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Quote of the Day: “Because it is There”
I can’t improve upon the many posts for Memorial Day, so I won’t try. This is more of a personal reflection on a small blurp I heard on a news report earlier today–that it’s the seventieth anniversary of Edmund Hillary’s and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay’s successful ascent of Mt. Everest. It is a time so long ago (barely sixteen months before I was born) that it took the news three days to arrive in London, just in time to celebrate the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, on June 2 of that year. What a different–not necessarily worse–world it was.
As a matter of fact, though, it’s not even Hillary’s and Norgay’s ascent that captures my attention today. (Although I’ll always remember Hillary Clinton’s idiotic assertion that she (who was born in 1947) was named after the man who ascended Everest six years later. Talk about cultural appropriation–from the New Zealanders, no less.)
No, today I think about an abortive attempt to ascend the world’s highest peak, almost exactly ninety years ago when, on May 30, 1933 (just like “5 o’clock,” it’s May 30 somewhere–maybe even in the Himalayas, right?), Percy Wyn-Harris–a member of the British climbing team and, at that time a Colonial Officer in Kenya–discovered an ax buried in the Everest ice. The ax was at first thought to have belonged to Thomas Mallory who had disappeared nine years earlier during another failed ascent. Subsequently, the ax was identified as actually belonging to Andrew Irvine, Mallory’s climbing buddy who disappeared on the same historic expedition as his fellow.
Thomas Mallory is the man generally credited with the response to a reporter’s question of, “Why do you want to climb Everest?” with “Because it is there.”
It’s perhaps the greatest quote ever, when it comes to the power of overcoming the unknown.
Wyn-Harris’s act of recovering the ax remains, as it always has, a signal moment in mountaineering history. And he is famous because of it.
Wyn-Harris’s subsequent career in the British Colonial service culminated in his administration of the Northern Cameroons during a UN-sponsored plebiscite that was held to determine its future. His immediate subordinate in that matter was my father.
Dad didn’t have much time for Percy Wyn-Harris, thinking him to be too much of a politician, and as a result, perhaps a lesser man. I was a child, though, and I remember him fondly.
I think Dad and I would have agreed that the Percy Wyn-Harris who attempted an ascent of Everest in 1933, and whose altitude record–without supplemental oxygen–stood until the summitting by Reinhold Messner and Peter Habeler in 1978, was a mensch, at least in that matter.
I know that the late Mr. She would have thought the same. Because when I mentioned that I’d a personal acquaintance with the man, he knew exactly of whom I spoke. He knew the story, and had nothing but respect.
Full disclosure: I’ve slept in Percy Wyn-Harris’s bed. He wasn’t in it at the time, of course. But when I was a child, and my parents were on the cocktail party circuit, they’d simply lug me along. In the early hours, I’d play with the children of the Nigerian servants, and have a whale of a time. And when it came bedtime, they’d put me in the host’s bed so I could sleep until the party ended, at which point, they’d pick me up and take me home in the car. As I said: It was a different–not necessarily worse perhaps better–world.
“Because it is there.”
Not a bad reason to strive for more, IMHO.
Dad (middle). Percy Wyn-Harris (right). I believe the gentleman on the left is Derek Mountain, and that the photo must have been taken on the occasion of the UN referendum and the subsequent Northern Cameroon’s vote to join Nigeria. Which, according to the British, was the outcome devoutly to be wished.
Published in General
A wonderful post, thank you.
Somehow my news feed has decided that I am interesting in people climbing Mt. Everest. It appears that this year is a hard one with many experiences climbers dying. I suppose if you die in a quest like this, at least you are doing what you want to do. Because it is there.
As a child I read the book Annapurna, one result of which was that the subsequent climbing of Everest just seemed anticlimactic.
Why do you like this?
Climbing Everest was very dangerous, and pointless as a practical matter. What point did it serve?
One step closer to the Lord.
Is that a serious question?
It serves (in this particular post) as a metaphor for human achievement against all odds. (See: Landing, Moon. TBC, Jerry, I don’t know how you feel about the moon landing. Perhaps you were for it before you were against it. Either way, IDC.)
I’ve written before here about Thomas Mallory (a different one).
Life, Jerry, is complicated. Make the best of it. Show a little humility. And recognize that, just because you think you’re God’s hammer, not everything is a bloody nail.
🤣
A more apt question would be what was the purpose of the comment? Was it meant to change our opinion of the post? Our opinion of the subject? Our opinion of the poster? Our opinion of the matchless Gagara Yasin?
It’s a mystery.
Perfect!
More to change our opinion of the questioner, perhaps?
Because it is there.
Duh.
What if there’s not a rational explanation for either of those things — neither the climbing of the mountain, nor the liking of the quote? What if there is a rational explanation but not one which satisfies you?
Lovely sentiment and story. Thank you for sharing.
To conquer a boundary or a fear. To prove to himself or to others that it could be done. This desire is more prevalent in males than in females (watch children explore and play – the boys are often climbing things or sliding down things or doing other stunts to prove that they can and are not held back by fear). I do not share this characteristic with my fellow males.
