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.
The Nautilus was piercing the water with its sharp spur, after having accomplished nearly ten thousand leagues in three months and a half, a distance greater than the great circle of the earth. Where were we going now, and what was reserved for the future?
The old wanderlust had gotten into his blood, the joy of the unbound life, the joy of seeking, of hoping without limit.
Live, travel, adventure, bless, and don't be sorry.
But I always liked side-paths, little dark back-alleys behind the main road- there one finds adventures and surprises, and precious metal in the dirt.
I think the only thing I knew for sure is that I wanted to, whatever I did, I wanted to travel with my work, an adventurous spirit.
Adventures are not all pony-rides in May-sunshine.
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