Short Form Media Is Reductionist By Nature.

Above The Comforts Of Base Camp, The Expedition In Fact Became An Almost Calvinistic Undertaking. The Ratio Of Misery To Pleasure Was Greater By An Order Of Magnitude Than Any Mountain I'd Been On; I Quickly Came To Understand That Climbing Everest Was Primarily About Enduring Pain. And In Subjecting Ourselves To Week After Week Of Toil, Tedium And Suffering, It Struck Me That Most Of Us Were Probably Seeking Above All Else, Something Like A State Of Grace.

You Are Wrong If You Think Joy Emanates Only Or Principally From Human Relationships. God Has Placed It All Around Us. It Is In Everything And Anything We Might Experience. We Just Have To Have The Courage To Turn Against Our Habitual Lifestyle And Engage In Unconventional Living.

To The Contrary: His Life Hummed With Meaning And Purpose. But The Meaning He Wrested From Existence Lay Beyond The Comfortable Path: Mccandless Distrusted The Value Of Things That Came Easily.

Unlike Most Of Life, What You Do Really Matters. Your Actions Have Real Consequences. You Have To Pay Attention And Focus, And That's Very Satisfying. It Forces You To Pay Great Attention And You Lose Yourself In The Task At Hand. Without The Risk, That Wouldn't Happen, So The Risk Is An Essential Part Of Climbing, And That's Hard For Some People To Grasp. You Can't Justify The Risk When Things Go Wrong And People Die. The Greater The Risk, The Greater The Reward In Most Aspects Of Life, And In Climbing That's Certainly True, Too. It's Very Physical, You Use Your Mind And Your Body.

The Sad End He Met In Afghanistan Was More Accurately A Function Of His Stubborn Idealism - His Insistence On Trying To Do The Right Thing. In Which Case It Wasn't A Tragic Flaw That Brought Tillman Down, But A Tragic Virtue.