Absolutely love your new live in bestie! Very gorgeous. ;-) Is she going to have her own substack page and post too?:-)
This is another beautiful post, but you should never feel guilty about the effects your accident had on others, in as much as that no one is being coerced into helping you, loving you, and if you were actually a complete twat, which trust me, as a female philosopher, there are some hideous men out there in philosophy, you probably would not have the support you do. So the support you do have is probably grounded in others believing you are a good person, deserving of good treatment no matter what and you would do the same for them. And there is this huge thing in my mind, I fly paragliders, human society needs adventurers. Human society always needs outliers. People who question and challenge the edges of normality. Thomas Khun!!! Those people make society better, and we need them. Obviously you are one of those people, so it's natural for those of us who understand that society often only gets better by people pushing boundaries in every area of endeavour. Right now I give money and support animal activists who get arrested and sent to prison for protesting against climate change. I am a vet. As well as a philosophy. I give money to support people i do not even know who are supporting my cause. In the animal rights movement, we support our own. It's a natural feeling to want to support your own. All of us climbers and paragliders know the risks. You are getting supported because your mates love you. What happened to you could happen to anyone. Dont feel guilty because people love you.
There is this other thing, the people who push boundaries in human society get commercialised so much. For the most part they are out there getting the shit, from what I can see Alex got heaps of shit, because his is fertile, and met a super cool chick, who loves him for who he is, who in the world does not want that???? and they had children. To be frank, I have met a lot of awful men who really wanted to seed out their sperm indiscriminately in the world, because they were like Elon musk, but Alex and his lovely wife have probably produced super babies. :-) They are such awesome parents. And if he gets a zillion pounds, good on him I say. He took the risk, and he delivered. OK, and the windy parts, through the windows, where I could look at his abs, I have replayed that alot!!!! Sorry to be so superficial.
Happy cat getting! We see akarasia all the time in the conservation field, where people impose themselves on wild animals to get self gratification (and a selfie) even though they know it's not in the animals' best interests. Frustrating that even so-called conservationists and animal lovers are among the worst of these. There's been lots of research into it and its effects down here in New Zealand. Thanks for all the Substacks, I really appreciate your writing and perspectives, as another philosophy major.
I saw something earlier today about a woman in China who got mauled by a snow leopard…after she skied close to the snow leopard to take a selfie with it. It's hard to know where to even begin.
Again, great writing. You hold yourself to an extraordinarily high standard, and you very tenaciously observe yourself and self-correct. That's very admirable, but I wonder if you apply the same rigour to others' behaviour and reflections.
Over the years since the accident I've noticed that at least in your writing, the white hot anger has given way to something gentler. Is that the case in daily life, or does it still take you by surprise?
I was thinking about this the other day, before I wrote this piece - and yes I think it has made me more forgiving of other people. But it's for a bunch of reasons. One of them is that a lot of everyday stuff just seems trivial now, in a way it always was, but I used to be much worse at recognising - and I'm now better at not being bothered by. Another is that when you depend on other people, being more patient starts as a psychological survival strategy, but in in turn just teaches you to be more patient. I may write about this in the future; there's a lot going on.
This is so beautifully written and painfully self-aware. My two older boys have recently become enamored of climbing, so I have my own complicated feelings about Honnold. I made my boys promise they’d never free solo (perhaps that will hold), and other than that I have decided to trust them, forgive them preemptively for any mistakes, and then be a Daoist about the whole thing.
Excellent! I used to holiday at a farm in the Lakes who had blue cats. They used to sleep in a heap in front of the Aga. I used to think they were Norse cats. Might have been Russian looking at your photo. Next step - you need to get an Aga. No excuses. 😹
When I used to teach at Cambridge, the students absolutely loved the cat I had then (Hera). I am confident the students at KCL would welcome an emotional support cat accompanying me to campus. Princess of The Strand indeed!
Vietnam veterans apparently got a unique battlefield created high from the adrenaline rush found only when the body is highly focused in a tense life & death environment. Many of those Vets came back to the states and became drug addicts because there was nothing closer to obtaining that high they got by surviving a life & death battle.
When you attune your baseline for fear response, pleasurable hormones, and/or pain reduction (the reward to a stressed animal for surviving the immediate danger or fear of death) then you cannot enjoy the lower responses to similar escalated events, outside of the same extremes which triggered that chemical response to that higher level.
This is why druggies need a better high than the last one, and why thrill/combat high seekers cannot find something higher to 'biologically' drug themselves with, because the body's hormones cannot reward you any more than it can immediately following a near-death escalated experience. The body is designed to keep you alive, and wishes to chemically reward you in order to keep you alive, especially when your life is threatened most.
