The Wildest Dreams

A few days ago I watched the documentary film, "The Wildest Dreams".  Conrad Anker, an accomplished mountain climber, finds the body of George Mallory five hundred feet below the summit of Mt. Everest.  The body is surprisingly preserved on the frozen mountain, his letters and papers still perfectly legible.  One of his legs had been severely fractured, the bone had ripped through the skin and several ribs were broken.  Mallory had aspired to be the first human to reach the summit of Mt. Everest in 1924 but never made it off the mountain alive.  The film documents Anker as he becomes obsessed with discovering whether Mallory had reached the summit and was descending when he fell to his death or if he had still been on his way to the top.  Was he the first to reach the summit or not?   There isn't any conclusive evidence either way.  The knowledge of his success or failure died with him.

Aspirations are such a strange and uniquely human phenomenon.  No other living being aspires to be anything other than it is or wants to be anywhere it isn't.  To some, dreams become an object of obsession and the only purpose for living, while others are content to think about them from time to time, then put them away in the backs of their minds to carry on with life. George Mallory allowed his dream to become more important than his life or his family.  I wonder if he would have said it was worth it.