The World Beneath Their Feet by Scott Ellsworth

Author:Scott Ellsworth
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2020-02-17T16:00:00+00:00

Eric Shipton slipped back into London in the fall of 1938.

The last Everest expedition, of course, had already been deemed a failure, simply because the summit had yet again not been attained. But Shipton’s thinking on mountaineering had continued to evolve. He had long been opposed to massive expeditions. But now he was starting to question the very ethos underlying the expeditions to begin with, be they big or small—and, with them, the very idea of the race to the roof of the world. By early October 1938, copies of his second book, Blank on the Map, an account of an expedition to the Shaksgam he’d taken with Bill Tilman one year before, had begun to appear in London bookstores. In the book’s second chapter, titled “Of the Real Value of Climbing,” he took direct aim at the comforts of the modern world: “With a wistfulness, perhaps a little tinged with sentimentality,” he wrote, “I think of the leisurely days of a few hundred years ago, before life was so mad a rush, before the countryside was spoiled by droves of people, and beauty itself exploited as a commercial proposition. We have become so accustomed to having everyday life made easy for us, that our energies are not absorbed in the art of living, but run riot in a craving for sensation.”

Turning to pursuits as varied as sailing and skiing, he threw arrows and darts at those who become consumed by competition “and care more for trophies, or record-breaking, or acclamation, than for a real understanding of their craft.” Shipton quickly dismissed “the mountaineer who goes to the Alps for a season’s climbing, with a desire to climb more peaks than other men, and by more difficult routes, misses the real value of the experience—the love of mountains for their own sake.”

But he wasn’t finished.

“Let us climb peaks by all means, because their beauty attracts us; not because others have failed, nor because the summits stand 28,000 feet above the sea, nor in patriotic fervour for the honour of the nation, nor for cheap publicity. Let us approach the peaks with humility, and, having found the way to them for ourselves, learn to solve their problems.” Philosophical and impassioned, here were the beginnings of a new manifesto for mountaineering, and a bridge between New World thinkers like Thoreau and John Muir, and the aesthetic of a generation of climbers who were only just then being born. Eric Shipton wasn’t just the most talented mountain climber of his own generation. He was also, in many ways, its most thoughtful.

But right then, and right there, this wasn’t what the members of the Mount Everest Committee, nor his fellow climbers in the Alpine Club were looking for. It was not simply that British climbers had now failed, seven times in a row, to reach the summit of Mount Everest. Rather, the preeminence and invincibility of British mountaineering was no longer assured. And waiting in the wings were others who, in their own ways and their own time, were already scraping up against their own Himalayan stars.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.