I Think Part Of The

When A Young Person Is Moved By A Passion And Feels Compelled To Go On This Sort Of Quest, I Think You Have To Let Him. You Can't Stop Him. In Our Culture We Don't Have Formal Rights Of Passage Like In Some Ancient Cultures. Subjecting Yourself To Risk... May Be Something You Have To Go Through To Be A Man Or A Woman.

The Sad End He Met In Afghanistan Was More Accurately A Function Of His Stubborn Idealism - His Insistence On Trying To Do The Right Thing. In Which Case It Wasn't A Tragic Flaw That Brought Tillman Down, But A Tragic Virtue.

Above The Comforts Of Base Camp, The Expedition In Fact Became An Almost Calvinistic Undertaking. The Ratio Of Misery To Pleasure Was Greater By An Order Of Magnitude Than Any Mountain I'd Been On; I Quickly Came To Understand That Climbing Everest Was Primarily About Enduring Pain. And In Subjecting Ourselves To Week After Week Of Toil, Tedium And Suffering, It Struck Me That Most Of Us Were Probably Seeking Above All Else, Something Like A State Of Grace.

When I Start Any Book, I Have No Idea What I'm Going To Do.

But Now That I Was Finally Here, Standing On The Summit Of Mount Everest, I Just Couldn't Summon The Energy To Care.