You get a compound fracture in Colorado where I live, and you can probably be in a hospital within a matter of hours, certainly within a day.
Many traumatized people expose themselves, seemingly compulsively, to situations reminiscent of the original trauma….Freud thought the aim of repetition was to gain mastery, but clinical experience has shown that this rarely happens; instead, repetition causes further suffering for the victims or for people in their surroundings. In.
In April 1992, a young man from a well-to-do East Coast family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mr. McKinley.
When our heroes turn out to be sleazebags, self-deception is easier than facing the facts.
Kittredge wrote, I was looking for what I took to be a genuine world to inhabit. I wanted to be someone that I could understand and stand—a romantic idea that seems commonplace in the West these days….The northern Rockies seemed like an undiscovered land, thick with secrets no one could bother to keep. During.
He did a lot of socializing. Sometimes I think it was like he was storing up company for the times he knew nobody would be around.
My hunger to climb had been blunted, in short, by a bunch of small satisfactions that added up to something like happiness.
The plain truth is that I knew better but went to Everest anyway. And in doing so I was a party to the death of good people, which is something that is apt to remain on my conscience for a very long time.
You'll never feel the joy of movement if you're struggling. You've got to get good enough and strong enough to reach the point where you can feel this quintessential lightness. - John Gill.
The thing that is most beautiful about Antarctica for me is the light. It's like no other light on Earth, because the air is so free of impurities. You get drugged by it, like when you listen to one of your favorite songs. The light there is a mood-enhancing substance.
I read somewhere... how important it is in life not necessarily to be strong, but to feel strong... to measure yourself at least once.
At that stage of my youth, death remained as abstract a concept as non-Euclidean geometry or marriage. I didn't yet appreciate its terrible finality or the havoc it could wreak on those who'd entrusted the deceased with their hearts.
The core of mans' spirit comes from new experiences.
I was dimly aware that I might be getting in over my head. But that only added to the scheme's appeal. That it wouldn't be easy was the whole point.
It is true that I miss intelligent companionship, but there are so few with whom I can share the things that mean so much to me that I have learned to contain myself. It is enough that I am surrounded with beauty...
Mortenson was merely selling what the public was eager to buy.
Once you believe that God is speaking directly to you, there is no discussion.
When I write books, I've learned not to have any expectations that I'm going to change the world.
Most climbers aren't in fact deranged, they're just infected with a particularly virulent strain of the Human Condition.
I don't know that you ever get over this kind of loss. The fact that Chris is gone is a sharp hurt I feel every single day. It's really hard. Some days are better than others, but it's going to be hard every day for the rest of my life.
In the adversarial system, it's more important to follow legal procedure than to speak the truth.
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.
Those who would assail The Book of Mormon should bear in mind that its veracity is no more dubious than the veracity of the Bible, say, or the Qur'an, or the sacred texts of most other religions.
You are wrong if you think Joy emanates only or principally from human relationships. God has placed it all around us. It is in everything and anything we might experience. We just have to have the courage to turn against our habitual lifestyle and engage in unconventional living.
But somethings in life are more important than being happy. Like being free to think for yourself.
That's what was great about him. He tried. Not many do.
His struggle to mold me in his image had been successful after all. The old walrus in fact managed to instill in me a great and burning ambition; it had simply found expression in an unintended pursuit. He never understood that the Devils Thumb was the same as medical school, only different.
Nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future.
McCandless conveniently overlooked the fact that London himself had spent just a single winter in the North and that he'd died by his own hand on his California estate at the age of forty, a fatuous drunk, obese and pathetic, maintaining a sedentary existence that bore scant resemblance to the ideals he espoused in print.
Almost every magazine piece I've ever written, I felt like I haven't done it justice, like it was just a gloss.
As a young man, I was unlike McCandless in many important regards; most notably, I possessed neither his intellect nor his lofty ideals. But I believe we were similarly affected by the skewed relationships we had with out fathers. And I suspect we had a similar intensity, a similar heedlessness, a similar agitation of the soul.
It's not always necessary to be strong, but to feel strong.
What makes climbing great for me, strangely enough, is this life-and-death aspect. It sounds trite to say, I know, but climbing isn't just another game. It isn't just another sport. It's life itself. Which is what makes it so compelling and also what makes it so impossible to justify when things go bad.
Traumatic memories have a number of unusual qualities. They are not encoded like the ordinary memories of adults in a verbal, linear narrative that is assimilated into an ongoing life story….[R]ather, they are encoded in the form of vivid sensations and images.
He drifted past saguaros and alkali flats, camped beneath escarpments of naked Precambrian stone. In the distance spiky, chocolate-brown mountains floated on eerie pools of mirage.
We just have to have the courage to turn against our habitual lifestyle and engage in unconventional living.
I love being outdoors, being in the mountains and the desert, and my wife enjoys that too. That's one of the things that sustain our relationship.
Most women are all too familiar with men like Calvin Smith. Men whose sense of prerogative renders them deaf when women say, No thanks, Not interested, or even Fuck off, creep. Smith.
But perhaps the greatest attraction of Mormonism was the promise that each follower would be granted an extraordinarily intimate relationship with God. Joseph taught and encouraged his adherents to receive personal communiqués straight from the Lord. Divine revelation formed the bedrock of the religion.
Books possess an ounce-of-weight to minute-of-entertainment ratio that compares quite favorably to intoxicants.
Chaos is indeed the normal state of affairs on the battleground, and no army has figured out a way to plan effectively for, let alone alleviate, the so-called fog of war. When the military is confronted with the fratricidal carnage that predictably results, denial and dissembling are its time-honored responses of first resort.
Huguet, on the other hand, insisted that prosecutors settle for nothing less than a lengthy sentence at the state penitentiary in Deer Lodge.
I enjoy its beauty and the vagrant life I lead, more keenly all the time. I prefer the saddle to the streetcar and star-sprinkled sky to a roof, the obscure and difficult trail, leading into the unknown, to any paved highway, and the deep peace of the wild to the discontent bred by cities.
If you want to get more out of life, Ron, you must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life that will at first appear to you to be crazy. But once you become accustomed to such a life you will see its full meaning and its incredible beauty.
Sometimes he tried too hard to make sense of the world, to figure out why people were bad to each other so often.
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.
There is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.
But some things are more important than being happy. Like being free to think for yourself.
When I went to Everest, I underestimated things. I just didn't know what altitude could do. Or the cold - I especially didn't appreciate the cold. It can be just debilitating, and things can happen so quickly.
