Showing posts with label Tesson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tesson. Show all posts

Thursday, April 18, 2024

The Consolations of the Forest – Alone In A Cabin on the Siberian Taiga

 



I thought I would review a book sent to me by a friend who I emailed about the concept of suffering. At issue was whether suffering was useful or not. That issue was used as a social media cudgel against psychiatrists – specifically that psychiatrists are trained to alleviate suffering but if they did not people would benefit from it instead. That is obviously an overly simplistic argument by a person who does not know very much about psychiatric practice.  I don’t want to get too far afield from the actual book.

The author is Sylvain Tesson who is generally described as a world adventurer who writes about those adventures. He wrote this book over the course of 6 months living in relative isolation on the shores of Lake Baikal in Siberia when he was 39 years old.  He is currently 51.

Lake Baikal is in the Southern region of Siberia and it is the world’s oldest and deepest freshwater lake. Irkutsk – the 25th largest city in Russia in on the main outflow river from the lake – the Angara River about 45 miles from the lake. Irkutsk has a population of about 600,000 people and is probably best known to people of my generation from the board game Risk where it is a separate region rather than a city.  After reading the book I did research Tesson’s academic background and he has a degree in geopolitics. He is obviously well read and provides many of those references in the text.

Tesson’s previous exposure to Lake Baikal led to his interest in a more prolonged stay at a rough time of the year.  He documents what occurred along with his associations in diary form beginning on February 14 when he arrives on the lakeshore and ending on July 28 as a boat sent to pick him up is coming in from the horizon. He describes his motivation for this adventure in the introductory chapter. The climate in that area is temperate and comparable to Canada and the upper Midwestern states in the US.  He stayed during winter and spring and temperature ranges from -20 F to above freezing. He did this with the intention that living as a hermit would lead to desired changes – while documenting the day-to-day effects of the climate, changes in the ecosystem, occasional social contacts, his hiking and outdoor adventures, and the necessary work to maintain himself. It is presented mostly as a document of what he experienced and the associations (both autobiographical and literary) that he has with those experiences. At no point was this an argument that we can all be saved by living the life of a hermit.  It is more of a document about a part of that experience and what others have said about it.

He was well supplied for this adventure including 6 months of food and solar panels for recharging batteries and a satellite phone. Despite the relative isolation he describes plenty of traffic on both the frozen and thawed lake providing visitors and, in some cases, additional supplies. There was abundant wild life but he did not have a firearm apart from a flare gun for scaring off bears. His main protein source was fish from the lake.  He did not hunt any mammals or birds.  He had 67 books that were compromised mainly of humanities titles, but also some fiction and descriptions of surviving winter in Siberia. 

He described high levels of activity across terrain elevations and temperature ranges.  Much of the terrain was difficult to navigate because of the presence of underbrush, deep snow, and dwarf pines.  Tesson was undeterred by temperatures in the – 27F range.  He makes detailed observations and descriptions of the nature and scenery.  On some days he is trekking 10 miles to get to a fishing site, on others he is going 80 miles on a 6-day round trip.  He acknowledges that his levels of physical exertion and the resulting pain and exhaustion are high at times.     

What is it about hermitism that is life changing?  Tesson believes it is silence against a background of the splendor of nature existing forever in an idyllic setting. One of his last observations:

“It is good to know that out there in a forest in the world there is a cabin where something is possible, something fairly close to the sheer happiness of being alive.” (p. 232).

It seems apparent that he knew this all along and had to prove it to himself.  Full circle back to the theme of suffering.  Tesson suffered but that he tolerated it to attain a goal. At any point he could have called the nearest neighbor, called it off, and gone home.  The suffering is over at that point.  That is no equivalent to the suffering that accompanies medical problems that can seem random and senseless.  In many cases – people are expected to expend energy and tolerate suffering not toward any higher goal or advantage but because there are no effective treatments or they can’t access them.  It is also not the same as acute and unpredictable stress like an accident or natural catastrophe.

Despite seeing his hermitage as transformative he is circumspect about the experience.  He quotes Aldo Leopold that “hermitism is elitism”.  It is not a solution to the ecological problems of modern-day life because any mass exodus to the wild would destroy the forests. In fact he talks about how some of that had been done.

There is no description of the potential limitations of hermit life.  As a physician – medical emergencies and access to care is at the top of that list. To an extent that is age dependent but even a healthy 30-year-old can come down with acute appendicitis or break a bone.  He is very conscious about dying of exposure and guards against that.

In writing about the advantages – he does not consider alternatives.  For example, I was born and raised on the shore of one of the largest freshwater lakes in the world and could experience much of what Tesson experiences by walking 6 blocks to the lake.  There were no bears but plenty of fishing, ice transitions, and winter sports every year.  And all of that occurred in a town of 8,000 people and homes full of modern conveniences.  The largest close city was Duluth about 70 miles away with a population of 100,000.

A secondary observation is that the hermit in the woods is a more honorable position to be in because there is a smaller carbon footprint.  The hermit only uses the resources they need and does not squander energy or material goods.

