Conquistadors of the Useless by Geoffrey Sutton Lionel Terray David Roberts Read Free Book Online Page B

spare time. I even grudged the time taken out to give skiing lessons for a bit of extra money. In summer I accumulated climbs at the speed of a professional guide, and in the midst of all this intense activity I still found the energy for enormous cycling trips and to go in for swimming, athletics and gymnastics.
    It has to be admitted that my intellectual activity was very much less, being limited to a few books whose serious nature contrasted oddly with the physical preoccupation of my life. About this time I read almost the whole of Balzac, Musset, Baudelaire and Proust.
    Had I been less acutely aware of the fragile bases on which my way of life, so rich in action, reposed, it would have satisfied me so completely that the future would not have worried me at all. I have never thought an occupation any the better for being lucrative: on the contrary, money has a way of soiling everything it touches. Then as now, what mattered for me was action and not the price of action. The value was in the acting itself. My whole life has been a sort of tight-rope walk between the self-justifying action in which I have pursued the ideals of my youth, and a more or less honourable prostitution to the necessity of earning my daily bread. Could any mind be vulgar enough to suggest that the prostitution was worth more than the gratuitous act? In any case, outside of primitive societies where every gesture springs from the instinct for survival of the species, what in fact is a ‘useful’ action? If, in order to forget the emptiness of their existence, many people become drunk with words and speak of their place, their mission, their social utility, how meaningless and conventional their words really are! In our disorganised and overpopulated world, how many people can honestly say they are useful today? The millions of dignified go-betweens who encumber the economy, the titled pen-pushers in their sinecures which drain society and frustrate the administration, all the hoteliers, journalists, lawyers and other such who could disappear tomorrow without anyone being a penny the worse? Can you even call the majority of doctors useful, when they fight like famished dogs for patients in the big cities, while all over the earth men are dying for the lack of their care? In this century when it has been shown a hundred times over that a rational organisation can vastly reduce the number of men needed for any task, how many can be quite certain that they are genuinely necessary cogs in the huge machine of the world?
    By the end of the winter of 1941 I realised that the foundations of my free and wonderful life were becoming daily more uncertain. Despite her unending kindness, it was obvious that my mother could not go on keeping me like a race-horse forever. At this crucial moment a way suddenly opened up in front of me.

1. Guido Lammer. [back]
2. A method of descending steep rocks. The climber slides down a rope which has been doubled round a spike hammered into the rock, then recovers it by pulling one of the ends. It is also known as abseiling. [back]
3.
Translator’s Note.
The phrase ‘grandes courses’, meaning the climbs which in any era are outstanding for length, seriousness and sustained difficulty, has no exact equivalent in English and is often used untranslated by British climbers. [back]
4.
Translator’s note.
In climbing parlance the crux of a climb is its hardest pitch. The crux of a pitch is its hardest moves, and so on. [back]

– Chapter Two –
First Conquests
    The traditional military service had now been replaced by a kind of civilian service aimed at the virtues of manliness, industriousness, and public and team spirit, much extolled by the national leaders of the day. An institution called ‘Les Chantiers de la Jeunesse’ was set up to put young men of twenty-one through an eight months’ training. A similar but much smaller organisation called ‘Jeunesse et Montagne’, or J.M.