I would think that the goal of climbing is not to get a thrill based high, but to test your limits on variable terrain, as safely as possible. I could see how people that have a problem with their self-image of their ego could get caught up in trying hard to prove something to themselves in order to keep a false self-perception of themselves going. It is well known that people will do insane things in order to be perceived as useful/important to the tribe, because at a biological level being abandoned by the tribe usually meant certain death, while doing risky activities to gain the tribe's support is actually less risky overall, back in the ancient times of primitive humanity.
A friend and I were sitting in a pub in one of the major London railway stations, discussing where we had been of late and what we had got up to while we were there. (This conversation took place a long time ago. These days I can go for weeks without leaving the house.) We were both at a stage where we were rather blasé about travelling. We would turn up somewhere with no forward planning. A man tending goats or sheep would point, like an Old Testament prophet, across an expanse of pseudo-desert, or into what amounted to light jungle, and inform one of us (we never travelled together; it was probably just as well) of a village a few miles away in that direction. I would always take a compass bearing off the pointed finger. I doubt my friend even did that. Off we would go, hoping that we wouldn’t run into a leopard or a pack of hyenas.
My friend had recently returned from six months in India. He showed me a photograph someone had taken of him crossing a deep ravine with a torrent of whitewater at the bottom. All that remained of the bridge was an unstable-looking girder, no more than a foot across. He was partway along it, semi-crouched with his backpack on. It made me feel ill just looking at that photo. I don’t think I could have done it.
I always told my family, if I was taken hostage, not to pay anyone. If I died then it would be better to arrange for me to be cremated and have my ashes brought back. I’m sure they worried, but it is important to take risks. You stop growing as a person if you don’t. You never get a feel for what you are capable of if you to defer to the voice in your head advising caution. In the Arthur Ransome classic 'Swallows and Amazons,' four children holidaying in the Lake District write to their father, who is away in Malta with the navy, seeking permission to take a sailboat out onto the great lake at the foot of house where they are staying. He responds by telegram: BETTER DROWNED THAN DUFFERS IF NOT DUFFERS WON'T DROWN. No doubt Commander Ted Walker loved his children but he recognised the value in allowing them to place themselves in danger. The book is about children taking their early steps towards adulthood with realising it. They make some smart choices along with some choices that are really stupid and could have got one or more of them killed.
Were we (my friend and I) embodying Akrasia by ignoring our better judgement? Perhaps an argument could be made in that direction; it might even survive the rigours of peer review. I think that a more convincing counter-argument is that we were both retarded.
My first alfresco attempt at climbing was with the scouts in Luxembourg. The venue for our ascent was a steep wooded bank rising from a little-used road. At the top of the slope there was cliff that was perhaps fifty feet high. What lay above the summit I never found out. The bank was so steep that it could only be climbed by crouching down and moving on all fours. The trees were coniferous. The lower branches had been pruned to within a few inches of the trunks. If you lost your footing, then there was good chance of being impaled. Roughly three feet from the base of the cliff the gradient of the slope eased off but was still on a slant. There wasn’t adequate space to layout all the gear properly. It was difficult to be the belayer holding the rope at the bottom while retaining balance. The cliff was formed from a combination of hard rock and rock that was on its way to becoming soil. There was a very pronounced overhang at the top with no clear way over. When it was my turn, I got about a third of the way up, then kicked off and came back down. One of the older boys, Simon, was actually competent. He got to the overhang but couldn’t find a way past. As he reached up to explore a potential handhold, the head-sized boulder he was pawing came loose in its socket. It plunged past him, struck the soil at the base of the cliff with a sobering thud, then rolled unevenly down the slope through the trees. We called it a day after that.
Last year you wrote about not not wanting to be here any longer. And now you’ve written about climbing. Both, I feel, pretty momentous. It’s discombobulating to me that you have felt diminished by loss of bodily function and I feel diminished by the power of your writing.
Absolutely love your new live in bestie! Very gorgeous. ;-) Is she going to have her own substack page and post too?:-)
This is another beautiful post, but you should never feel guilty about the effects your accident had on others, in as much as that no one is being coerced into helping you, loving you, and if you were actually a complete twat, which trust me, as a female philosopher, there are some hideous men out there in philosophy, you probably would not have the support you do. So the support you do have is probably grounded in others believing you are a good person, deserving of good treatment no matter what and you would do the same for them. And there is this huge thing in my mind, I fly paragliders, human society needs adventurers. Human society always needs outliers. People who question and challenge the edges of normality. Thomas Khun!!! Those people make society better, and we need them. Obviously you are one of those people, so it's natural for those of us who understand that society often only gets better by people pushing boundaries in every area of endeavour. Right now I give money and support animal activists who get arrested and sent to prison for protesting against climate change. I am a vet. As well as a philosophy. I give money to support people i do not even know who are supporting my cause. In the animal rights movement, we support our own. It's a natural feeling to want to support your own. All of us climbers and paragliders know the risks. You are getting supported because your mates love you. What happened to you could happen to anyone. Dont feel guilty because people love you.
