Thanks for checking my book out. I'm honored and will do my very best to keep you in mind. I do tend to go off on tangents, and for that I must apologize already. Hopefully the editing process helped cut that s#$t down.
I'm fond of references to The Lord of the Rings. If you didn't read those books then I'm sorry. Sorry for you, ha! No, I know they aren't everyone's cup of tea. However, in my experience of the mountains, those books are threaded through and are now inseparable, kind of like that new metamorphic rock we are getting with bits of plastic embedded. When these references crop up, know that I'm trying to get through them quickly and am at least aware that I go too far.
I'm both a serious alpinist and a regular guy whose fitness level was never much to brag about. As I look back, I think the key to success for me was risking more. If you've seen the movie Gattaca, when Ethan Hawke's character explains why he beat his brother swimming, it's because he didn't hold anything back for the return journey. In my secret heart, I did the same, knowing it was the price of playing today and not waiting for some future year when I would be as fit as I imagined I should be.
Some people just want to live and not examine every little thing. Dear Reader, I'm sorry to say, I'm not one of those people! At least not any more. I think little things matter, in that they provide clues to the largest things. Again, the editing process should help us both out here!
I use curse words rather a lot, but always in a particular way. I want to turn up the volume on something I'm saying and indicate that I really, really feel the truth of it. So, weirdly, curse words only occur in a positive context. Since I'm pretty positive about a great many things, there is a lot of cursing!
You'll get a lot of philosophy in this book, because I see the world as full of meaning to be discovered. If you actually know something about philosophy, you'll probably be frustrated with me. It's not that I value my opinion so much more than the learned opinion of so many wise people who came before, it's only that I am unwilling to take the time to trace my thoughts on living to their first emergence. I'm the kind of sample artist, whose only honest defense when caught sampling all kinds of things without attribution says that she found it more important to be Sound than to place Sound in it's proper place. There might well be a special circle of hell awaiting me for that, but I just don't have time.
What works for me might be terrible for you, and you should give it a wide berth. However, I thought about this stuff a lot, and if your disagreement is sharp and intense, I urge you to set the book aside and linger for some days on that sore point. It doesn't matter to me where you end up, so long as you process that knot in your muscles.
In the European Alps, on a multi-pitch rock climb there is usually a "route book" some ways up the route. It's usually found in a little niche somewhere after the crux, such that signing it means yeah, you've done the route even if you beetle off on some escape ledge above that point.
Ed: this thought trails off
I use the term fire to mean the will (Sturm und Drang!). The will grows in power by feeding it with products of the imagination. The imagination is fed with images, ideas, conversations...all the scraps of life. You end up with a vision that slowly evolves, growing in power day by day.
In my case, the vision was one of Mastery. I saw myself on the edge of a beautiful, complex and dangerous alpine landscape. Icefalls tumbled through grey cliffs into dark and silent forests. Improbable ledge systems led, Cahadhras-like, around corners, and appeared again, now mist-beshrouded on a far, snow-speckled battlement. I felt within me the level-headed skill to traverse all this terrain quickly and silently. The vision included a component of growth over time, in which I'd have been tested, sometimes failing, but always getting up again wiser, and with an essential purity or naivete intact. This was important, because I really disliked what I saw in some older climbers -- a weariness that wasn't balanced by laughter. It seemed to me that if you weren't careful with your life in the mountains, you'd end up an old stone, durable but worn down and no longer capable of reflecting the "beautiful disaster" of such incredible landscapes.
"You're a romantic, Michael!" a friend said to me once, with the air of having found some secret.
"Yes. By God you're right! Put me on the cupboard next to all the unfashionable men and women of the mountains who got lost in their appreciation of those darkling towers and silent waiting crevasses...who were judged by the world as impractical. About whom the world uttered a 'told ya so!' when they disappeared one day, presumed dead."
If I had actually said that I'd be fricking huge, with like, groupies or something, but really I just felt vaguely bad like I'd made a mistake. I've always felt like the world regards me as a show-off because I insist on describing and enthusing about the things I see and occasionally do. I always know that where the world is concerned, less back-talk from me is usually whats wanted. However, screw that! I gush, I yell out what I saw, I sing my song, and now the older me comes to the rescue of the younger and says that my freak flag is not all bad, and even slightly good.
So...I had a vision, fired and refined in my imagination. But were it to remain there I wouldn't have anything to say. I'd just be reporting a dream. A channel has to open up into action, and this is the Will. This is Fire.
A problem today with talking about the Will and Fire and such things is that you end up conjuring up a Ubermensch image, and man, we (rightly) hate such people, because we are deeply familiar with the dark side. Conceit, withering scorn, ultimate destruction. So let me go deeper.
The truth is, the greatest acts of will are made in the minds and bodies of the vulnerable. Someone who has few gifts, is unnoticed, but who is fired by a vision has the chance to redeem the world. Why so? Because in their transformation, they combine empathy for what they were with excitement about where they are going. When balance is kept on the journey, they combine strength with gentleness for the weak. This is the meaning of phrases that show up in places like the Lord of the Rings, where a healer woman says about Aragorn that the hands of the King will be the hands of a Healer as well.
Here, I'm saying that it's important to find a way to build Fire in some aspect of your life. If you were always talented as a climber, if you always found the trips easy, were never riddled with fear at the cruxes...if you never felt small and alone and abandoned...then you had better do something else. Your path lies elsewhere, and the best life will come after that day you stumble with horror upon a situation that is finally larger than you. Send us a postcard!
So I've made a big deal about this "Will" thing, how do you build it? Just give me the TL;DR and hush up!
Okay, what you do is prove things to yourself. If you read that Hermann Buhl carried snowballs around pre-war Innsbruck in order to build up the capillary network in his hands, and if that inspires you...then find some damn snowballs and do it. Let people see you doing it, and laugh along with them.
If your trip requires walking up through the jungle at 2 in the morning in order to reach the summit on time, then do it. And do it alone, proving that your will is stronger than any warm sleeping bag.
If you are scared of falling on a sport climb, then dedicate the day to falling over and over exactly at the place that scares you the most (this only works on sport climbs, not alpine stuff!).
If you don't trust your gear placements, then take some aiders and gear to an easy crag and ignore all your favorite routes...only stand in etriers on your gear for 8 full hours, one piece after another after another. Feel the "flavor" of denying yourself the company of friends, dogs and smiles.
Will is a muscle that grows stronger through the testing. And by passing a test, you set another part of yourself to dreaming further.
Hmpf, I guess this is the most important thing. The rest of this book is rubbish! Wasted pixels, all up in yer screenz!