Chastity Life

A lot of time, people who don’t climb mountains assume is about this great heroic sprint for the summit, and somehow this great ego-driven ambition. But actually it’s the reverse. It’s about supplication and sacrifice and humility, when you go to these mountains. It’s not so much a celebration of oneself but the eradication of one’s self-consciousness. And so on these walks you lose yourself, you become a vessel of energy in harmony hopefully with your environment. One thrives on enthusiasm, curiosity, humility.

Sands death is a tragedy as his passion for mountaineering was inspiring. I was nodding my head when I read that Sands once began a telephone interview by saying, “Right now I’m looking across the North Face of the Eiger towards the Jungfrau. Spectacular!” But then he rang the journalist back several hours later from a bivouac to impress upon him that, though he was climbing the Eiger, he was going up the easier Mittellegi Ridge rather than the feared North Face. “Mountain and climbing folk, and a small percentage of your readers, will know the difference.” Yes, I thought, Sands gets it. I bowled over by his humility and his honesty generously bound up with his joie de vivre. These are the values of real mountaineers in seeking to climb the mountains of the mind.

Live, travel, adventure, bless, and don’t be sorry.

Graham Hill in the Gold Leaf Team Lotus 49B on his way to finishing 4th at 1969 German Grand Prix, Nürburgring Nordschleife.

Naked is a human commodity. Nudity is God's art.

To be free in any substantial sense is to be able to live as one wishes to live, to choose one's own way, to choose to do this rather than that, to choose to be here rather than there, to choose to do it now rather than later, to choose to be with these people rather than those.

Literature illuminates life only for those to whom books are a necessity. Books are unconvertible assets, to be passed on only to those who possess them already.