Mountains and Desire is a small book (113 pages) and not an easy or relaxing read. A clue to why this is so can be found in the publisher’s statement at the end of the book (had I pondered it before I started reading): “Repeater Books is dedicated to the creation of a new reality. The landscape of twenty-first century arts and letters is faded and inert, riven by fashionable cynicism, egotistical self-reference and a nostalgia for the recent past.”

No small task, creating a new reality for such a landscape, but philosopher Margaret Grebowicz is up to the challenge and takes the work in a surprising direction.

She finds opportunity to describe a “new reality” in mountains and mountaineering as they appear in 21st century culture, especially Mount Everest, which she writes has “become symbolic of a world used up by humans.”

Puzzling over her take on Mount Everest as symbol of a world depleted, I happened to read the new book by mountaineer Mark Synnott (The Third Pole: Mystery, Obsession, and Death on Mount Everest), which is partially an account of a 2019 expedition to Everest’s north side on which he reaches the summit. Synnott was one of hundreds attempting the climb in the brief pre-monsoon window during which 11 climbers in separate incidents lost their lives on the crowded Northeast and Southeast Ridge routes.

Synnott’s experience on Everest clarified for me what I think Grebowicz means when she says the mountain is symbolic of a world “used up” by us humans.

In her book, Grebowicz explores controversies today about climbing in general and on big mountains like Everest in particular. She describes debates around the use of oxygen on the highest peaks, about the commercialization of mountaineering when anyone can hire a guide to lead them up a big mountain if they have the money, and about the ethics of summiting when people around you are dying or in distress.

All of these issues play out on Everest which, as the world's highest mountain, is the ultimate object of desire for the many who aspire to climb it. She considers the motivation of Everest climbers.

“The question is not whether or not to summit, but what summiting – or excellence, or training, or passion, or performance – means in the context of a body, life, or culture not driven by something other than capitalist definitions of optimization.” Climbing the highest mountains or, in the other example she examines, free climbing the hardest routes in Yosemite and other places, constitute “a culture of celebrity climbers and celebrity mountains.”

This culture, she points out, goes all the way back to the 1920s and George Mallory’s celebrity when he starred as the leading climber in British attempts to “conquer” what Synnott calls the “third pole.” The Brits, in a fever of nationalism, had failed to be first to the North and South Poles, so they tried their best, with the loss of Mallory and Irvine on Everest in 1924, to stoke national pride by being first on Everest.

Grebowicz’s contention that Everest symbolizes a world “used up by humans” is provocative. How is this so? She and Synnott write of how the commercial climbing industry has, in a few decades, changed mountaineering on peaks like Everest.

The first photo in Synnott’s book is captioned, “The infamous conga line that clogged the upper section of the Southeast Ridge on the Nepal side of the mountain during the ‘day Everest broke.’ What many people didn’t realize was that the Northeast Ridge on the Tibet side was also overrun.”

Hundreds of climbers stand in line, and some died at least partly because it took so long to reach the summit and, having done so, to safely descend. Synnott provides gripping accounts of struggles climbers have, and how some suffer and even die, on the Northeast Ridge route.

Even such inaccessible places as the upper reaches of Mount Everest have become so commercialized, monetized, and crowded that the meaning of experience there has been changed forever. Grebowicz writes, “That mountains get used up materially is not news. But environmental degradation isn’t just material; it’s also cultural. The cultural meaning of environments is another ‘resource’ humans use up.” She concludes that “Everest, as an idea and cultural force, is over.”

Synnott does not agree entirely with Grebowicz’s assessment that Everest has no more “cultural force.” His story here is interesting in that initially he was not drawn to the mountain by a desire to reach its summit, or so he claims, but to probe a mystery of its history. He pursued an angle on Everest that might spare him joining the “conga line” and succeeds in doing so. But eventually, as an accomplished mountaineer, desire to go to the summit eclipsed other motivations.

Everest exerted a powerful “cultural force” on him as a mountaineer.

Philosopher Grebowicz observes that “climbers continue to climb in pursuit of the very mountain thereness that unsustainable, bottomless economic growth continuously threatens.”

At least some do – others write books and make films and profit from their adventures, Synnott among them. Yet his account suggests that what Grebowicz calls “thereness,” absorption in the challenge, the struggle of the moment, the exhilaration of achievement, the beauty of the environment, are for him powerful elements of his experience. So, the situation is not perhaps as either/or as Grebowicz makes it out to be.

