“My first awareness of Reality with a capital ‘R’ came to me in the form of hunger, that nagging devouring of my own flesh from which there is no escape except through death, that incessant longing that has to be satisfied at all costs. My second awareness came in the form of freezing cold, which kills more quickly. In the face of this awareness, the real me– a vulnerable, petty, selfish, greedy, cowardly me– surfaced.

I felt as if Art had given us all a great gift. The day he lay frozen on the tundra and I sat beside him in the sunlight, I felt a warm spiritual peace envelop me. …I had come to understand that life is good. …Reality had never seemed so sweet.

By the end of the trip, we loved one another as we had never loved before, because outside that perimeter of love lay terror, terror of lying alone on that ever-frozen land. …How graciously it fed us; how quickly it killed Art. And so we huddled in our spiritual cocoon of love, and lived in beauty, frightened to death.”

–from George James Grinnell, A Death on the Barrens

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“Sometimes I go about pitying myself, and all the time I am being carried on great winds across the sky.”

–“Ojibway saying,” as quoted in George James Grinnell’s A Death on the Barrens

12/22/23:

Montana snow drought.

not too late to go hiking

And what if my whole life, my conscious life, has indeed been “not right”?

It occurred to him that those barely noticeable impulses he had felt to fight against what highly placed people considered good, barely noticeable impulses which he had immediately driven away– that they might have been the right thing, and all the rest might have been not right. …He tried to defend it all to himself. And he suddenly felt all the weakness of what he was defending. And there was nothing to defend.

“But if that’s so, and I am quitting this life with the consciousness that I have ruined everything that was given me, and it is impossible to rectify, what then?” …In the morning, when he saw the footman, then his wife, then his daughter, then the doctor– their every movement, their every word confirmed the terrible truth revealed to him that night. In them he saw himself, all that he had lived by, and saw clearly that it was not right, that it was all a terrible, vast deception concealing both life and death.

–from The Death of Ivan Ilyich, by Leo Tolstoy

The supreme triumph of reason, which is analytical, that is, destructive and dissolvent, is to cast doubt upon its own validity. A stomach ulcer ends by causing the stomach to digest itself, and reason ends by destroying the immediate and absolute validity of the concept of truth and of the concept of necessity. Both concepts are relative: there is no absolute truth, no absolute necessity. We call true that concept which agrees with the general system of all our concepts; and we call true that perception which does not contradict the system of our perceptions; truth, then, is coherence, connection.

(…) And so, neither the vital longing for human immortality can count on any rational confirmation nor can reason supply us with any incentive or consolation in life or any true end purpose for it. And yet, here in the depths of the abyss, the despair of the will and of the heart meets rational scepticism and in the encounter they embrace like brothers. And from this embrace, this tragic embrace, that is, this intimately loving embrace, will surge a wellspring of life, a life both true and terrible. It is scepticism, uncertainty, the final position reached by reason in its exercise of self-analysis, the analysis of its own validity, that provides a foundation upon which the heart’s despair must build its hope.

Miguel de Unamuno, “The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations,” p. 116-18

the elk hunt

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head of West Fork Mill Creek/ Pine Creek Trail, Bear Creek/ pink-edged sulphur on aster/ prehistoric projectile point/ eyelash cup (Scutellinia scutellata)/ pinesap/ unnamed lake basin, Mineral and Emigrant mountains in distance/ alpine vagrant form of Hayden’s rimmed navel lichen (Rhizoplaca haydenii)/ yellow suillus (Suillus americanus)/ former route of Forest Service trail destroyed by 2022 floods/ violet webcap (Cortinarius violaceus)/ view from Ash Mountain highpoint/ secondary growth in West Fork Mill Creek