(Audiobook) A compilation of two books -- Deborah was about a failed attempt on Mt. Deborah, and the Mountain of My Fear is a climb on Mt. Huntington, with two additional members. I rated the book 2 stars when I was in the middle of reading Deborah, but the writing got better and better in the second book to urge me to a 5 star.
What is unusual about this book amongst mountaineering writings is its deep, subtle, and complex reflections and feelings that David Roberts managed to pin down. In this book, I read the best paragraphs narrating a mountain climber's fear, frustration, motivation, secret desires, connections with the mundane, and the most convoluted thoughts about one's relations with the universe and unknown. It keeps getting deeper and deeper, alongside of David's desires to know, to feel, to really understand, what humans feel while climbing mountains. Many paragraphs resonated with me. Two spots hit me really hard, one about richness of inner life and loneliness in Chapter 4, and another about feelings on the summit of Huntington:
Chapter 4:
”Of course, Matt’s thought at the moment were different. He seemed understandably subdued. To suddenly find oneself in a place like this is bound to be chastening. Matt probably felt neither the sense of having cheated, nor the sense of having missed anything. But I couldn’t really know what he was thinking. And I wanted to then. I could remember my first sight of McKinley. That was from a road. I could try to empathize with him. But he was difficult to interpret. He couldn’t explain the strange mixture of sensations he must have felt then. Even if he had wanted to. Perhaps he didn’t. But what I write now, must to some extent, stand for all four of us.
Climbing together, which forces men close to each other physically and sometimes spiritually still can’t overcome the irreducible barrier of their separate selves. Nor can writing ultimate translate the experience. So in words, all may ultimately get through is some third-hand filtration of life that was once lived. A man’s best moments seem to go by before he noticed them. And he spends the large part of his life reaching back for that, like a runner for the baton that would never come. In disappointment he grows nostalgic. And the nostalgia inevitably blurs the memory of the immediate thrills, which simply because it had to be instantaneous, could not have lasted. Now our whole expedition has paste. Now that I sit in a warm room with pencil and a blank paper before me instead of a rock and snow. I feel our vanished moments forever lost. I want to read their reminisce and feelings I’ve never felt before. especially not while the moments have lived. The frustration of it reminds me too, how I felt sitting on my pack on June 29, waiting for the plane wanting to know what Matt was thinking.
People placed in any isolation even together, lose something in their humanity. And a style of isolation so complete as mountaineering begs for someone to understand it, to convey it as it is not as the melodrama of death and courages that it seemed to to resemble. Courage plays a smaller part then the tension and the dependence that being alone together in dangerous place forces on men. The drama is largely an internal one, whose conflicts from the stress between private desire and cooperative skills that climbing imposes. Perhaps that is why mountaineers are usually inarticulate. Everything having to do with climbing seems to stifle the soul’s urge to communicate. Part of the strange sorrow I felt then on a glacier must have a reason from dilemma no more peculiar to me than to anyone, of being born alone, with the desire not to be. If the mind can escape itself a little better than the body can, still something goes on between being men and the mountains, something lost in the static rigor of reporting it.”
Chapter 7:
“The summit itself was a cornice, so we had to remain a few feet below it. But our heads stood higher. It was 3:30am, we’ve been going for 16 hours without rest. Now, we are too tired even to exult. The sun has just risen in the northeast. One hundred thirty miles away, we could see Deborah only a shadow in the sky. As Don looked at it I said:”This makes up for a lot.” He knoded. There was no-one to tell about it. There was perhaps nothing to tell. All the world we could see lay motionless in the mute splendor of sunrise. Nothing stirred; only we lived. Even the wind had forgotten us. Had we been able to hear a bird calling from some pine tree, or sheep in some valley. The summit’s stillness would have been familiar. Now it was different. Perfect. It was as if the world had held its breath for us. Yet, we were so tired. The summit meant first of all, a place to rest. We sat down just beneath the top. Ate a little of our lunch and had a few sips of water. Ed had brought a few firecrackers, all the way up. Now he wanted to set one off. But we were afraid that it would knock the cornices loose. There were so little to do, nothing we really had the energy for, no gesture appropriate for what we felt we had accomplished. Only a numb happiness. Almost a languor. We photographed each other and the views, trying, even as we took the pictures, to impress the side of our memories more than our cameras could on the film. If only this moment could last, I thought. If no longer than we do. But I knew even then that we would forget. Someday I should remember should be the memories themselves, rehearsed like an archaic dance. But I should stare at the pictures and try to get back inside them, reaching out to something that had slipped out of my hands, and spilled in the darkness of the past. And that someday I might be so old that all that might pierce my seniority would be the vague hardpan of something lost, inexplicably sacred, maybe not even the name Huntington meaning anything to me, nor the names of the three friends. But only the precious sweetness leaving its faint taste, mingled with the bitter ones of dying. And that there were only four of us. Four is not many. And that surely, within 80 years, and maybe within five, for climbing is dangerous, we would all be dead. The last of our death, closing the legacy that even the mountain itself could forever attest to. We sat near the summit, already beginning to feel the cold. I got up and walked a little bit beyond, still roped. Down the top of the east ridge, which someday men would also climb. From there I could see the underside of the summit cornice, which we had judge right not to step exactly on top...
I wanted to know how the others felt but couldn’t. Trying to talk about it now would have seemed profane. If there is anything we shared, it was the sudden sense of quiet and rest. For each of us, the high place we had finally reached culminated ambitions and secret desires we could scarcely have articulated had we wanted to. And the chances are, our various dreams were different. If we had been able to know each others, perhaps we could not have worked so well together. Perhaps we could have recognized in our partnership the vague threats of ambition, like boats through a fog, the unrealizable desires that drove us beyond anything we could achieve, that drove us in the face of danger, our unanswerable complaints against the universe, that we die, that we have so little power, that we are locked apart, that we do not know. So perhaps the best things that happened on the summit were what we could see happening, not anything beneath. Perhaps it was important for Don to watch Matt to walk across the top of the east ridge, for Matt to see Ed stand with a cigarette in his mouth, staring at the sun, for me to notice how Matt sat, eating only half of his candy bar, for Ed to Insist Don in changing to black and white films. No one else could see these things. No one else could even ask whether or not these were important. Perhaps it were all that happened.”