There is this other thing, the people who push boundaries in human society get commercialised so much. For the most part they are out there getting the shit, from what I can see Alex got heaps of shit, because his is fertile, and met a super cool chick, who loves him for who he is, who in the world does not want that???? and they had children. To be frank, I have met a lot of awful men who really wanted to seed out their sperm indiscriminately in the world, because they were like Elon musk, but Alex and his lovely wife have probably produced super babies. :-) They are such awesome parents. And if he gets a zillion pounds, good on him I say. He took the risk, and he delivered. OK, and the windy parts, through the windows, where I could look at his abs, I have replayed that alot!!!! Sorry to be so superficial.
Happy cat getting! We see akarasia all the time in the conservation field, where people impose themselves on wild animals to get self gratification (and a selfie) even though they know it's not in the animals' best interests. Frustrating that even so-called conservationists and animal lovers are among the worst of these. There's been lots of research into it and its effects down here in New Zealand. Thanks for all the Substacks, I really appreciate your writing and perspectives, as another philosophy major.
I saw something earlier today about a woman in China who got mauled by a snow leopard…after she skied close to the snow leopard to take a selfie with it. It's hard to know where to even begin.
There are no recorded instances of a snow leopard (or a meteor for that matter) ever killing a human. She was so close to entering the history books!
Exactly. No sympathy for the woman! Though it's often the animals that are punished for human idoicy and arrogance - either directly or indirectly.
Again, great writing. You hold yourself to an extraordinarily high standard, and you very tenaciously observe yourself and self-correct. That's very admirable, but I wonder if you apply the same rigour to others' behaviour and reflections.
Over the years since the accident I've noticed that at least in your writing, the white hot anger has given way to something gentler. Is that the case in daily life, or does it still take you by surprise?
I was thinking about this the other day, before I wrote this piece - and yes I think it has made me more forgiving of other people. But it's for a bunch of reasons. One of them is that a lot of everyday stuff just seems trivial now, in a way it always was, but I used to be much worse at recognising - and I'm now better at not being bothered by. Another is that when you depend on other people, being more patient starts as a psychological survival strategy, but in in turn just teaches you to be more patient. I may write about this in the future; there's a lot going on.
This is so beautifully written and painfully self-aware. My two older boys have recently become enamored of climbing, so I have my own complicated feelings about Honnold. I made my boys promise they’d never free solo (perhaps that will hold), and other than that I have decided to trust them, forgive them preemptively for any mistakes, and then be a Daoist about the whole thing.
Love your writing.
There is an element of self-destruction in humans.
Life is a drag, even on a beautiful Scottish day, isn't that the reason for " Akrrasia "
I suspect so. Or at least, one reason for how it sometimes manifests
Nice piece. Love Koshka. Looks v regal and possibly Russian. Glad you have company.
Russian blue!
Excellent! I used to holiday at a farm in the Lakes who had blue cats. They used to sleep in a heap in front of the Aga. I used to think they were Norse cats. Might have been Russian looking at your photo. Next step - you need to get an Aga. No excuses. 😹
And does she have a Sunday name eg Koshka the Furst (yes....that is a pun😹), Empress of The Strand.
When I used to teach at Cambridge, the students absolutely loved the cat I had then (Hera). I am confident the students at KCL would welcome an emotional support cat accompanying me to campus. Princess of The Strand indeed!
Have to confess sneaking a cat into Stanmore once. Why not the Strand?
!!!!!!
I thought The Strand might resonate 😹💕
Just realized you called a Russian blue cat “cat” in Russian. Nice.
I like to think there is a British shorthair in Moscow called “Cat”
She's gorgeous. I hope she's as sweet as she is pretty. Enjoy!
Vietnam veterans apparently got a unique battlefield created high from the adrenaline rush found only when the body is highly focused in a tense life & death environment. Many of those Vets came back to the states and became drug addicts because there was nothing closer to obtaining that high they got by surviving a life & death battle.
When you attune your baseline for fear response, pleasurable hormones, and/or pain reduction (the reward to a stressed animal for surviving the immediate danger or fear of death) then you cannot enjoy the lower responses to similar escalated events, outside of the same extremes which triggered that chemical response to that higher level.
