Alpinism means you go by yourself with your own responsibility, knowing that you could die. But Everest now is more like ski tourism: preparing the piste, helping people go up, setting oxygen bottles near the summit.
Interpretation
The quote contrasts the true spirit of alpinism with the commercialization of climbing Everest, emphasizing personal responsibility and risk.
Reinhold Messner highlights the essence of alpinism as a solitary and self-reliant pursuit fraught with danger, arguing that the experience of climbing Everest has become commodified and overly safe, diminishing the authentic challenge that once defined the sport. His words reflect a concern that the thrill and personal growth derived from facing extreme risks are being lost in the modern approach to mountaineering, which prioritizes accessibility and safety over the inherent dangers of the climb.
In practice
A motivational speech on overcoming challenges could incorporate this quote to illustrate facing personal risks.
I became famous for the fact that I would break many, many limits. People said, 'He does all these crazy things.' But oddly it was a crazy thing only because scientists and climbers said, 'Everest and the 8,000-meter peaks without oxygen - impossible. Messner is becoming sick in his head.'
A 30-year-old rock climber is an old man. At 40, one is in the middle of his high-altitude power. At 50, a crosser of deserts is at his best age. But at 60, each of us is out of the game.
I think my cultural work is more important than the adventures I did. The adventures are not important for human beings. It's the conquering of the useless.
In mountaineering, there is not only the activity, but the philosophy behind it. Some say a moral, but I am against that because all morality is dangerous.
I was the first man to climb the world's 14 tallest peaks without supplementary oxygen, but I never asked how high I would go, just how I would do it.
In my state of spiritual abstraction, I no longer belong to myself and to my eyesight. I am nothing more than a single narrow gasping lung, floating over the mists and summits.
Human misery must somewhere have a stop; there is no wind that always blows a storm; great good fortune comes to failure in the end. All is change; all yields its place and goes; to persevere, trusting in what hopes he has, is courage in a man. The coward despairs.
I belong to a nation which over the past centuries has experienced many hardships and reverses. The world reacted with silence or with mere sympathy when Polish frontiers were crossed by invading armies and the sovereign state had to succumb to brutal force.
To me non-violence has come to represent a panacea for all the evils that surround my people, and, therefore, I am devoting all my energies towards the establishment of a society that should be based on its principles of truth and peace.
In war there is no second prize for the runner-up.
The presence of evil was something to be first recognized, then dealt with, survived, outwitted, triumphed over.
Are we at last brought to such an humiliating and debasing degradation, that we cannot be trusted with arms for our defense?
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