On Mount Everest it feels as if you are in the womb, but on K2 you are always out on the edge.
Interpretation
The quote contrasts the safety of Mount Everest with the danger of K2, highlighting different experiences in climbing.
Reinhold Messner's quote encapsulates the essence of climbing two of the world's highest peaks, portraying Mount Everest as a place of relative safety and security, akin to being in a womb. In stark contrast, K2 represents a more perilous challenge where climbers constantly face risk and uncertainty, emphasizing the mental states involved in high-altitude climbing and the varying experiences that different mountains offer.
In practice
During a motivational speech about adventure sports.
I became famous for the fact that I would break many, many limits. People said, 'He does all these crazy things.' But oddly it was a crazy thing only because scientists and climbers said, 'Everest and the 8,000-meter peaks without oxygen - impossible. Messner is becoming sick in his head.'
A 30-year-old rock climber is an old man. At 40, one is in the middle of his high-altitude power. At 50, a crosser of deserts is at his best age. But at 60, each of us is out of the game.
I think my cultural work is more important than the adventures I did. The adventures are not important for human beings. It's the conquering of the useless.
In mountaineering, there is not only the activity, but the philosophy behind it. Some say a moral, but I am against that because all morality is dangerous.
I was the first man to climb the world's 14 tallest peaks without supplementary oxygen, but I never asked how high I would go, just how I would do it.
In my state of spiritual abstraction, I no longer belong to myself and to my eyesight. I am nothing more than a single narrow gasping lung, floating over the mists and summits.
Live, travel, adventure, bless, and don't be sorry.
The very basic core of a man's living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.
To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the most pleasant sensations in the world. You are surrounded by adventure.
The truth is that the scientific value of Polar exploration is greatly exaggerated. The thing that takes men on such hazardous trips is really not any thirst for knowledge, but simply a yearning for adventure. ... A Polar explorer always talks grandly of sacrificing his fingers and toes to science. It is an amiable pretention, but there is no need to take it seriously.
If you're going to immerse yourself in a project for three years, why not stake out a chunk of the world that is completely alien to you and go traveling?
I wanted real adventures to happen to myself. But real adventures, I reflected, do not happen to people who remain at home: they must be sought abroad.
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