Wolves and Ephemerality

Beginning today, National Review publishes three excerpts in three days from Solzhenitsyn’s just-released memoir, Between Two Millstones, Book 2: Exile in America, 1978–1994, translated by Clare Kitson and Melanie Moore. Today’s selection, written in 1982 but published here for the first time in English, evocatively describes Solzhenitsyn’s silent encounter, in his Vermont seclusion, with a pair of Canadian wolves, and his sense of the transience of earthly life, especially for an exile.

“And how I loved that spot! At my dugout desk, densely surrounded by the trunks of five birches, it was like sitting in an arbor. To one side, a little higher up, was the terrace outside the cottage, evenly laid with flat stones of varying shapes (when they were playing, the children used to say that one was Australia, another Greenland), and you could get a quick bit of exercise there next to the pond, racing up and down these flagstones. On hot days, I would take several plunges into the pond. To the other side, where those wolves had gone, was the only meadow on our entire property, 150 paces of it, and the only view open to the sky, where I took the boys to study the constellations. And on moonlit summer nights when I couldn’t sleep, I would sometimes wander slowly from the cottage by the pond through that meadow, knee-deep in grass, gazing in wonder at the towering poplars, and, through a chain-link gate that was never used, at the empty byway; and beyond lay the same distinctly defined and silent moonlit world, with only the sound of the three brooks playing as they came together — right there, near a dark dip in the ground. This exile world is still our familiar terrestrial one, but at the same time somehow extraterrestrial.

And — why am I here? and — is it for long? . . . I always feel that: no, I am here temporarily; and, because of that, everything feels even more ephemeral than for others on Earth.”