I now walk into the wild.
We like companionship, see, but we can’t stand to be around people for very long. So we go get ourselves lost, come back for a while, then get the hell out again.
The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.
We were too tired to help. Above 8,000 meters is not a place where people can afford morality.
He must have been very brave and very strong, at the end, not to do himself in.
He never suspected that in so doing, he was crossing his Rubicon.
Unlike Muir and Thoreau, McCandless went into the wilderness not primarily to ponder nature or the world at large but, rather, to explore the inner country of his own soul.
With enough determination, any bloody idiot can get up this hill,” Hall observed. “The trick is to get back down alive.
The pursuit of knowledge, he maintained, was a worthy objective in its own right and needed no external validation.
He had fled the claustrophobic confines of his family. He’d successfully kept Jan Burres and Wayne Westerberg at arm’s length, flitting out of their lives before anything was expected of him. And now he’d slipped painlessly out of Ron Franz’s life as well.
Achieving the summit of a mountain was tangible, immutable, concrete. The incumbent hazards lent the activity a seriousness of purpose that was sorely missing from the rest of my life. I thrilled in the fresh perspective that came from the tipping the ordinary plane of existence on end.
It may, after all, be the bad habit of creative talents to invest themselves in pathological extremes that yield remarkable insights but no durable way of life for those who cannot translate their psychic wounds into significant art or thought.
An extended stay in the wilderness inevitably directs one’s attention outward as much as inward, and it is impossible to live off the land without developing both a subtle understanding of, and a strong emotional bond with, that land and all it holds.
Danger has always held a certain allure. That, in large part, is why so many teenagers drive too fast and drink too much and take too many drugs, why it has always been so easy for nations to recruit young men to go to war.
When you forgive, you love. And when you love, God’s light shines upon you.
Most climbers aren’t in fact deranged, they’re just infected with a particularly virulent strain of the Human Condition.
I mean, how can you not be a feminist if you have a brain in your head? If you’re not a feminist, then you’re a problem.
I thought climbing the Devil’s Thumb would fix all that was wrong with my life. In the end, of course, it changed almost nothing. But I came to appreciate that mountains make poor receptacles for dreams.
Having stumbled upon a tolerable career, for the first time in my life I was actually living above the poverty line. My hunger to climb had been blunted, in short, by a bunch of small satisfactions that added up to something like happiness.
Some people feel like they don’t deserve love. They walk away quietly into empty spaces, trying to close the gaps of the past.