Mount Analogue (Réné Daumal, 1952)

When I realized this book had the same take on metaphorical mountain climbing as the one i’d encountered in Sloterdijk, I knew I wanted to give it a try. Unfortunately Daumal never managed to finish the manuscript, but what was there was published anyway shortly after his passing. This is something of a classic in a certain niche of religious writing, and the style is quite funny too. It makes some connections between mysticism and mountain climbing, and brings up religious traditional views on mountains like pic Meru in the Hindu tradition and and the Greek-orthodox Mount Athos. Is it a coincidence that Aleister Crowley, Peter Wessel Zappfe and Arne Naess were mountaineers? My father was a mountain climber too, by the way. Daumal introduces the concept peradam, something that can’t be found unless one is looking for it. I’m not at all up to speed about Daumal or his writing (in fact, I had at first gotten him mixed up with René Guenon, who upon closer inspection seems to be quite another kind of René). A key passage in the text is this one:

Alpinism is the art of climbing mountains by confronting the greatest dangers with the greatest prudence. Art is used here to mean the accomplishment of knowledge in action. You cannot always stay on the summits. You have to come down again…

So what’s the point? Only this: what is above knows what is below, what is below does not know what is above. While climbing, take note of all the difficulties along your path. During the descent, you will no longer see them, but you will know that they are there if you have observed carefully.

I thought this would contain more insights than it actually did, but hey – maybe I wasn’t looking deep enough?