It’s a pastime like any other, which allows you to kill the hours between the ascent of the Aiguille du Midi and an escapade on the Tibetan highlands, by the side of the roads, in trains, on board boats or in huts deep in the forests of Siberia: sketching little hanged men and suicides in the margins of his notebooks. “I don’t like death. But I know what I owe him, writes Sylvain Tesson. Death forbids us to take life lightly. The adventure writer has been indulging in this little game for thirty years and has ended up raising this mania to the rank of art. Witness the 250 macabre doodles, saturated with dark humor, which he has brought together in Black. Sketches which are preceded by some texts in which the author of The snow panther exposes to us his conception of death — and consequently of life. “I hold suicide to be an exercise of the will, the crowning achievement of self-control,” he writes. Death, moreover, he knew closely and continues to look it in the face. But as much to laugh about it, he tells us, as to let himself be buried alive.
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