to the point of plagiarism, influenced by Malick, which is to say that my experience was a cheap imitation of the kind of authentically intimate experience of nature you might see in a film by Malick, a filmmaker for whose work I had never had much time to begin with.
As the afternoon wore on, though, this self-consciousness gradually receded, and I began to be able to look at things—the rippling of the grass in the breeze, the glistening of sunlight on the river—without the fact of my looking at them constantly presenting itself to me as evidence of my communion with nature. For several minutes, I watched a minuscule spider meander haltingly across a page of my notebook, before eventually insinuating itself into the little foldable paper pocket inside its rear cover, so that I had to fish it out by means of the concertinaed cream-colored leaflet inside the pocket, which leaflet I then instinctively and reflexively set about reading. I read about how this notebook of mine was heir and successor to the legendary stationery favored by such giants of nineteenth- and twentieth-century culture as Pablo Picasso and Ernest Hemingway and Bruce Chatwin. According to the blurb, it was Chatwin, a particularly obsessive fan of this small black notebook, who gave it the name Moleskine. Chatwin’s name was firmly associated in my mind with a kind of stylish writerly ruggedness, and I began to wonder whether, just as my notebook was heir and successor to the legendary stationery favored by Chatwin, I myself, given the kind of literary exercise I was currently engaged in, might one day come to be seen as an heir and successor to Chatwin, of whose writing I had admittedly never read so much as a word, but whom I imagined, perhaps even correctly, to be the kind of writer who went out into the wilderness alone, wearing stylishly practical apparel, featuring many pockets for notebooks and other useful appurtenances, and then came back and wrote about it in prose that was as stylish and practical as his apparel.
At which point, of course, I had been led directly back into the condition of self-consciousness I had briefly transcended, or imagined I had. And what was worse, this return to self-consciousness had been mediated by reading—and reading, of all things, high-end advertising copy—an activity that flew in the face of the whole idea of the solo, which was the removal of all impediments to a deep and authentic experience of nature.
I was then assailed, suddenly and with unexpected force, by a sense of my own ludicrousness. It was abruptly not at all clear to me what I thought I was up to, sitting for hours on end by a riverbank in the remote Scottish wilderness, contemplating nature and my place as a human being within it. In fact, that wouldn’t have been so bad; it would have been fine, actually. But what I was doing was attempting to contemplate this stuff and failing miserably. I looked eastward up the valley—although it could have been westward, as I had no real sense of my bearings, either literally or figuratively—toward the mountain Paul Kingsnorth had said he was heading toward for his own solo. I wondered what he was doing up there, up on his literal dark mountain. Certainly, I thought, he wouldn’t have been reading through the little leaflet that came with his Moleskine notebook and measuring himself against Bruce Chatwin, whose work he was almost certainly familiar with. I found it hard to imagine him even having a Moleskine notebook. I imagined him meditating for hours on end. I imagined him whittling a crude wind instrument out of a piece of wood he’d picked up in the grass by his tent. I imagined him not even having a tent, just sleeping out in the open. I imagined him receiving from the ether profound insights about our apocalyptic days, our days of trouble, which by the time he descended from the mountain the following afternoon would have been transfigured into finely crafted stories he would relate to everyone with great narrative skill and conviction. I tried to imagine the sort of insights he might be having, but failed to imagine anything at all, because such insights were, apparently, literally beyond my capacity to imagine.
Eventually, I relinquished the whole notion of profound insights, on the grounds that such interior events could not be deliberately cultivated, even if, and perhaps especially if, you had committed to