One of the thought experiments prompted by Tesson’s hermetism is the characteristics of a transformative environment.  Each of us can probably think back to several of the environments in our life and not have to think too much about the impact it had on us.  Taking the histories of thousands of people illustrates how varied those environments are and how varied the responses can be to environments that are qualitatively similar. I spent a week hiking through Glacier National Park with a friend of mine when I was in my 20s. The scenery was magnificent and it was rigorous hiking at altitude (5393 ft). It was also populated by grizzly bears and you could always see them at a distance. There were bear warnings every day and we took them seriously. My friend thought I was too serious about it until we encountered a ranger in a fern filled valley loudly banging a shovel and his hard hat together to “warn the bears”. The effect it had on me was “great place to visit but I don’t want to live there.”

As a physician – the training and work environments are striking. Medical school was probably the most.  Going from the lecture hall to seeing people dying in front of you to being responsible for preventing those deaths probably had the most impact on me than anything. That is probably the closest I can come to an environment that Tesson describes as “changed myself completely.”  It was my equivalent of the Russian taiga.

It also raises the question of what is suffering and these days – what is trauma? There are a lot of variables. One of the critical dimensions seems to be voluntariness – whether people choose to suffer or not.  If they do – is there enough information ahead of time for true consent?  In this context – there is knowledge about what to expect and probably some experience in tolerating the environment. The example I am most familiar with is athletes where painful effort is required and career ending injuries are always possible. Tesson’s hermetism seems to fit this model compared with unexpected serious illness or injury.  The latter can also be life changing in unpredictable ways but it is not possible to predict whether the individual would consider the event a net positive or negative.

A second consideration is what increases our tolerance or in the more popular vernacular - resilience to the stress. In Tesson’s case he seems to attribute much to solace, silence, freedom, and the beauty of nature as a counterpoint to the noise, artificiality, regimentation, and excesses of modern life.  There are Darwinian considerations that he does not cover – primarily that many people in populations everywhere could not survive in such an environment.

Thirdly, people often view trying times much more positively in retrospect. I think back to another experience in my 20s – climbing Mt. Kenya with a coworker and friend. We were both habituated to 5,000 feet and ran regularly at that altitude. I have a single grainy photo of me climbing the scree at about 12,000 feet. We were poorly prepared and knew very little about mountaineering. The first night we stayed in a hut at about 10,000 feet and I had altitude sickness. That night hyraxes – small rodent like mammals weighing 4-10 pounds scurried about the hut running over us as we tried to sleep. I was able to recover the next day and continue the ascent but at the time it was a miserable experience and I could not wait to get off that mountain.  I recalled a quote from Pirsig that Zen happens in the valleys and not on the mountaintops.  In retrospect – I really like that old picture.  But at the time I was not sure I was going to make it.

Tesson’s literary and social observations are as interesting as his social and ecological ones.  I was interested in his take on DH Lawrence’ Lady Chatterley’s Lover. I have not read the book since college. It was widely considered to be an advance in explicit sexuality and was high controversial in the early 20th century.  It was banned as obscenity in several countries including the US. Some opinions focused more on sexual life as being part of the larger life picture.  Tesson describes it more of a “requiem for wounded nature.”  He focuses on the effect of mining and the industrial revolution on the landscape and how the main protagonist describes the adverse effects on the environment and the human spirit. (p.89).

Boredom was always an interesting topic to me as a psychiatrist. No matter where I am it seems to be a completely alien feeling. I can’t recall ever being bored. Tesson comments that he was warned that boredom might not only get the best of him in solitude but that boredom can kill. (p. 79).  He did not take the warning seriously.  He discusses why the solitary man must be a virtuous man.  He describes a “double penance”  that can occur and quotes Rosseau: “The civil man desires the approval of others, the solitary man must of necessity be content with himself, or his life is unbearable. And so, the latter is forced to be virtuous.”  The double penance occurs at both levels.  Contemporary theory just focusing on the cognitive aspects of boredom suggest that spontaneous thought is a factor and, in that department, Tesson never seem to be lacking.

Should you read this book?  If you have read any of my past book reviews, I try to make things as conditional as possible. I recently read a paper on how many people read books after they graduate from high school or college.  It is a surprisingly low percentage and the same survey looked at how many people read assigned texts in college and that percentage was far below expected. This book is logistically straightforward to read. It is arranged in diary form. Some days are described in a paragraph and the more detailed days takes several pages. It can be read by dates or months. It is a unique book that ties in life in the wilderness with literary references.  Some of the books referenced you may have read.  The others are interesting enough to investigate. Following Tesson’s lead – I like the idea that there are people living successfully in the Russian taiga and that he wrote about his adventure and philosophy.  It is good to know how one man experienced personal growth and the sheer happiness of being alive in such a setting.

George Dawson, MD, DFAPA

 

Supplemental:  I also want to credit the translator of this book from French – Linda Coverdale, PhD. There is a 7-page addendum - Translators Notes – that adds significant details about geology and the history of the area as well as literary references.

 

Reference:

1:  Tesson S.  The Consolations of the Forest – Alone In A Cabin on the Siberian Taiga.  Rizzoli International Publications, Inc. New York; 2014.