In The snow panther (Gallimard, Renaudot Prize 2019), the story of a trip made with wildlife photographer Vincent Munier to the highlands of Tibet, Sylvain Tesson had discovered the virtues of silence and discretion.
There, at an altitude of 5,000 meters, lying in wait among yaks and laughing children, in the middle of a “frozen eternity”, the photographer had taught him to look. “Waiting was a prayer. Something was coming. And if nothing came, it was that we had not been able to look, ”he wrote.
After On the dark paths (Gallimard, 2016), a long diagonal hopping across France, Sylvain Tesson escapes this time into the “White”, with his capital letter and its blurred contours. The project is to forget oneself under the effort, to blend into the landscape and to disappear through what the French travel writer born in 1972 does not hesitate to call “substantial color”.
From 2018 to 2021, Tesson crossed the Alps on skis, from Menton to Trieste, passing through Italy, Switzerland, Austria and Slovenia. Over four winters, in a team of two or three, sometimes four, and for three to six weeks of hiking each year, he played “giant skipping school” with his friend Daniel du Lac, a high mountain guide who has “inexhaustible friendship and a solid back”.
More than traversing a massif, he says in White, the beautiful story he drew from this adventure, the idea was to “melt into a substance”. “The slightest run in the mountains dissolves time, expands space, drives the spirit back to the depths of oneself. In the snow, the brilliance abolishes consciousness. Moving forward matters alone. Effort erases everything—memories and regrets, desires and remorse. »
At the heart of this hypnotic reservoir, he will have no trouble finding what he was looking for. “I wanted to become this character: a worthless presence in a world without contours. The contrast therefore seems absolute with our modern relationship to space, ultra-fast, utilitarian.
From one refuge to another, whether guarded or not, heated or not, through passes, corridors and valleys, advancing step by step into the “territory of freedom” while the echoes sometimes pierce distant from a global pandemic and sanitary confinement, the writer invites us to a kind of dissolution in whiteness and effort. “Where does the white go when the snow has melted? would have written Shakespeare, which Sylvain Tesson does not fail to quote. It doesn’t matter to him, deep down, since “White unified the world, anesthetized anguish, increased space, vanished the hours. »
He tells us all about it, in pursuit of the horizon, with his formidable sense of formula and his inimitable humor, sometimes schoolboy, sometimes witty. At the Grand-Saint-Bernard pass, with a thought for Napoleon’s army which had crossed it in 1800 before defeating the Austrians at Marengo, as well as to the empires that are made and come apart, to the summits and to the roads that are still there, Tesson still takes height: “History is what passes in the middle of what remains. »
“The slightest run in the mountains dissolves time, expands space, drives the spirit back to the depths of oneself. In the snow, the brilliance abolishes consciousness. Moving forward matters alone. Effort erases everything—memories and regrets, desires and remorse. »