The life we value

What are the value of the things we do?  What is the point of our decisions?

Today, while climbing Kelso's ridge enroute to Torreys Peak, I'm struck by the question of what is the point.  But what is the point of the dissertation I spent three years writing...

These things matter to me.  Do not underestimate the satisfaction of self-reliance, of doing something you did not know was possible.

Enough is as good as a feast

Mountain Quotes

“Mountains are not Stadiums where I satisfy my ambition to achieve, they are the cathedrals where I practice my religion.”

― Anatoli Boukreev

I suppose we really amounted to nothing more significant than a gang of overgrown children delighting in the conquest of altitude by the force of our own muscles.  Yet to see a companion arrive for the first time on a sunlit crest, his eyes full of happiness, seemed in itself an adequate recompense.  Tomorrow he might return to the valley and be swallowed up by all the mediocrity of life, but for one day at least he had looked full at the sky.

- Lionel Terray (Conquistadors of the Useless)

The thin line between commitment and obsession

“Annapurna, to which we had gone emptyhanded, was a treasure on which we should live the rest of our days. With this realization we turn the page: a new life begins.

There are other Annapurnas in the lives of men.”

Amen, Abbey!

A man on foot, on horseback or on a bicycle will see more, feel more, enjoy more in one mile than the motorized tourists can in a hundred miles.

Time

The time passed extremely slowly, as time should pass, with the days lingering and long, spacious and free as the summers of childhood.  There was time enough for once to do nothing...
                            - Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire


Nothing is more rock solid than rock.  "Grounded."  "Foundation."  "Earth."  Of course we mean immovable.  And yet, it must move.  The orogeny that gave us the mountains standing solidly before us are proof that they must move.  Perhaps even more than astronomy, the time scale befuddlement that the geological implications of mountains can have on us is truly profound.

Centimeters a century of movement.  Mountains several kilometers high.  Tally the infinite ledger in your mind and then stand the equivalent ledger of a single lifespan, or even the lifespan of the human race, next to it.  Maybe there is time enough for once to do nothing.

Remember when I took you to the Grand Canyon and showed you the strata?  The strata that marks a time span utterly beyond any real comprehension?  And yet the observable strata that remain in the Canyon's walls are a fraction of earth's history.  The voids and nonconformities dwarf the layers that so inspire us.  Stand next to the Muav limestone.  Realize that it is 500+ million years worth of sea life living and dieing, living and dieing, living and dieing, incrementally adding their shells to the Calcium at the bottom of a shallow sea that will someday become a cliff we can touch.  So what is time?

We yearn for time's structure to yoke our modern lives to.  Time is the only true commodity in a human life and we lament that we don't have enough of it.  But what do we tend to balk when confronted with moment of unscheduled, unstructured time in our life.  The mountains should be proof enough that we don't really understand time.

Math Quotes

If in other sciences we should arrive at certainty without doubt and truth without error, it behooves us to place the foundations of knowledge in mathematics.  (Roger Bacon)

Philosophy is written in this grand book--I mean the Universe--which stands continually open to our gaze, but it cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and interpret the characters in which it is written.  It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one is wandering about in a dark labyrinth.  (Galileo Galilei)

Thus all the mathematical sciences are founded on relations between physical laws and laws of numbers, so that the aim of exact science is to reduce the problems of nature to the determination of quantities by operations with numbers.  (James Clerk Maxwell)

The study of mathematics is apt to commence in disappointment....We are told that by its aid the stars are weighed and the billions of molecules in a drop of water are counted. Yet, like the ghost of Hamlet's father, this greatest science eludes the efforts of our mental weapons to grasp it.  (Alfred North Whitehead An Introduction to Mathematics)

No knowledge can be certain, if it is not based upon mathematics or upon some other knowledge which is itself based upon the mathematical sciences.  (Leonardo da Vinci)