BY DOMINIC WIGHTMAN

Stephen Pax Leonard is Research Professor at Moscow State Linguistic University. Educated at Oxford and the Sorbonne, he previously held positions at Oxford and Cambridge. A writer, linguist and traveller, he is the author of six other books on the Arctic and sub-Arctic region. Lucky for us, Stephen occasionally writes for Country Squire Magazine and his articles can be found here.

Stephen’s recent voluntary exile on Greenland turned into a book, Annals of Solitude: A Year in a Hut in the Arctic. I read Stephen’s book on a recent holiday to Cornwall and enjoyed it thoroughly.

Every writer dreams of another world where they can escape from the interruptions and distractions of the modern. Some hire cottages on the North Yorkshire moors or escape to Greek islands away from the hustle and bustle. Stephen chose the most remote Arctic settlement he could find and in his own words,

“discovered how the paraphernalia of modern living conspires to eliminate our dreams”

To escape to the High Arctic may seem to be taking things a tad too far but the result echoes his isolation, time to think, and his choice of words that often transcend into poetry. The promo of his book can be seen in Stephen’s video below and it is helpful:

Stephen calls his book a philosophical travelogue and it’s just that:  

“a record of the joys (and frustrations) of disconnecting from our complicated, modern existence and living, at a time of climate upheaval, a simple life as close to nature as possible”

This is way more than an escape to pen a book. It’s a pioneering attempt to see how life can be if we land somewhere alien on this shared planet. Sometimes a prison and sometimes a heaven, Stephen experiences lows and highs, and his experiences with the local Inuit are invariably positive ones. They may as well be aliens. But his stance is friendly and helpful towards them – he recalls that visitors from so-called ‘civilisation’ were not always so empathetic in the past:

“the Inuit were abducted by the polar explorer Robert Peary and taken to New York where they became exotica; objects of curiosity. Most of them died of tuberculosis”

Those locked away in studio apartments during recent lockdowns will experience some chime with this book. In effect Stephen’s locked himself away in solitary confinement for months on end, albeit willingly. As the marketing blurb for the book explains,

“No longer ruled by time and blessed by transcendences that flashed him the totality of life, he found harmony with the external world led to an inner dialogue that challenged everything he had known before”

And, some weeks into his self-imposed sentence, the thoughts come streaming…

“My mind is already working in a different way. The intellectual gymnastics of Cambridge are a distant memory. Intellectuality has been replaced by a spiritual aura. The sounds of nature colonize my hearing now, and so I have rediscovered the privilege of being in touch with my acoustic intuitions. I speak slower, walk slower and think largely in poetic aphorisms.”

While the words that follow are a feast, I am reminded of fasting during these diary entries (annals, a record of events, comprise of diary style entries) as Stephen’s body gets used to the extremes of change and his mind reaches new levels of order and purity, living with less – Stephen has become a trappist monk and he starts to write like Thomas Merton:

“the silence of nature provides some kind of spiritual allure. It is not just a refuge from human noise, but if it can be felt at a physical level so that that it reverberates through your body, it can be transcendental and ennoble the mind“

And you can witness the transformation page by page. Stephen’s earlier diary entries are more matter of fact. The latter entries are epithet-laden, rich and poetic. There is talk of ‘celestial splendour’. At one point even soup becomes a target for this growing, exulted eloquence:

“Last week’s greyish, viscous soup has become off-white sea ice and is apparently going nowhere. It is no longer quite possible to distinguish between sea and land. The icing on the cake has set“

There is a humility mixed in with the bravery. Stephen asks at one point why our words for ‘remoteness’ carry such negative connotations?

“Such sinister associations. You can be remote from the world of men, but close to nature. Then, it is not so much ‘remoteness’, but a kind of divine intimacy.”

At this point one almost feels like shouting at him to reverse his annals a few lines and point out that he is talking about the onset of springtime and how he has gone down from four to three layers. Remoteness is sinister, Stephen! You could die out there, mate! While Stephen’s cabin is hardly a prison cell at Fort Worth, it is sparse and spartan, yet he seems not to care after a while for the hardships of the hard living he is experiencing, while “sucking on blubber for vitamin c”.

Not only is living hard. Life is hard too. On one of his trips to the local shop, Stephen goes online and finds his ‘love’ has left him. Stephen takes the news like a gentleman and retreats to his annals in even greater solitude, inevitably conjuring up more poetry as he dwells on what love is and how he feels it is constituted.

This is a fascinating and alluring read.

I thank Stephen for going where others would not dare and for telling us how life is there. This book is one of adventure, tears and joys, written spectacularly and in typical Pax Leonard.

However, at its end one feels relief that Stephen is leaving…

“I think I have retreated far enough into this inner world, producing fantasy dialogues with the dogs and even covert, invisible lovers”

Brave, illuminating and thought-provoking, Stephen’s Annals of Solitude: A Year in a Hut in the Arctic can be acquired here.