In most lives, she would have at least been physically comfortable.
And yet, she was feeling something new here. Or something old that she had long buried.
The glacial landscape reminded her that she was, first and foremost, a human living on a planet.
Almost everything she had done in her life, she realised – almost everything she had bought and worked for and consumed –
had taken her further away from understanding that she and all humans were really just one of nine million species.
“If one advances confidently,” Thoreau had written in Walden, “in the direction of his dreams,
and endeavours to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”
He’d also observed that part of this success was the product of being alone.
“I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.” And Nora felt similarly, in that moment.
Although she had only been left alone for an hour at this point,
she had never experienced this level of solitude before, amid such unpopulated nature.
She had thought, in her nocturnal and suicidal hours, that solitude was the problem. But that was because it hadn’t been true solitude.
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