Burning Milan Kundera in the Himachal Pradesh
After hiking for several hours from Shimla I had arrived above the tree line in what appeared to be total wilderness. It being near dusk I set up camp. I had not eaten in several days, fasting for spiritual reasons I can no longer recall. While at the time I would have said I was trying to find god, it is clear to me now—twenty years later—that I was trying to lose god. Not-eating likely contributed to the feeling of crushing loneliness I was experience. Plotinus described the mystical journey as one “from solitary into solitude.” I seemed to have gotten stuck in solitary. I felt as if I had been cursed to be alone, as if I had been alone my entire life and this current excruciating loneliness was the ultimate peak of being so alone. The sky was overcast and low down; the nearby hills gloomy and foreboding; the temperature was dropping fast. I stood beside my tent, looking down the long gray green slopes dropping on and on into the darkening valleys submerged under a pall of drifting smoke. In the hazy middledistance a lone man stood on a hill. “What the fuck is he doing here” I wondered aloud; my loneliness could not abide someone else being around.
I decided I would make a fire. A fire was good company; a cheerful spiritual presence of heat and light; just the solution to being so alone. Because I was above the tree line the shrubs were few and far between; there was not much to burn. But I hunted around the dusky hill side and found some few twigs and a dried disks of yak shit. The flat disks of yak shit was the common combustible of Northern India and could be seen set in long neat rows, drying on the roadside. I had no tinder, but I did have books. I pulled out of my pack the thirteen books that I had been carrying up and down the mountains. These heavy books were symptomatic of my disorientation. They were like talismans: the home that I could take with me. of the titles I can recall were Dante’s Purgatory, Kafka, Dillard, Naipaul, Plath, The Tibetan Book of the Dead etc. I had just finished Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being. It would burn as good as any book. Starting from the back I tore out several pages and twisted them into little sticks and, constructing a lean-to of the yak shit and twigs, I placed the twisted Kundera pages inside and lit them with a match. They would not burn. A thin line of red climbed the text from the match flame, leaving behind a black silken sheet that collapsed into glowing ash, the words still visible; but no flame emerged. I tore out more pages to make more sticks and packed them tighter and lit them again and blew on them. My breath caused the pages to burn faster but the flame still refused to appear. “Einmal ist keinmal,” I read while the pages burned: once is never. Soon I had run out of matches; and that was that; never even once.
Tears stung my eyes. I turned off my headlamp letting the dark and the cold rush in on me, together with a new and profound feeling of despair. I understood then that I could not light a fire because of the elevation: at 3800 meters the air was too thin. The idea of crawling into my cold tent to sleep was terrible. Even the thought of reading, the main solace at that time (or any time) was so meager that I would have burned all my books at once for the heat; except of course they would not burn. In the morning I would go back to Shimla and break my fast, eat too much, get food poisoning and hallucinate in a haunted hotel room for three days. But there I stood shivering, staring out into the now-total dark, the complete silence of the hills seemed like the void. I had not been eating because I wanted something to happen, what I got instead was silence and darkness. I felt a rising sense of dread; I did not know who I was or what I was doing there.
