A Higher High
Immanuel Kant believed that an experience of the sublime required a mindset that could fuse the overwhelming fear of a natural object or force and the imaginative comprehension capable of overwhelming it. Fear and bliss moved hand in hand. An experience of the sublime is in fact central to the experience of climbing mountains, but far less glamorously, the habit develops like a drug addiction. Mine began at a very young age and by the time I had graduated from university I had a lot of four-thousand-meter peaks under my belt. But that was no longer enough and I began to wonder what a five, six, seven, or even an eight-thousand-meter peak might feel like. The possibilities were unimaginably alluring. I soon found myself in the company of a group of friends from Colorado expressing similar yearnings. Madness is a solitary obsession. Genius is a madness shared.
