Solitude

Sweet spot

A journey around living alone
Jun 29th 2013
[abridged]
“Consolations of the Forest” is about staying put, he lived the simple life, much of it reading and thinking—about nature, time and himself. “Nothing is as good as solitude,” he says, adding: “The only thing I need to make me perfectly happy is someone to whom I could explain this.” Instead he described the pleasures to himself in a diary; “Consolations of the Forest” is the happy result.

The sound of cracking ice brings Schopenhauer to mind. Staggered by the view from a mountaintop, he can think only of Hegel’s words: So ist (“It is so”). His writing is elegant and urbane, full of paradoxes, aphorisms and conceits: “The sky has powdered the taiga [the northern forest], shaking velvety down over the vert-de-bronze of the cedars. Winter forest: a silvery fur tossed onto the shoulders of the terrain.”

He loves the taiga and understands the Russians’ almost mystical attachment to it. The “sweet spot” is the present moment, that special place “between longing and regret”