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The province is called Troms og Finnmark, covers the north of Norway and has 3.3 inhabitants per square kilometer.

Lots of space!

The famous North Cape is by the sea, inland there are a few cities and settlements made of colored wooden houses, Kautokeino for example.

To the east of it by a lake, John Burnside has rented a cabin.

It is the end of May and it should gradually thaw, which gives the subarctic landscape an acoustic spectacle every year.

Crashing ice, raging rivers, bursting wood - to hear this and to see spring break in, Burnside flew once again from Scotland to Tromsø, then on a shuttle plane to Lakselv, where a rental car is waiting, with which he finally Kautokeino and the hut reached.

A lot of effort to look into the white nothing for a week and hear the snow melt.

Kautokeino in Finnmark, at the top of Norway

Source: Getty Images

But spring hasn't come and Burnside has to go back.

To say goodbye, he wants to treat himself to a short circular hike of twelve kilometers on a signposted path.

With the fully packed car he drives to the starting point and starts walking.

He loves the tundra and has visited it often, with and without snow.

In warm outdoor clothes and tight shoes, with energy bars in his rucksack, he feels well prepared - in just under three hours he will be back at the car and start the journey home.

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When it starts to snow, he walks carefree through the silence interrupted by the roar of the wind and enjoys the well-being of even movement in the monotonous landscape.

Far and wide no house, no one.

Cold and loneliness, that's it.

He wants to remember exactly that during the upcoming, exhausting summer months.

Until it gradually dawns on him that he has lost the markings.

Where, at what point did he deviate?

The snow has already covered his footprints, just left in, and there is no point in turning back.

Natural markings (a tree, a boulder) can only be recognized at close range in the floating flakes.

In the morning while packing, he noticed that his compass had disappeared, which didn't seem so important to him on the last day.

Everything is beautiful in the sun: the vastness of wintry Finnmark

Source: AFP via Getty Images

A map sleeps like a mockery in his rucksack - but what use is it if he cannot determine its location or direction?

The first reaction is panic, just for seconds.

“It wasn't until hours later… I realized what fear I should have been.

At that time, however, my first feeling of being truly in the world was a thread in its web, perhaps a stupid and vulnerable one, but still alive and as alert as I hadn't been for a long time. ”A feeling of elation and happiness overcomes him, just now because his life is threatened: "I felt more real than I had ever felt at home."

"Absurd luck"

So on, on, even as the exhilaration fades.

At the end of May the days are long: he wanders around for about twelve hours until suddenly, completely exhausted and against all odds, he finds the road and the car again, a different kind of “absurd happiness”.

John Burnside at the time he was writing "Alone"

Source: Getty Images

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He tells about it in 2012 in the “London Review of Books” under the title “Alone”, later in the “sixth digression” of his memoir “On Love and Magic”.

The unheard-of event only provides the framework.

The key question is: Why this longing for loneliness?

What luck does it promise?

And do you risk death for it?

Even on the first trip to Tromsø, Burnside saw the Nordic landscape as a home that had finally been discovered.

He would have loved to buy a house there, to have stayed there, alone in another life.

It is said that all life as a writer is paper.

In this series we provide counter-evidence.