group of about ten wooden houses, obviously centuries old, which could be visited and where everyday objects from the old days were displayed. Naturally, no one lived there any more. It seemed to me a huge waste: why not take advantage of such a living environment and settle there?
I left the place a bit mixed, happy to have seen beautiful things but frustrated to know that I would never live in such a setting, and that no one here would either. Contemporary architecture, functionalist and rejecting the very idea of Beauty, has always repulsed me. The visit was over, my comrades and I had free time to buy postcards and other goods in the souvenir shop; with a friend I had decided to go away and explore the surroundings. The fields continued up to a very steep drop, I won't call it a ravine, as it wasn't a steep drop, but you had to take metal stairs embedded in the rock to get down.
The path led to a small wood of widely spaced birch trees which in turn, after a hundred metres or so, led to another village, exactly the same as the first, except that it was inhabited. It looked like those ridiculous folklore shows on German television, which we used to watch in my parents' house, as we lived near the border. The typical clothes, the rural setting, the general impression of being in an eternal, archetypal Germany, where time has stopped...
Discovering this hidden, unsuspected human community, this living Hinterland, which secretly survives away from the modern world, which does everything the opposite of what seems reasonable and desirable for ordinary people, was an extremely strong, extremely moving experience for me. I also realised that what is sometimes taken for an absolute exception and a vestige (the ecomuseum) turns out to be only one element of an unsuspected, very real and very alive whole.
