La montagna a modo mio - Reinhold Messner

Reinhold Messner is perhaps known as the most famous mountaineer in the world. Wrongly so, because Messner is above all a true “maître à penser”.

It is staggering how little the mountain itself is present in this book, somehow instrumental to the reflections of that man known as Reinhold Messner. A name used far too often to invoke the excellence of world mountaineering. But one that really tells us nothing about that bundle of fibres, muscles and thought so rarely understood by the general public and even less by the press.

The powerful twist of this book lies in discovering how, to some extent, it was harder for him to dig frankly into his inner chasms, his fears, his human limits, than to climb Himalayan peaks. With this book Messner stops being just a mountaineer and becomes an “explorer of the depths”.

The rawness, the bluntness, the sincerity, at times perhaps too explosive, probably make him a writer hard to digest, but the working-through of his experiences hands us considerations that would take a whole lifetime to reach. And so we feel repaid for the effort of holding the penetrating, hard gaze of Reinhold the man; we feel enriched, as well as reinvigorated by a new creative impulse that comes from a simplicity of attitude free of social superstructures, baroque moralities or sanctimonious falseness.

The mountain is risk, it is risk that shows us our limits, and it is at the limit that we discover something about ourselves. Eliminating risk in the mountains means eliminating the possibility of living the wild environment intensely and, as a consequence, of discovering something about oneself. High alpine huts, equipped walls, fixed ropes on the classic routes, the use of GPS: all this does nothing but eliminate the risk of adventure. This isn't the mountains, it's just a playground. You might as well stay in town.

And from this it certainly follows that not everyone can go into the mountains. This is the harsh conclusion, or rather, that in the mountain environment risk and the survival instinct would do nothing but fatally lay bare our limits. And this applies to conquering a summit just as much as to crossing a desert of sand or ice.

For the readers of www.stilealpino.com an all the more necessary read, because we abuse the concept of “alpine style” far too much. A read like the book “La Montagna a Modo Mio” would be enough to make us switch off computer and mobile phone, fold away the maps and the hiking guides, throw the satnav out of the car window, and for once recover the true sense of adventure.

For those who have found new food for thought and reflection in the mountains: a great book.