After an early cup of coffee in the Neste Oil filling station, where we were nicely welcomed by nearly a dozen villagers, Eeva left me alone in a rented 32 square meter apartment in the empty middle of Posio and she took off for the twelve hours drive back to South Finland (my publisher once told me that writers often don’t have a driving licence, so, Eeva, here’s my excuse).

I went for a walk as the clouds played with the sun, letting its light through but only rarely showing a glimpse of its weakened body. Although there have been many days with full sun and nights with stars and northern lights, I will always remember Posio as a place where clouds sweep low over the lakes and marshes, as in an attempt to erase everything, or to cover life in eternity. More than once I got the impression that the more north clouds drift, the heavier they become, just like thoughts and dreams and all that.

Last week’s snow had disappeared during the night. The path towards Kirintövaara was now covered by putrefying grasses, burning red like Lemminkäinen’s beard, and the half-light intensified all the colours of the marshes. I breathed an indistinct smell of wetness, scents of an eternal nowhere.

As I strolled through the wilderness, I did not meet any people, I saw no more animals than a couple of ravens that flew over the emptiness and cried for time to pass by. I didn’t really search for it, but I found an intense loneliness today. I think that I had expected it, but not yet on my first day of the months that I will spend here on my own. I did not fear this loneliness, because it was, in a way, the reason to be here. For a writer, loneliness can be the wellspring of creativity.

I climbed the old ski-jump of Kotivaara that looks out to the north. The wooden tower has not been used for many years. Its stairs are nearly rotten, and as I reached its platform, I felt the wooden construction slowly moving by the force of the wind. There I stood, watching out over the desolate land behind God’s back, where Ultima Thule starts.

Soon, the loneliness started to work on me. Thoughts appeared silently but they disappeared before I could grab them. All I had to do was to listen to the wind and focus on the dancing moves of the ski-jump. New ideas arose, some of them merely touched me, but others shook my shoulders and took my breath. Were I to have a pen that could instantly write down the stream of thoughts, a book or two would have been produced today.

I pondered on how many great ideas must have risen in billions of minds, and how many of those have stayed there, in the mind, dead as thoughts are dead as long as they remain just thoughts. For a moment I thought that I understood why these thoughts and ideas remained dead – out of fear – but a minute later I rejected the hypothesis. A new breeze blew and pulled the wooden ski-jump tower and then I thought of other things. To whom do people relate themselves?, I thought. City men find friends among the similar; writers’ friends are writers, doctors spend their time with doctors, runners with other runners and the truck driver parks his truck between other trucks. In a village, the doctor’s neighbour can be an old and cheerless widow and on the other side of the street lives a farmer. In a village, the social sphere of influence includes everyone; villagers relate themselves to all other villagers.

Many more thoughts came up, but I will not reveal them – not yet. Just like a brook, a thought needs time and place to magnify, before it is great enough to debouch into the sea of all these other thoughts, ideas and confessions.

I went down the rotten steps of the ski-jump, down the snowless skiing route where wood chips muted my footstep and I turned to the road that took me home. In the 32 square meters apartment I played Einaudi and I burned a candle and in the midst of it, the loneliness suddenly turned into a grey sadness. There I sat, with melancholic wordless music that I had brought up north. Even the poetry that I had brought with me (Ted Hughes’s The Hawk in the Rain, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and a couple of Dutch poets) did not include anything that could cheer me, as I had chosen them thematically: the few things that I had brought with me up North were all to promote loneliness.

Cogito ergo sum – I think, therefore I am. The proposition by Descartes is especially of importance when running at -10 degrees temperature, without jacket, without hat, without gloves, just your body and your mind and the power of the sun and almost a meter of snow covering the marshes. The proposition is usually explained as a proof of existence by thinking: you can doubt nearly anything, the only thing you can’t doubt is that you exist.

However, while running, and the sun and the coldness ‘are’ (although nothing demonstrates its existence as relative as does the coldness), I discovered that this proposition is also a statement about what you could call ‘the soul’ or ‘the person I’, as you could also interpret Cogito ergo sum as ‘I am my thinking’, so as the thinking stops, I am not anymore.

For example, one could also say: the wind blows, so the wind is. Also this is true, because the blowing is what defines the wind. Surely the wind does not think, but that does not mean that the wind cannot be. Only, the wind isn´t me. If Descartes would have written: I think, therefore I am; the wind blows, therefore it is; the light shines, etc. – if he would have constructed his proposition thus in a wider context, it would be clear that he defines the ‘self’, or, if you like, the ‘soul’, as the ‘thinking’. My body is merely the material requisite to be me. As the body dies, the brains do not function, the ability to think is forever lost and thus the soul ceases to be.

The being, though, does not necessarily vanish when the body dies. For instance, the idea, or the concept of the person (his soul) can persist in the third person. Mozart, for instance, still exists in the third person, as do many famous people from the past, who left there footprints. Even people who have not existed in the reality can actually exist in the third person, as their (fictive) existence may have impact on our thinking, just as real persons of the past may do. Thus, although I am an atheïst, I must admit that God exists, at least in the third person, as the idea of Him exists and has major influence on peoples thinking and doing, but it does not imply that he also exists in the first person.

The concept can also be implied to the animal: the further emotions and higher thinking are developed in an animal, the more we regard it as an animal with (bit of) a soul. Dogs (especially those with long hair and sad eyes) are of course the philosophers among animals, they surely have to some extend a sort of soul, cats are bipolar beings, full of affection, they may have a soul too, and also elephants, horses, cows and reindeer, but not the snake or the fish (not even the goldfish, they are simply too simple), nor birds – not even the parrot, although it can learn to say ‘cogito ergo sum‘ if one bothers to teach him those words.

Cogito ergo sum not only tells me ‘what’ I am, but also ‘when’ I am: I am when I think. When we sleep, when we are severely drunk or in other conditions in which the consciousness is impaired, we are in a lower degree.

These are the things that kept my body warm while running, today. As often before, I can feel that during the running my consciousness expands, and thus, while running, I am in a more vigorous way, my existence intensifies.

(Descartes lived most of his life in Amsterdam, not in Posio).