—Peter in The Shining Mountain by Peter Boardman
Peter was a British mountaineer in the late 1970s and early 1980s and The Shining Mountain is his story of his first ascent of a route on Changabang. In this quote, he is trying to explain why he’s a mountaineer to someone who challenged him, saying: “I still don’t understand how you chaps justify this climbing…what about the furtherance of humanity, your role in society…?” Peter gives this person a half page of reasons why it’s ok to like climbing—all sound as good as the one I highlighted above—and ends up not even convincing himself that it is ok to like what he likes: “Perhaps I was trying to justify all this to myself,” he said as he went off to climb.
Months before I read this passage, on a summer day, I lay on my back under the cherry tree in my yard, looking at the patterns the branches made of the sky.
“What would you do,” my husband asked, “if you could do anything?”
“I’d make a long list of novels that I was excited to read and get started on it,” I said.
I’m not sure where that answer came from. I hadn't read a work of fiction for pleasure since I was young.
The answer might have come from the cherry tree. During early grade school summers, I’d pull my red wagon with its cargo of Nancy Drew mysteries out to a tree in my front yard. I’d fold a frayed colorful towel into a chunky pillow, lie down in the wagon and begin to read. When I paused to absorb a bit of Nancy Drew, I’d look up at the patterns the branches of the tree made of the sky.
When I finished a book, I’d go to my desk where Mom kept a stable supply of so many books that a child of grade four couldn’t, not once, build them all into a stack without it falling over. I’d pick the next best book and go back to the birch tree.
In middle school, my favorite class period “Reading” grew up into a stranger called “English.” I’m a delicate reader. I must be allowed to put myself at the mercy of the story the author has prepared for me: to pause when the story slows down, to watch closely only when the characters do something interesting, to comment when the author gives me something worth saying. I can’t read with one eye toward memorizing who said what for a quote quiz or stop reading to add a word to a list for the SAT. If I am to read—really read, like I did under that tree—I can’t allow a teacher, instead of an author, to direct my interaction with the story.
English class made books a game, and the game was to get a good grade. What I think now is that I didn’t like the game and didn’t like the small subset of novels we played it with. What I decided then was that while I loved fiction for children, I didn’t like fiction for adults. So I stopped reading fiction outside of class.
This happened nearly twenty years before that day in August under the cherry tree. “Well,” my husband said that day, “then make a list of novels you want to read and start reading them.”
I began reading fiction again, starting with The World According to Garp by Irving, moved on to David Copperfield by Dickens and now, every night at the time some people reserve for prayer, I read fiction. It’s the first activity I chose to do for myself as an adult; it’s the one thing I like to do better than anything else. These books are like a group of perfectly wise and sympathetic friends who advise me, comfort me, entertain me and challenge me.
I would read far more than I do if I didn’t have the voice that plagues Peter, the voice that asks me to justify my interest in reading literature to myself: Are you going to do something about this, it asks? Become an English teacher or a librarian? What’s the point of all this reading?
I don’t know that Peter ever had the chance to hear that voice fade to a whisper and then to nothing at all. He died only a few years after the Changabang climb, on the Northeast ridge of Everest.
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I’m curious about people and characters who are not thoroughly convinced by the things they love. Do you know of any?
Caroline, replacingmiddlemarch [at] gmail.com
