The
wilderness of coastal north Norfolk possesses a solitariness and a melancholy
beauty all of its own that cannot I think be replicated. It is not a
spectacular landscape, even if it is a primal, reticent and fascinating one.
But in preparing to leave it after the break-up of my marriage, I was brought
to mind of the French travel writer Sylvain Tesson, who for six months in 2010
– the year my wife and I bought our coastal home – lived in a rudimentary hut,
altogether alone, in the icy wastes of Siberia alongside the looming depths of
prehistoric and dramatic Lake Baikal. Six months into his monastic and
Thoreau-like vigil, with only bears, birds and occasional foresters and
trappers for company, Sylvain received a five-line text message via his
emergency satellite phone that his girlfriend had determined to leave him.
Later on that evening, overcome by grief and exhausted by weeping, he records
in his journal that a seal broke through the ice, in front of the beach
adjacent to his lonely shack. The sight of it prompts the distraught writer to
wonder, half-seriously, if the animal is in fact the woman he loved, ‘come to
smile at me … I must manage to speak to her one last time’. As Tesson suggests, the opportunity for appropriate or
final words doesn’t always present itself, when relationships go irrevocably
awry. (‘Time doesn’t hand out second chances.’) The freedom to love is always
counterpointed by the freedom to leave, while love itself constitutes the
ultimate voyage of doubt. However well that you think that you know someone,
however much you think they are uniquely recognisable, no close companion is
ever understood in their entirety. That is because human beings are not
problems to be solved but mysteries to be cherished and appreciated – even at
great personal cost and risk. Like Baikal, we all have hidden depths which can
never be clearly seen. Perhaps those depths are blurry and indistinct, even to
ourselves. We don’t know exactly when or where our feet will touch bottom. Most
icebergs show us only their tips, not the massive stumps that extend hundreds
or even thousands of feet into the water and which will never break its numbing
and glacial surface. What’s swimming down there in the abyss may not be what we
want to find. For the abandoned Tesson, the silence of his isolation has in
previous days led to a kind of personal epiphany, where even mundane, everyday
things become holy and sanctified: ‘Light ennobles all it touches even
glancingly: wood, the row of books, the knife handles, the curve of a face and
of time going by, even the dust motes in the air’. This leads him to reflect
that ‘that’s not nothing, to be specks of dust in this world’. Such revelations do not however lead to belief, and the
writer is quick to reject any notion of a personal faith: ‘Strange, this need
for transcendence. Why believe in a God outside His own creation? The crackling
of the ice, the gentleness of the titmice, and the puissance of the mountains
stir me more than any idea of the master of these ceremonies. They are enough
for me. If I were God, I would atomise myself into millions of facets so I
could dwell in ice crystals, cedar needles, the sweat of women, the scales of
potted char, and the eyes of the lynx. More exhilarating than floating about in
infinite space, watching from afar as the blue planet self-destructs’. Such joyous celebration of immanence is a salutary reminder
that the experience of landscape and loss is invariably ambiguous. It is always
individual and it is forever distinct. We might take comfort in the natural
world, when confronted with sudden absence – even a world so badly threatened
by pollution and precipitate warming. We might find solace for our loneliness
in the snow that covers the conifers on the mountains, or the first flowers of
spring or the inquisitive seal that reminds us of the attentions of departed
lover or friend. But not all pathways lead to divinity. For some, there is only
an absence in the heart that can never be filled, or a hut in the woods beside
a spring that is always brackish. Such experiences are as compellingly
authentic and valid as their contrary faith-based counterparts.
Ursula Le Guin, most humane and wise of
authors, writes in one of her novels that ‘Freedom is a great and strange
burden for the spirit to undertake. It is not easy. It is not a gift given, but
a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one. The road goes upward towards
the light; but the laden traveller may never reach the end of it’. In choosing the
freedom to hope we are also embracing the freedom to doubt that there is any
real certainty or positivity ahead for us. There are no sureties on the long
roads to fulfilment. Yet that does not mean there are not also destinations
worth getting to. Faith in the future, in some outcome as yet unseen, but
nevertheless ardently to be hoped for, may involve creative agnosticism, and
considerable incertitude. It may involve moments of abjectness. It may at times
mean cursing God. It may even mean denying God. Many people of faith have
experienced moments of abandonment, even in the end of negation. The flight of
Peter from Gethsemane is not sui generis.
But to give oneself permission to doubt, to raise fundamental and difficult
questions about religious ultimacy, does not mean embracing the absence of all
transcendent meaning in the universe – or asserting that, despite the setbacks
we suffer, and the many awful things that we have to endure, that wider things
have no spiritual pregnancy at all.
The
point about doubt is that if you care enough about a relationship with
divinity, whatever that may involve, and then question the legitimacy and
veracity of these relations without opting for a permanent or wholesale
rejection – which already suggests a measure of open-mindedness to an opposing
outcome – then things must to some degree matter. They must be worth
having some hesitancy or uncertainty about. Jesus thought himself
finally abandoned by God in the doubt and dark dereliction of a humiliating
death intended for a criminal. This was perhaps, as he conceived it, the
ultimate betrayal and desertion. But the Christian story, or at least the
ongoing story of the founder’s religion, did not end there
– or with his cry ‘Eloi, Eloi, lama
sabachthani’. In the rich and painful hinterlands of religious ambiguity,
there is more than one road to the sea.
This is an
extract from Exploring Doubt: Landscapes of Loss and Longing by Alex Wright, available now in paperback, priced
£12.99.
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