On the courage to abandon the colony and walk toward one’s own horizon.

I. The Scene

In Werner Herzog’s documentary Encounters at the End of the World, the camera lingers on a penguin. Not upon the colony—that dense congregation of identical forms shuffling toward the sea to feed, returning to breed, executing the ancient choreography of survival. No. The lens follows a single penguin who has stopped. Who has turned. Who has begun walking in the wrong direction.

The researcher, when asked, cannot explain it. “Is there such a thing as insanity among penguins?” Herzog inquires, his voice carrying that distinctive gravity, that mixture of wonder and melancholy that defines his work. The scientist hesitates. Disorientation, perhaps. A malfunction of the biological compass. The penguin will not go to the feeding grounds at the edge of the ice. He will not return to the colony. He walks toward the mountains—seventy kilometers of white desolation, five thousand kilometers of frozen interior beyond. Certain death.

They could catch him. They could carry him back. But it would make no difference. He would simply turn again and resume his march toward the interior.

Herzog calls him deranged. The word hangs in the cold air, and we are meant to feel its weight.

II. The Refusal

But what if we have misread the scene?

The colony operates on imperatives older than thought. Swim. Eat. Return. Breed. Huddle against the cold. Repeat until death arrives as it always does—a leopard seal’s jaws, the slow failure of organs, the ice claiming what was always its own. The penguins do not choose this life. They execute it. They are born into a current and carried by it, and the current delivers them, eventually, to the same destination as every penguin before them.

The deranged penguin has seen through the current. Or perhaps he has simply stopped believing in it. Either way, he has done what almost no creature—human or otherwise—ever does: he has refused the given path.

We dress this refusal in clinical language. Disorientation. Malfunction. Mental illness. We must, because the alternative is unbearable. The alternative is that he has made a choice. That he has looked at the sea and the colony and the endless repetition of survival-unto-death and has said: No. Not this. Not for me.

III. The Recognition

There is a reason this scene haunts us.

We recognize him. We recognize the pull toward the mountains, the distant and impossible horizon that calls to something deep within us. We have felt it in the morning when the alarm sounds and the day stretches before us, identical to yesterday, identical to tomorrow. We have felt it in the meeting room, in the commute, in the carefully maintained routines that constitute a life. We have felt the colony pressing in on all sides, warm and suffocating, demanding that we shuffle forward with the rest.

Most of us shake off the feeling. We return to the current. We tell ourselves that the mountains are madness, that the interior holds nothing but death, that the colony—however tedious, however small—is at least something. And we are not wrong. The colony offers warmth. Companionship. The comfort of shared delusion.

But the deranged penguin has made a different calculation. He has weighed the sea against the mountains and found the mountains more honest. The sea promises survival, but survival is not life. The mountains promise nothing but themselves—vast, indifferent, beautiful. To walk toward them is to walk toward truth, even if truth is annihilation.

IV. The Question

I do not suggest we all abandon our colonies and march into the wilderness. That would be to miss the point entirely. The penguin’s journey is not a prescription but a question, posed in the only language available to him: the language of his body moving across the ice.

The question is this: Are you walking toward the sea because you have chosen the sea, or because you have never considered the mountains?

Most lives are inherited. We take up the paths laid down by parents, by culture, by the accumulated momentum of history, and we walk them as though they were inevitable. We optimize within constraints we never examined. We argue about the best route to the feeding grounds while the mountains stand silent on the horizon, unexplored, unconsidered.

The authentic life—if such a thing exists—begins with the mountains. Not with walking toward them, necessarily, but with seeing them. With acknowledging that the colony is a choice, that the sea is a choice, that every step in every direction is a choice, even when it feels like compulsion. The deranged penguin may be walking toward death, but he is walking as himself, on his own heading, by his own reckoning.

Can the same be said of the colony?

V. The Departure

Herzog does not moralize. He simply watches, and in watching, he invites us to watch ourselves. The penguin diminishes against the white expanse, a dark speck moving steadily toward the mountains. The colony continues its ancient rhythms behind him, unaware or unconcerned that one of their number has departed.

Perhaps they think him mad. Perhaps they do not think of him at all. It makes no difference to the penguin. He has found his direction. He has chosen his death. And in choosing it, he has done something the colony never will: he has lived.

There is a word for what drives a creature to abandon safety, warmth, and the company of its kind to walk alone into the frozen interior. Herzog calls it derangement. I call it the first and final act of freedom.

The mountains do not care if he arrives. But he will arrive nonetheless—or he will fall trying, which amounts to the same thing. Either way, he will have walked his own path to its end. Either way, he will have answered the only question that matters: Given the choice between the colony and the horizon, which way will you walk?

He has given his answer. The mountains receive him in silence.

Toward the Mountains

On the courage to abandon the colony and walk toward one’s own horizon.

Achraf SOLTANI — January 23, 2026