On Mount Everest it feels as if you are in the womb, but on K2 you are always out on the edge.
Interpretation
The quote contrasts the safety of Mount Everest with the danger of K2, highlighting different experiences in climbing.
Reinhold Messner's quote encapsulates the essence of climbing two of the world's highest peaks, portraying Mount Everest as a place of relative safety and security, akin to being in a womb. In stark contrast, K2 represents a more perilous challenge where climbers constantly face risk and uncertainty, emphasizing the mental states involved in high-altitude climbing and the varying experiences that different mountains offer.
In practice
During a motivational speech about adventure sports.
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.
Let your walks now be a little more adventurous.
There are no safe paths in this part of the world. Remember you are over the Edge of the Wild now, and in for all sorts of fun wherever you go.
Climbing K2 or floating the Grand Canyon in an inner tube; there are some things one would rather have done than do.
Part of the reasons I have lived the life I have is because I wanted to have an adventurous life. But my best adventures are more literary than political.
Fare well we call to hearth and hall Though wind may blow and rain may fall We must away ere break of day Over the wood and mountain tall To Rivendell where Elves yet dwell In glades beneath the misty fell Through moor and waste we ride in haste And wither then we cannot tell With foes ahead behind us dread Beneath the sky shall be our bed Until at last our toil be sped Our journey done, our errand sped We must away! We must away! We ride before the break of day!
It's more of an adventure when you set off into unknown territory, and there's nothing like that feeling you get when you discover a place on the Earth where no one has ever been.
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