Weekend Words: Climb
Recently, Cliff Bar announced the termination of its sponsorship of five professional rock climbers.
Recently, Cliff Bar announced the termination of its sponsorship of five professional rock climbers. According to an article in The New York Times, the decision was made because “the climbers take risks that make the company too uncomfortable to continue financial support. [Cliff Bar’s decision] has stirred debate in the outdoors community, creating rare introspection about how much risk should be rewarded.
“’They’re on a really slippery slope,’ said Cedar Wright, one of the five whose sponsorship deal was cut. ‘Where do you draw the line?’”
“You are wise to climb Mt. Fuji, but a fool to do it twice.”
—Japanese Proverb
“We Irish, born into that ancient sect
But thrown upon this filthy modern tide
And by its formless sprawling, fury wrecked,
Climb to our proper dark, that we may trace
The lineaments of a plummet-measured race”
—William Butler Yeats, “The Statues”
“If thy heart fails thee, climb not at all.”
—Elizabeth I
“I’ve been trying to help people all my life—that’s been the trouble. My sense of responsibility. Otherwise I’m a free man, that’s a big eighteenth-century problem. I’m absolutely trying to climb up both walls at once.”
—Charles Olson, Paris Review interview, 1956
“To people who live in the bottom of valleys
A rise in the landscape, hummock or hogback, looks
To be meant for climbing. A peculiar logic
In going up for the coming down if the post
We start at’s the same post we finish by,
But it’s the clear conversion at the top can hold
Us to the oblique road, in spite of a fitful
Wish for even ground, and it’s the last cliff
Ledge will dislodge out cramped concept of space, unwall
Horizons beyond vision, spill vision
After the horizons, stretching the narrowed eye
To full capacity. We climb to hopes
Of such seeing up the leaf-shuttered escarpments,
Blindered by green, under a green-grained sky
Into the blue.”
—Sylvia Plath, “Above the Oxbow”
“My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them—as steps—to climb beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.) He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright.”
—Ludwig Wittegenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
“Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be interesting, absorbing, exhilarating, racking, relieving. But amusing? Never!”
—Edna Ferber
“Ambition often puts Men upon doing the meanest offices; so climbing is performed in the same position with creeping.”
—Jonathan Swift
“History is only the pattern of silken slippers descending the stairs to the thunder of hobnailed boots climbing upward from below.”
—Voltaire
