Image: From Erling Kagge’s Silence: In the Age of Noise, via 52 Insights.
I had planned to stay at a Cistercian monastery a few hours north of here for spring break. But the monks are all booked up that week. My strange notions of spring break may not be uniquely strange.
Instead I’ve reserved a campsite in the Channel Islands for that week. I’ll drive down from San Francisco almost to Los Angeles, haul myself and six days’ worth of gear and food and water onto a ferry, and settle in for the three-hour channel crossing, hoping to spot a whale. Mostly I will be pleased to be on my own and beyond the reach of the wireless networks in which I am usually so entangled.
I’ve mentioned my plans to a couple of people. The first question each has asked has been, “Who are you going with?”
I do a lot of things on my own in the outdoors. This is in part because my patience for coordinating with other people’s plans and schedules and preferences runs to vanishing.
More so, it is because I find the experience for which I go to the outdoors — one of silence, active meditation, and getting into the present — disrupted by conversation or the expectation thereof. I guard my silence and solitude carefully, and in the moment I never wish for another person to be there with me. It’s nice to share a meal and conversation at the end of a day of hiking, and that’s what other campers are for.
But when people ask me who I’m going with, they seem vaguely puzzled when I respond that I’m going on my own. I just smile when really I’d like to explain the feeling of presentness and wholeness I have in my own company in a way that’s both accurate and doesn’t sound defensive. I might have to simply direct them to this passage from Erling Kagge’s Silence: In the Age of Noise, which I read this week.
It feels good to share a joy.
On hectic days, I sometimes long for someone with whom I could do that. But this can also feel disruptive. In my late teens, I heard a story about the war hero Claus Helberg, who later became a respected guide in Norway’s mountain region. The story seems like a random but precise response to Wittgenstein’s idea about how, as long as you don’t attempt “to speak the unspeakable, nothing is lost.”
Early one morning, Helberg led a group of hikers out from Finsehytta, a famed Norwegian mountain cabin. The summer light was returning, winter had released its hold, and new colours were emerging everywhere. The conditions were fantastic, and instead of commenting on it he began the hike by handing out slips of paper to each of the participants on which was written: “Yes, it is totally amazing.”
Wittgenstein only partly followed his own ban on speaking about that which is unspeakable. He was not silent on the subject of remaining silent, but often talked about it. Helberg went further than Wittgenstein. He simply fell silent.
I’ve often thought of that story. After a long life on the mountain, and with an expansive understanding of occupying German forces, Helberg understood the way that words create boundaries for our experiences. He wanted to avoid a situation in which members of his group were continuously remarking to one another throughout the day on just how “amazing” everything was, instead of actually concentrating on it being amazing.
Reading the above passage — the whole book, really — I was pleased to learn that other people have found ways to express this feeling of wanting to experience deeply first and share only later. (I was also delighted to learn that a mountain cabin can be famed, at least in Norway.)
I would recommend Silence with the caveat that it requires some patience. As Jodie Noel Vinson writes in the Kenyon Review, Kagge’s ruminations on silence are most effective when tethered to anecdotes.
I’ve since been trying to acquaint myself with Kagge, because it seems that we share a certain way of thinking and being in the world. So far, I’ve learned that he was a poor student, worked as a lawyer, and made a name for himself in the 1990s as a record-setting explorer of cold places — Everest, the Arctic, and the Antarctic — becoming the first person to complete the Three Poles Challenge [1]. After summiting Everest, he spent a year reading philosophy at Cambridge [1]. He returned to Oslo when his then-girlfriend became pregnant and founded Vorlag Kagge, a publishing house that he still runs [2]. He also collects art and writes [2]. Most recently, he’s written a book on walking, the English translation of which is due to be published in late April of this year [3].
He is an icon in Norway, internationally famous, a member of the Explorers’ Club [4]. Yet he seems famous in an unassuming way, perhaps because I hadn’t heard of him until recently. And perhaps because he doesn’t seem to fit in with the hyper-macho culture of explorers and daredevils who pit themselves against nature — a cultural trope that Lucia Graves critiques in a recent article for Pacific Standard [6]. In fact, every profile or interview of Kagge that I’ve come across mentions that he is a father to three daughters, all born after he completed the Three Poles Challenge.
the main post
Erling Kagge
Interview, Brian Patrick Eha for Avaunt Magazine
Interview, in Collector's Agenda
In Search of Silence, Steven Kurutz in the New York Times
Lunch with the FT, Richard Milne in the Financial Times
Interview, in 52 Insights
from pillar to post
other links from my bookmarks folder
‘Free Solo’ Celebrates Man vs. Nature — But Nature Lost Long Ago, by Lucia Graves, who asks “When will we stop heroizing men for risking the world along with their lives?”
Cool Runnings, by Blair Braverman, who profiles five mushers who will compete in this year’s Iditarod. I’ve begun reading Braverman’s memoir, Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube, and catching up on Tough Love, her advice column for Outside Magazine.
To Sleep With Anger Is a Masterpiece From an Overlooked Film Pioneer, by David Sims, introduced me to the work of Charles Burnett, whom The New York Times once described as “the nation’s least-known great filmmaker.”
Guilty, by Seth Stevenson, who revisits his experience as a juror for a murder trial 20 years ago. He writes, “In 1998, I helped convict two men of murder. I’ve regretted it ever since.”
A Black Legacy, Wrapped Up in Fur, by Jasmine Sanders, who writes about the cultural significance of fur coats for black women. Robin Young interviewed Sanders for WBUR.
the shit post
I have a running email chain with my mum and her brother about all things scatalogical in the news. I’ll feature some of the most interesting articles here.
The latest: the warty comb jelly is the first known case of an animal with a transient anus. From what I can tell, it’s transient in both time and space.