15/12/2025 ☼ books ☼ reflection ☼ nothing

For 3 years during Covid, I lived in crumbling houses in depopulated hamlets on two different mountains in the Haute-Loire, one of the departements of France located on the volcanic plateau of the Auvergne. At dinner last week, someone asked me what one actually does when living alone in an otherwise uninhabited, rural, remote hamlet for an extended period.

Boredom and distress seem to loom large in peoples’ minds when it comes to thinking about living in such isolation. Let’s be clear: It was a global pandemic and it wasn’t always good times in the Auvergne. But it was a very good time all told, and I would be living on those mountains still if I could find a way to make a living there.

What to do when there’s nothing to do? In the unusually snowy winter between 2020 and 2021, I walked the same 6ish kilometer loop of trails on my mountain every day. Maybe a hundred circuits, in rain, mist, sun, wind, and snow. Those trails were the same every day, but also different each time. For over a decade, I had a daily yoga practice where the sequence of asanas was identical every day, yet every day was different. Removing one kind of variation gives other kinds of variation space to emerge and become visible.

Around the mountain.

When there’s “nothing” to pay attention to, small features of the environment become noticeable and incredibly exciting. No neighbours whose streaming tv obsessions impinge upon your aural space, no dinner with people you don’t really want to spend a few hours with, no intrusive road noises from under the window. So minor obsessions form, entirely different ones from those specific to being in cities surrounded by people.

I developed one for mushrooms. Because I’m deeply risk-averse, I learned how to identify two kinds of chanterelles, pieds de mouton (undersides covered with a fuzz of tiny bumps instead of gills; great texture when cooked fast and hot), those brainlike Sparassis that are always filled with bits of leaf litter but superb to eat, and of course the cèpe which was the best of all.

The forest walks in the autumn became a daily casual practice of looking for mushrooms without actually looking for them. I discovered that trying hard to find mushrooms didn’t work, but an oblique and generalised inclination to pick up mushrooms usually did. I developed a habit of slicing mushrooms off at the base just below the soil and brushing each one clean before putting it into the bag. This fastidiousness saves time later, and many mushroomers find it deeply suspect.

Two hours not-looking for cèpes.

Winter is the season of introspection. A series of immense storms was forecast, dropping vast quantities of snow that would probably leave the steep mountain path leading up to my small and poorly insulated stone house impassable for weeks, at least for a 20-year-old VW Golf without much puissance.

Called the local fuel merchant to come by with his tanker trailer of appallingly polluting heavy fuel oil called gazout to fill up the enormous tank under the field that I’m told used to be a stable, laid in lots of freezable product and dried legumes at the market in Le Puy, then stayed on the mountain for 5 weeks. (I had also accidentally left the only car key in a freezer in an outbuilding, but the car would not have made it out of the little depression the house was in anyway. Maybe.)

But that was okay because it can be quite nice to be well-stocked and tucked away wrapped in lots of warm clothing in a small, moderately well-insulated room in a cold house for several weeks. Mornings were for those looping paths circling the mountain, wading through fresh, clean snow that had fallen overnight and hearing faintly through the trees the small handful of other people out with their dogs, then coming home and making a hot mug of tea, and assembling lunch and dinner out of a continually evolving assortment of enchained leftovers.

So being alone for weeks or months with nothing much to do can be not so hard. It isn’t work and it isn’t vacation, but the days are just packed nonetheless.

After that dinner, I got a message asking what books could be read to prepare for an adventure in non-vacation solitude. I hadn’t read anything specifically to prepare for going to the Auvergne. (I went because London was shutting down again in late 2020, and work had gone entirely remote for the foreseeable future.)

But when I started thinking about why I’d considered going to the middle of nowhere in the first place, I realised that several decades of indiscriminate reading had gradually nudged me to the point of being ready to go somewhere where there’s nothing to do.

Some of these readings are below.

The Fish Can Sing (Halldór Laxness; 1957): This book uses simple language and simple constructions, almost like a children’s book, to describe precisely the grimness of living in rural isolation and the grandeur of living a cosmopolitan life. The narrative gradually inverts to show the sweetness of rural life and the sadness of an existence on the world stage.

String Too Short to Be Saved (Donald Hall; 1961): I first read this book 26 years ago. It’s a reflection on the meanings of living in a context where being frugal and reusing even the most trivial, worn, and insignificant things is normal, and which shows how those kinds of things may be more worth saving than the new, the shiny, the things which seem big and significant.

Plant Dreaming Deep (May Sarton; 1968): A memoir, of a sort, of moving to a rural family house and figuring out how the house itself, the things it contains, the environment in which it is located (including its garden and outside space), become characters in the inner life of the person who occupies it — especially if living solo.

Coming into the Country (John McPhee; 1977): One of my favorite writers describing how people are when they live far away from civilisation, the trials they go through, and what happens if and when they pass those tests and stay

First Person Rural (Noel Perrin; 1978): An academic buys a Vermont farm and learns how to become self-reliant and competent in a place where the needs of life are not always or easily transacted for using fungible money. This is an amusingly self-deprecating book.

A Month in the Country (J.L. Carr; 1980): A soldier returns from the war with what today would be diagnosed as post-traumatic stress disorder, and recovers through the undemanding nature of work and life in a small village that amply satisfies any semi-cliché dreams you may have of bucolic English countryside life.

Always Coming Home (Ursula K. Le Guin; 1985): An imaginary ethnography of a semi-settled, highly dispersed society, an inversion of modern high-technological urbanised developed-world life, set in a medium-term, post-disaster northern California that often feels nonetheless utopian and prelapsarian.

For the Time Being (Annie Dillard; 1999): Some people talk about this book as an exploration of why bad things happen to good people and it is true that that is what it is. But it is also a series of facts that by their combination function as observations about how to observe the world and use what appears to be absolutely impossible badness to comprehend why something can still be good in the moment.

The Death of Picasso: New and Selected Writing (Guy Davenport; 2003): Diverse in influences, erudite, and with pinpoint accuracy in observing and describing both trivial and significant things. This book is hard to recommend because it touches on topics generally considered socially unacceptable — but described to show the possibility of reconceiving them as something novel and good. A strong motif is the importance of having space away from convention, whether an isolated hut or an artist studio, for rethinking how things are and how things should be.

and finally

“Languor” (Billy Collins; from Nine Horses, 2002):

I have come back to the couch — hands behind my head, legs crossed at the ankles —

To resume my lifelong study of the ceiling and its river-like crack, its memory of a water stain,

The touch of civilization in the rounded steps of the molding, and the lick of time in the flaking plaster.

To move would only ruffle the calm surface of the morning, and disturb shadows of leaves in the windows.

And to throw open a door would startle the fish in the pond, maybe frighten a few birds from a hedge.

Better to stay here, to occupy the still room of thought, to listen to the dog breathing on the floor,

better to count my lucky coins, or redesign my family coat of arms — remove the plow and hive, shoo away the bee.