A lot of technology has been developed by people who had no idea whether there was a practical use for the technology. If there was a purpose to the nascent technology, often that nascent technology was far more dangerous, less effective, and less efficient than the existing mechanisms for accomplishing the purpose. Many years ago before robots became relatively common, students at a local engineering school built a robot that would go retrieve a soft drink from the dormitory vending machine so the students didn’t have to stop playing their video games. The robot was glitchy, temperamental, and slow. People reacted in two ways: The more common reaction was, “Why?” They were utterly mystified by the students’ desire to spend enormous amounts of time building something of such little utility and such problems. But a minority of people had the response of, “Cool! Why not? You’ve proved it can be done.”
I was gonna ask, why didn’t they just have their girlfriends get the sodas. Then I re-read it and saw “engineering school”.
That comes closer to my initial reaction to the question.
OK, as an instinctive contrarian, I’ll defend Jerry. Because beating up on him is too popular. And because he has a point.
Just because something is there is not enough reason to go do it. Just because it has not been done before is not enough reason. Climbing a stupid mountain is senseless. Exploration I understand. Blazing new trails, all of that. But Everest was not really unexplored, and climbing it has limited utility. Especially when it means risking your life.
There are plenty of challenges that mean something, that matter. Improve yourself. Love others. Raise a family. Love your wife. Heck, cure cancer or build a school. There are real things to be done with one’s life, things that only a single person can do.
Here’s one that tickled my fancy when I read the comments: resist the crowd’s siren song when you suspect the crowd might be wrong.
Yet the original (hundred-year old) question is not about the mountain or the climbing, but about the decision. “Why did you climb the mountain?” Had he responded with some reductive argument about the utility of climbing it, nobody would care or remember, which would be correct. The reply was a laconic masterpiece, a zen redirection of the question to a deeper one — why does anybody do anything?
There’s a reason that this reply is famous and beloved — because it is deep. He wasn’t justifying it to his Home Owner’s Association in triplicate
Fascinating psychology at work here. I think most people understand the human drive to do something just to do it. It’s not about the utility of it. It’s not about whether it’s efficient or necessary. About whether it’s practical or functional or adds to the storehouse. It’s just the doing of the thing.
It’s often the doing that matters. The doing is the self-improvement and builder of confidence that creates the sort of person who can then serve and build up others.
To only do that which is prescribed, functional, or practical and otherwise not challenge oneself creates . . . softness? complacency? Much has been written about the plague of “safetyism” in our culture and how fear and risk-aversion have allowed the creation of myriad laws and regulations that now bind us. Climbing a mountain is in direct conflict with safetyism.
Why do people run in marathons? Why do people engage in sports? Why even go for a walk? None of these things are practical or necessary. Yet we do them because of the challenge. Because the doing of the thing matters more than the thing itself.
And look what happened to him up there!
They’ve forced him to un-climb it, and at his own expense.
1000%**
One of my favorite Victorian novels is Hard Times, by Charles Dickens, which I first read in 10th grade as an adjunct to a Social Studies class project. We were reading The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times And Ideas Of The Great Economic Thinkers, by Robert Heilbroner. It was my introduction to the likes of Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes, Thorstein Veblen, and company.
Along the way we perused a few works of literature which the teacher considered thematically relevant to some of the subjects discussed in the book. Hard Times was one of them.
I remember everything about the course fondly. And–given the state of US public education today (for that is where I was in tenth grade, in a US public high school–with some amazement that there was a time when such rigor was even possible, let alone expected.
And ever since that experience, I’ve always considered myself far more on Team Sissy rather than Team Gradgrind. And I make no apologies for it.
**This is hyperbole. I realize that “100%” represents the entirety of the whole, than which there is no whicher. But by using the term “1000%” I am expressing boundless, expansively gaseous, enthusiasm for the point with which I’m agreeing, and I don’t need a correction on this matter. Thanks in advance for not making one.
The same answer could perhaps be applied to writing on Ricochet. For those who want to write “because it is there,” here’s your opportunity for June: the June 2023 Quote of the Day Signup Sheet.
OH HAY I GET IT THIS IS ONE OF THOSE SEG WAY THIONGS
Thanks, Bryan.
Jerry–as do a few other members here–has a remarkable propensity for expressing an opinion that might–under differently expressed conditions-be quite popular. But he just can’t quite get there….because (IMHO) he cannot remove his own persona from the equation. And because his own persona (I’ll leave you all to figure out what that might be) irritates otherwise rational folks in one way or another, the result isn’t good.
The man who died on Everest in 1924 was not Thomas Mallory, it was George Herbert Leigh Mallory. Mallory’s remains were found on the upper slopes of the north face. He and Sandy Irvine had apparently fallen during their descent. No determination could be made about whether he and Irvine did reach the summit, but most feel pretty sure than they didn’t.
There was a pretty good NOVA episode 20-or so years ago about the expedition to search for his body.
I watched it when first broadcast. It was a little anti-climactic after they kept talking about how they only had limited time and figured they didn’t really have great odds of finding him, and then he was literally like the first or second body they looked at.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/everest/lost/
Oh, thanks for straightening me out. Indeed it was. George, not Thomas.