(This news is almost a month old, but I missed it until recently. I suspect others might have as well.)
Heinrich Harrer, a great mountaineer, Twentieth-Century explorer, writer and geographer died on January 7th, aged 93. I have been familiar with his Tibetan travels from my youth, and Seven years in Tibet remains one of the best reads in mountaineering/Himalayan exploration literature. Harrer's account and photographs are some of the finest documents we have of Tibet as it was. He is also well know for the first ascent of the North Face of the Eiger. I was unaware until recently, however, that he also made the first ascent of Carstensz Pyramid, a 16,000' peak in New Guinea which is now generally counted as the seventh summit (representing Australasia/Oceania, since Australia's high point is, frankly, rather disappointing).
Unfortunately, much of the press attention to Harrer late in his life and after his death dwells on his fleeting and superficial connection to the Nazi party. I have no doubt that anyone who actually takes the trouble to read his books and examine his life will see his personal goodness as self-evident. His life and deeds as a whole speak much louder than a few bureaucratic documents. John Derbyshire asserts (in a podcast, not archived) that most of the Nazi muckracking which attended the film Seven Years in Tibet originated from the Communist Chinese, which makes perfect sense. The Chinese doubtless have a major interest in discrediting so excellent a documentor and defender of the kingdom they brutally invaded.
The Twentieth Century was the last, and in some ways the best, of the five centuries of great explorations. There are still innumerable oddities awaiting discovery in space and in the deep sea; there remain unclimbed peaks and walls, unentered cirques and valleys, ground where no man has stood; the intrepid can still find ample scope for personal adventure and discovery. But the world is different. Sea and space are not places we can experience without mediation. We can't get our hands dirty there, and their exploration is largely the domain of robots, not humans. Even the remotests peoples will now know who we are, as we have heard tell of all of them. And the remaining wildernesses are places we venture, but do not remain; our interaction with them is always artificial and temporary. As we lose Harrer and the last few like him, we are losing the knowledge of how it feels to enter a forbidden kingdom, discover a lost tribe, find a means of life in an empty land, venture beyond the edge of all our maps. I fear already young people are unmoved by tales of discovery because they cannot imagine how it would feel to truly discover a thing by themselves. There are many for whom a photo essay or a documentary film is a perfectly acceptable substitute for a physical journey. The wonder of beholding living creation is being replaced by the wonder of fantasy. Fantasy wonders are not bad things in themselves, but are they enough to make people step outside themselves and feel the world, their fellow men and the divine? Explorers' writings need to be read, and hard paths need to be traveled. Otherwise, life is only a game with nothing at stake.
