OCR Text |
Show 130 that Muir had to ask himself, but were the kinds of questions he would need to answer to those who had not undergone the awakenings he experienced on Mount Ritter and elsewhere. There were easy answers to these questions, and there were mountaineers to give those easy answers. Whymper could speak of the "development of manliness, and the evolution, under combat with difficulties, of those noble qualities of human nature - courage, patience, endurance, and fortitude." In similar passages, Clarence King argued that the wilderness was a place where men might develop those noble qualities in a simplified and pure environment, which differed markedly from the cities. To the Victorian, speaking of the wilderness and man's role there was tantamount to visualizing wild Nature as a place where men might exercise their power. As Kevin Starr shrewdly argues, "In Clarence King the mountaineer defied nature, pitting himself against rocks and gorges in a test of courage conceived of as an abstraction and revelled in psychologically." On the other hand, more modern commentators are likely to see mountaineering as an existential drama, like that of Camus' "Myth of Sisyphus." This has been generally more true for Europeans than for Americans. The twentieth century British climber George Leigh Mallory spoke to the query "Why do you try to climb Everest?" with an off-hand comment, "Because it is there." He knew the question could not be answered in the terms that had been given. What happened on the mountain was something like a "marriage of ideas about the |