Excerpted from The Armchair Mountaineer Edited by David Reuther and John Thorn

It must be admitted at the outset that our periodic literature gives little indication that our performance is concerned no less with the spiritual side of us than with the physical. This is, in part, because we require certain practical information of anyone who describes an expedition. Our journals, with one exception, do not pretend to be elevated literature, but aim only at providing useful knowledge for climbers. With this purpose we try to show exactly where upon a mountain our course lay, in what manner the conditions of snow and ice and rocks and weather were or were not favorable to our enterprise, and what were the actual difficulties we had to overcome and the dangers we had to meet.

Naturally, if we accept these circumstances, the impulse for literary expression vanishes; not so much because the matter is not suitable as because, for literary expression, it is too difficult to handle. A big expedition in the Alps—say, a traverse of Mont Blanc—would be a superb theme for an epic poem. But we are not all even poets, still less Homers or Miltons. We do, indeed, possess lyric poetry that is concerned with mountains, and value it highly for the expression of much that we feel about them. But little of it can be said to suggest that mountaineering in the technical sense offers an emotional experience which cannot otherwise be reached. A few essays and a few descriptions do give some indication that the spiritual part of man is concerned. Most of those who describe expeditions do not even treat them as adventure, still less as being connected with any emotional experience peculiar to mountaineering.

The Everest summit, ultimate object
of Mallory's artistic passion

Some writers, after the regular careful references to matters of plain fact, insert a paragraph dealing summarily with an aesthetic experience; the greater part make a bare allusion to such feelings or neglecting them altogether, and perhaps these are the wisest sort.

And yet it is not so very difficult to write about aesthetic impressions in some way so as to give pleasure. If we do not ask too much, many writers are able to please us in this respect. We may be pleased, without being stirred to the depths, by anyone who can make us believe that he has experienced aesthetically; we may not be able to feel with him what he has felt, but if he talks about it simply, we may be quite delighted to perceive that he has felt as we too are capable of feeling. Mountaineers who write do not, as a rule, succeed even in this small degree. If they are so bold as to attempt a sunset or sunrise, we too often feel uncertain as we read that they have felt anything—and this even though we may know quite well that they are accustomed to feel as we feel ourselves.

These observations about our mountain literature are not made by way of censure or in disappointment; they are put forward as phenomena, which have to be explained, not so much by the nature of mountaineers, but rather by the nature of their performance. The explanation which commends itself to me is derived very simply from the conception of mountaineering, which, expressed or unexpressed, is common, I imagine, to all us of the arrogant sort. We do not think that our aesthetic experiences of sunrises and sunsets and clouds and thunder are supremely important facts in mountaineering, but rather that they cannot thus be separated and cataloged and described individually as experiences at all. They are not incidental in mountaineering but a vital and inseparable part of it; they are not ornamental but structural; they are not various items causing emotion but parts of an emotional whole; they are the crystal pools perhaps, but they owe their life to a continuous stream.

It is this unity that makes so many attempts to describe aesthetic detail seem futile. Somehow they miss the point and fail to touch us. It is because they are only fragments. If we take one moment and present its emotional quality apart form the whole, it has lost the very essence that gave it a value. If we write about an expedition from the emotional point of view in any part of it, we ought so to write about the whole adventure from beginning to end....

But once again. What is the value of our emotional experience among mountains? We may show by comparison the kind of feeling we have, but might not that comparison be applied with a similar result in other spheres?

How it would disturb the cool contempt of the arrogant mountaineer to whisper in his ear,"Why not drop it and take up, say, Association football?" Not, of course, if a footballer made the remark, because the mountaineer would merely humor him as he would humor a child. That, at least, is the line I should take myself, and I can't imagine that, for instance, a proper president of the Alpine Club, if approached in this way by the corresponding functionary of the AFA, could adopt any other. But supposing a member of the club were to make the suggestion—with the emendation, lest this should be ridiculous, of golf instead of football—imagine the righteousness of his wrath and the majesty of his anger! And yet it is as well to consider whether the footballers, golfers, etc., of this world have not some experience akin to ours. The exteriors of sportsmen are so arranged as to suggest that they have not; but if we are to pursue the truth in a whole-hearted fashion we must, at all costs, go further and see what lies beyond the faces and clothes of sporting men. Happily, as a sportsman myself, I know what the real feelings of sportsmen are; it is clear enough to me that the great majority of them have the same sort of experience as mountaineers.

It is abundantly clear to me, and even too abundantly. The fact that sportsmen are, with regard to their sport, highly emotional beings is at once so strange and so true that a lifetime might well be spent in the testing of it. Very pleasant it would be to linger among the curious jargons, the outlandish manners—barbaric heartiness, medieval chivalry, "side" and "swank," if these can be distinguished, in their various appearances—and the mere facial expressions of the different species in the genus; and to see how all alike have one main object, to disguise the depth of their real sentiment. But these matters are to be enjoyed and digested in the plenty of leisure hours, and I must put them by for now. The plain facts are sufficient for this occasion.

The elation of sportsmen in success, their depression in failure, their long-spun vivacity in anecdote—these are the great tests, and by their quality may be seen the elemental play of emotions among all kinds of sportsmen. The footballers, the cricketers, the golfers, the batters and bailers—to be short, of all the one hundred and thirty-one varieties, all dream by day and by night as the climber dreams. Spheroidic prodigies are immortal each in its locality. The place comes back to the hero with the culminating event—the moment when a round, inanimate object was struck supremely well; and all the great race of hunters, in more lands than one, the men who hunt fishes and fowls and beasts after their kind, from perch to spotted sea serpent, fat pheasant to dainty lark or thrush, tame deer to jungle-bred monster, all hunters dream of killing animals, whether they be small or great, and whether they be gentle or ferocious. Sport is for sportsmen a part of their emotional experience, as mountaineering is for mountaineers.