like this hail that is falling down out of the sun.

For whatever reason it always come back to me this idea of trying to distill in reason words and such why it is I am drawn to mountains. Have not been able to yet. But in a moment this morning sun sifting through windows fog in and out the train rushing north reading The Snow Leopard pressed up against the glass I come across this idea in a way that catches my attention. Read it again. Pull out a pen to underline the paragraph. There it was. Of why I go. Why I take J.

They have just left the porters behind and crossed over Jang La pass on their own carrying full loads for once. Fed up with sluggish porters snowblind in mountains amidst from where they were born. Matthiessen describes that feeling carrying his rucksack he calls 'free life' the way a mountaineer would write it ~

'The mountains had been a natural field of activity where, playing on the frontiers of life and death, we had found the freedom for which we were blindly groping and which was as necessary to us as breath.'

But then - after near death - he says the same mountaineer would describe freedom in a much more luminous form. About how having won his freedom which he would then never lose. And about how - having been given the rare joy of seeing - a new life would have been opened before him.



... as necessary to us as breath ...



Like Daumal writes -

'There is an art of conducting oneself in the lower regions by the memory of what one saw higher up; when one can no longer see, one can at least still know … '

The obligation to take the lesson learned of mountains when plodding along our own symmetry.




This getting out then surrounded by mountains white 'thick and silent' comes down to Matthiessen his own idea of freedom. The 'possibility and prospect of free life' he writes - of 'traveling light, without clinging or despising, in calm acceptance of everything that comes. The absurdity' - he continues - 'of a life that may well end before one understands it does not relieve one of the duty to live it through as bravely and as generously as possible.




'I am here to be here, like these rocks and sky and snow, like this hail that is falling down out of the sun.'