The Core Of Mans' Spirit Comes From

I Don't Know What God Is, Or What God Had In Mind When The Universe Was Set In Motion. In Fact, I Don't Know If God Even Exists, Although I Confess That I Sometimes Find Myself Praying In Times Of Great Fear, Or Despair, Or Astonishment At A Display Of Unexpected Beauty.

I'm Going To Paraphrase Thoreau Here... Rather Than Love, Than Money, Than Faith, Than Fame, Than Fairness... Give Me Truth.

Unlike Most Of Life, What You Do Really Matters. Your Actions Have Real Consequences. You Have To Pay Attention And Focus, And That's Very Satisfying. It Forces You To Pay Great Attention And You Lose Yourself In The Task At Hand. Without The Risk, That Wouldn't Happen, So The Risk Is An Essential Part Of Climbing, And That's Hard For Some People To Grasp. You Can't Justify The Risk When Things Go Wrong And People Die. The Greater The Risk, The Greater The Reward In Most Aspects Of Life, And In Climbing That's Certainly True, Too. It's Very Physical, You Use Your Mind And Your Body.

He Read A Lot. He Used A Lot Of Big Words. I Think Maybe Part Of What Got Him Into Trouble Was That He Did Too Much Thinking. Sometimes He Tried Too Hard To Make Sense Of The World, To Figure Out Why People Were Bad To Each Other So Often. A Couple Of Times I Tried To Tell Him It Was A Mistake To Get Too Deep Into That Kind Of Stuff, But Alex Got Stuck On Things. He Always Had To Know The Absolute Right Answer Before He Could Go On To The Next Thing.

At Long Last He Was Unencumbered, Emancipated From The Stifling World Of His Parents And Peers, A World Of Abstraction And Security And Material Excess, A World In Which He Felt Grievously Cut Off From The Raw Throb Of Existence.