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.

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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.

Small party at the airfield

Yesterday I went for a walk, as I often do, on the heights of the city, in the fields, near the airfield. I was shocked, more shocked, I mean, than just astonished, to see that the airfield was so crowded – it was obviously an open house or something like that. Whole families were wandering the runways, hangars and various barracks – including, of course, the airfield's absolutely packed bistro. Under the beautiful afternoon sun, it was an almost dreamlike scene, so unexpected was it; I have never seen the airfield as deserted, only the continuous roar of the engines in the sky, which accompanied my entire childhood, suggesting that it is still in activity. I entered the bistro, there were people chatting, drinking, laughing, even in the kitchens and even in the toilets - and I came face to face, one after the other, with my father, whom I hadn't seen for a while, and with Pierre and his mother, already a bit tipsy. I accepted a glass of cheap Champagne, offered by one of the waitresses who was walking around, painfully, with a tray. The impression of dreaming did not dissipate, on the contrary it was stronger and stronger.

While writing all this I think back to the reflection I had made to myself one day while hiking in the forest in the Northern Vosges: what if, at the end of this path, of this hard climb, on which I find myself alone, in the half-light of the forest, surrounded by fir trees and immense sandstone rocks, I came upon an inn, a bright, joyful, welcoming, noisy place, rather than on other kilometers of forest, dark, silent, indifferent, inhuman? The irruption of life, of light, of celebration, in a setting usually deserted and « dead », provokes something that goes beyond, as I said, simple astonishment. It is as if the world - which naturally goes towards death, silence, darkness, emptiness – suddenly reversed its tendency and that life reappeared in all its strength. And when, in addition, one finds relatives and friends there, in the midst of laughter and libations, it is like a glimpse of Heaven.

Hinterland

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.