Grebowicz makes the obvious point that there are celebrity mountains and celebrity climbers, but it’s only the climbers that care about celebrity or desire anything. The mountains are “recalcitrant,” just there to be imagined or experienced. Climbers doing ever more difficult routes on big mountains like Everest without oxygen or stretching the imagined limits of the possible as Alex Honnold does with his free solos on big Yosemite walls, create “imaginaries,” extending perceptions of what humans can do.

In extreme sports, this results in “progression” in which someone “outdoes the last impossible accomplishment by doing something bigger, cooler.” Or at least tries to, sometimes with tragic results. Climbing, for individuals, extends the conception of what one can do. At the same time, culturally, climbing satisfies many desires – probing the physical and mental limits of being human; experimenting with ways technology can extend human capability; creating an industry and profiting off attempts to stand out, to literally climb above the achievements and aspirations of the masses.

Grebowicz concludes that “We have come to the end of a fantasy of climbing as an overcoming of the human condition and a transcending of time and place . . . The frameworks we have inherited for evaluating the moral standing of climbing, with debates built around universalizing questions like to climb or not to climb, fail to speak to a complexity and acceleration that characterize the global, late-capitalist situation.”

Back in the 1920s, George Mallory could simply and famously answer the why climb question with “Because it’s there.” Such an statement is certainly inadequate today.

Grebowicz is a writer-philosopher, Synnott a writer-mountaineer, at least as they appear in these two books. Synnott is not out to create a “new reality,” but to live in the present reality as a climber. Even so, The Third Pole in many ways describes Grebowicz’s “global late-capitalist situation” in the context of Mount Everest.

Synnott’s account spans the history of Everest climbing, from the mystery of whether George Mallory and Sandy Irvine made the summit in 1924 before they disappeared, to the “The Day Everest Broke” when he was on it in 2019. Controversy over the use of oxygen on Everest was present in 1924 and in 2019 and remains today. Without the assistance of supplemental oxygen in 2019, Synnott makes clear, he would not have made the summit, and there undoubtedly would be no “conga line” on the Southeast Ridge.

Perhaps without the technological assist of oxygen, there would still be an Everest frontier and it would not be a symbol of “The End of the World” as subtitled in Grebowicz’s book. Synnott and his expedition mates had to use what was essentially a gimmick, though one born of a genuine desire to solve a historical mystery of Everest, to gain access to the crowded Chinese side of the mountain. This is not to disparage their effort but reveals how mountaineering has changed in the century since Mallory and his companions made their attempts.

What does all of this critique by Grebowicz contribute to the “new reality” that Repeater Books is dedicated to creating? It seems to banish the “fantasy” of mountaineering, but what replaces it? Nothing concrete that I can find in Grebowicz’s analysis though perhaps her subtitle, “Climbing vs. The End of the World” offers a clue.

Throughout history in the remote mountain ranges and ever-higher, steeper walls, climbers have sought to extend the world, akin to earlier explorers pushing back the unexplored frontier, thus extending the known world in this post-modern age. In doing so they have extended conceptions of human capability. The question of whether humans could, for instance, survive exertion in places as high as Everest and other peaks over 8,000 meters was a burning one in Mallory’s day.

Quite a few have summited Everest without oxygen and survived, yet Grebowicz still wonders what this signifies, titling one chapter “Just Because Someone Has Done It Doesn’t Mean It’s Humanly Possible.”

Are climbers like Reinhold Messner and Alex Honnold somehow beyond human, as least as humanness is commonly conceived? So, having presumably exhausted the possibilities of extending frontiers in climbing, at least without technological assists, it is time, in Grebowicz’s view, to admit that we have exhausted the “old reality” of satisfying exploratory desires in mountains. We must go somewhere else.

Both of these books, in very different ways, raise intriguing questions about many things. I was nine years old when news reached New Hampshire in 1953 that Hillary and Tenzing had successfully climbed Mount Everest. I didn’t know anything about the mountain, but even at that tender age, I was excited by this achievement.

Why did I care?

Eventually I became a climber of very modest abilities, aspirations, and achievements, and to this day I am intrigued by the exploits of climbers – not of the conga line variety but of expert climbers and mountaineers like Synnott, Honnold, and many others– and have known a few of them. I am also a conservationist concerned about the exhaustion of the world in its many dimensions, so I appreciate thinkers like Grebowicz who pose questions that stretch my understanding of how we humans think about and treat the world today and what this bodes for the future.

Mountains and Desire and The Third Pole happened to land in my reading pile together and have given me rich food for thought about mountains, mountaineering, and “the end of the world.” One takes work to understand and one captivates with mystery and adventure, but they are complementary and both are well worth the effort required to glean insights into some of our often  inexplicable desires.