All stories are stories told. The one in this book is one of the many stories that could be told about the life of Dan Osman. A life certainly observed from a privileged position, but also reported from a very personal point of view of its own. Like an impressionist painting, Andrew Todhunter sets down in strong colours, in dots, in patches, just enough about Dan Osman to let the reader form the fullest idea of him. We are haunted by questions; in an endless loop, as on a Möbius strip, we chase answers without ever reaching them. But here, it must be said, among these pages we are no longer searching for truths about the life and death of Dan Osman. What we manage to do among the pages of this book is to live in friendship with the presence of a man who for many is still an enigma.
“Inseguendo la paura” comes across more as a dialogue between two friends who have a fine story to tell each other, the story of their friendship. None of us makes the right or the wrong choices; we simply walk the road of life led by an invisible hand: perhaps it is our past, perhaps a mix of ambitions, desires, personal sensitivity. Dan Osman chooses to go beyond...
In 1989, while combing the still virgin rock that would become Phantom Lord in search of holds, Osman fell again and again. Someone was belaying him, and he was protected by the rope, but like any other climber, a part of him feared that every fall might end terribly. There he realised that it was not in climbing but in falling that he would embrace his own fear – purifying himself in it, as he puts it – and go beyond it. He began to fall on purpose, from ever greater heights. His confidence on the rock and his performance grew in direct proportion.
This was the keystone, the point of no return that would launch him beyond, far beyond, and so far that “Osman achieved much more than a simple control of his own fear. By greatly exaggerating the conditions of any normal fall, in five years he gathered enough data to revolutionise the technology and the use of climbing protection”.
Learning to fall would give Osman the ability to climb with style. Because, after all, in the end it all became a question of style too. Osman would never have accepted climbing with mediocrity; he knew he could always get the most out of himself, out of commitment, out of the chance to open a route by his own strength alone. All this at the price of admitting that the risk of death would be an essential part of life.
“At what point, I try to ask myself objectively, do risky pastimes become immoral? Put another way: to what extent, if at all, do we owe our self-preservation to those we say we love, who depend on us both emotionally and financially? At what point does a dangerous pastime, the very fact of practising it, become a betrayal? The question has another side: at what moment, by abstaining from dangerous but deeply fulfilling activities because of these social responsibilities, do we betray ourselves? More important still: how do we find the right balance?
The temptation to answer these questions on Dan Osman's behalf is strong; Andrew Todhunter manages to give an answer for himself through the facts of his own life.
As for Dan Osman, Todhunter himself admits he cannot picture him on the pier, fishing. The image of such a Dan Osman would be utterly absurd.
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