This is why druggies need a better high than the last one, and why thrill/combat high seekers cannot find something higher to 'biologically' drug themselves with, because the body's hormones cannot reward you any more than it can immediately following a near-death escalated experience. The body is designed to keep you alive, and wishes to chemically reward you in order to keep you alive, especially when your life is threatened most.
I would think that the goal of climbing is not to get a thrill based high, but to test your limits on variable terrain, as safely as possible. I could see how people that have a problem with their self-image of their ego could get caught up in trying hard to prove something to themselves in order to keep a false self-perception of themselves going. It is well known that people will do insane things in order to be perceived as useful/important to the tribe, because at a biological level being abandoned by the tribe usually meant certain death, while doing risky activities to gain the tribe's support is actually less risky overall, back in the ancient times of primitive humanity.
Congratulations on Koshka!
I wish you the best rebuilding your life, brick by brick.
As usual, Paul, your writing is breathtakingly good.
To be rebuilding your life one brick at a time and thinking and writing the way you do is an achievement indeed.
Thank you again for what you contribute to our lives.
Please stroke the Princess from me. Such fantastic thick fur!
This is a brilliant, honest piece, Paul. I would never solo anything, but I painfully recognise the selfishness and stupidity in myself.
A friend and I were sitting in a pub in one of the major London railway stations, discussing where we had been of late and what we had got up to while we were there. (This conversation took place a long time ago. These days I can go for weeks without leaving the house.) We were both at a stage where we were rather blasé about travelling. We would turn up somewhere with no forward planning. A man tending goats or sheep would point, like an Old Testament prophet, across an expanse of pseudo-desert, or into what amounted to light jungle, and inform one of us (we never travelled together; it was probably just as well) of a village a few miles away in that direction. I would always take a compass bearing off the pointed finger. I doubt my friend even did that. Off we would go, hoping that we wouldn’t run into a leopard or a pack of hyenas.
My friend had recently returned from six months in India. He showed me a photograph someone had taken of him crossing a deep ravine with a torrent of whitewater at the bottom. All that remained of the bridge was an unstable-looking girder, no more than a foot across. He was partway along it, semi-crouched with his backpack on. It made me feel ill just looking at that photo. I don’t think I could have done it.
I always told my family, if I was taken hostage, not to pay anyone. If I died then it would be better to arrange for me to be cremated and have my ashes brought back. I’m sure they worried, but it is important to take risks. You stop growing as a person if you don’t. You never get a feel for what you are capable of if you to defer to the voice in your head advising caution. In the Arthur Ransome classic 'Swallows and Amazons,' four children holidaying in the Lake District write to their father, who is away in Malta with the navy, seeking permission to take a sailboat out onto the great lake at the foot of house where they are staying. He responds by telegram: BETTER DROWNED THAN DUFFERS IF NOT DUFFERS WON'T DROWN. No doubt Commander Ted Walker loved his children but he recognised the value in allowing them to place themselves in danger. The book is about children taking their early steps towards adulthood with realising it. They make some smart choices along with some choices that are really stupid and could have got one or more of them killed.
Were we (my friend and I) embodying Akrasia by ignoring our better judgement? Perhaps an argument could be made in that direction; it might even survive the rigours of peer review. I think that a more convincing counter-argument is that we were both retarded.
My first alfresco attempt at climbing was with the scouts in Luxembourg. The venue for our ascent was a steep wooded bank rising from a little-used road. At the top of the slope there was cliff that was perhaps fifty feet high. What lay above the summit I never found out. The bank was so steep that it could only be climbed by crouching down and moving on all fours. The trees were coniferous. The lower branches had been pruned to within a few inches of the trunks. If you lost your footing, then there was good chance of being impaled. Roughly three feet from the base of the cliff the gradient of the slope eased off but was still on a slant. There wasn’t adequate space to layout all the gear properly. It was difficult to be the belayer holding the rope at the bottom while retaining balance. The cliff was formed from a combination of hard rock and rock that was on its way to becoming soil. There was a very pronounced overhang at the top with no clear way over. When it was my turn, I got about a third of the way up, then kicked off and came back down. One of the older boys, Simon, was actually competent. He got to the overhang but couldn’t find a way past. As he reached up to explore a potential handhold, the head-sized boulder he was pawing came loose in its socket. It plunged past him, struck the soil at the base of the cliff with a sobering thud, then rolled unevenly down the slope through the trees. We called it a day after that.
Big love to Koshka - good move that
Last year you wrote about not not wanting to be here any longer. And now you’ve written about climbing. Both, I feel, pretty momentous. It’s discombobulating to me that you have felt diminished by loss of bodily function and I feel diminished by the power of your writing.