Austin Kleon

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On (not) climbing the mountain

“The tops of mountains are among the unfinished parts of the globe, whither it is a slight insult to the gods to climb and pry into their secrets, and try their effect on our humanity. Only daring and insolent men, perchance, go there.”
—Henry David Thoreau

Debbie Millman told me she asked Van Halen frontman David Lee Roth what it was like to be the biggest rock star in the world.

He said when you get to the top of the mountain it’s cold and you’re alone and the only way back is down.

(As sage an answer as that is, one of the weakest chapters in DLR’s otherwise excellent Crazy From The Heat is the one about mountain climbing.)

I’m not a mountain climber and I never will be, but yesterday in Edinburgh I climbed up an extinct volcano called Arthur’s Seat. (Robert Louis Stevenson described it as “a hill for magnitude, a mountain in virtue of its bold design.”)

There are a bunch of ways to get up up the hill, some more popular than others. The whole time I was hiking, I would stop, turn around, and admire the view. As I got higher and less-winded, I kept thinking, “This seems good enough. Do I really need to get to the top?”

When I got to the top, my suspicion was correct: The view, while majestic and panoramic, wasn’t really any more interesting than many of the other spots going up the hill. And, worse than that, it was crowded. There were people everywhere scrambling up the rocks to get selfies.

I stood there maybe 5 minutes then climbed back down to a more deserted grassy area and had a picnic with a seagull as a companion.

I thought about that photo of climbers waiting in line to get to the top of Mount Everest:

It’s an obvious metaphor, but people kill themselves for the view on the top of the mountain.

(I hate lines and nothing would turn me into an angry ghost more than dying while waiting in one.)

I walked down an easy grassy slope to the east and walked past the Dunsapie Loch, which looked, from the angle on foot, like it continued out to the sea:

A little further, I found a path by a stone wall that took me all the way through a wooded area back to Queens Road. I was alone the whole walk.

I came across these beautiful foxgloves:

And I felt happy.

Later, I walked through town and along the Water of Leith a few miles to the Scottish Gallery of Modern Art. It was even better than climbing up the crags.

No more climbing mountains for me. There are more interesting views in the foothills.

Richard Wright’s haiku

Writer Richard Wright spent the last eighteen months of his life writing thousands of haiku. In the introduction to the book Haiku: The Last Poems of an American Icon, his daughter recalls watching him work:

He was never without his haiku binder under his arm. He wrote them everywhere, at all hours: in bed as he slowly recovered from a year-long, grueling battle against amebic dysentry; in cafes and restaurants where he counted syllables on napkins; in the country in a writing community owned by French friends, Le Moulin d’Ande.

Wright tried to teach her the rules:

My father’s law in those days revolved around the rules of haiku writing, and I remember how he would hang pages and pages of them up, as if to dry, on long metal rods strung across the narrow office area of his tiny sunless studio in Paris, like the abstract still-life photographs he used to compose and develop himself at the beginning of his Paris exile. I also recall how one day he tried to teach me how to count the syllables: “Julie, you can write them, too. It’s always five, and seven and five—like math. So you can’t go wrong.”

But… teenagers, man:

Back then I was an immature eighteen-year-old and, worried as we all were by his drastic weight loss (the haiku must have been light to carry) and the strange slowness of his recovery, we did not immediately establish a link between his daily poetic exercises and his ailing health. Today I know better. I believe his haiku were self-developed antidote against illness, and that breaking down words into syllables matched the shortness of his breath, especially on the bad days when his inability to sit up at the typewriter restricted the very breadth of writing.

The Richard Wright Papers at Yale contain hundreds of the poems, as seen in these images.

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