蜜芽传媒

I can still remember the excited announcement that Mount Everest had been climbed, and those first pictures of Edmund Hilary and Tensing Norgay on the summit. It thrilled a nation, whose mood in 1953 was already pretty triumphalist. Celebrating the 60th anniversary of that first climb, the papers this week have reported how crowded the slopes of Everest have now become. On one day alone in 2012 230 people reached the summit. But for me that still adds to the puzzle-why do so many of us we want to climb mountains, or at least hills, when they have been climbed many times before? Even children say they want to 鈥渃limb to the top鈥�, whatever the nearest top might be, perhaps just a hillock. The stock answer to that question, 鈥淛ust because it鈥檚 there鈥� is no answer at all. What is puzzling is that what is there-which might be very dangerous, after all 219 people have been killed on Everest-still seems to challenge us. I suppose there is just something about us human beings that likes to be challenged, to be stretched to the very limit of our physical and mental resources.

For some people however, the challenge is not something they have chosen. It is what life has imposed on them and which is more inside than outside. I think of the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, living a very constricted life in Dublin out of whose anguish came lines like:
O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne鈥檈r hung there.
Those lines would be echoed by many suffering from severe depression, or incapacitating illness...