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a966b7f
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To the desert go prophets and hermits; through deserts go pilgrims and exiles. Here the leaders of the great religions have sought the therapeutic and spiritual values of retreat, not to escape but to find reality.
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Jon Krakauer |
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41e6a1e
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Balanced atop the highest spire of the Salt Lake Temple, gleaming in the Utah sun, a statue of the angel Moroni stands watch over downtown Salt Lake City with his golden trumpet raised. This massive granite edifice is the spiritual and temporal nexus of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), which presents itself as the world's only true religion. Temple Square is to Mormons what the Vatican is to Catholics, or the Kaaba in ..
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Jon Krakauer |
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78674ed
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The pursuit of knowledge, he maintained, was a worthy objective in its own right and needed no external validation.
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Jon Krakauer |
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80f8b24
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Don't settle down and sit in one place. Move around be nomadic, make each day a new horizon. -Chris McCandless
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into-the-wild
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Jon Krakauer |
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2133829
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Neither Emma's tears nor her rage were enough to make Joseph monogamous, however; nor were the prevailing mores of the day. He kept falling rapturously in love with women not his wife. And because that rapture was so wholly consuming, and felt so good, it struck him as impossible that God might possibly frown on such a thing.
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plural-marriage
religion
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Jon Krakauer |
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8d3a374
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All true meaning resides in the personal relationship to a phenomenon, what it means to you.
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Jon Krakauer |
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f031c83
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Thus the slopes of Everest are littered with corpses.
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Jon Krakauer |
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77e6824
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Immediately after graduating, with honors, from Emory University in the summer of 1990, McCandless dropped out of sight. He changed his name, gave the entire balance of a twenty-four-thousand-dollar savings account to charity, abandoned his car and most of his possessions, burned all the cash in his wallet. And then he invented a new life for himself, taking up residence at the ragged margin of our society, wandering across North America in..
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Jon Krakauer |
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abf3f24
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And my emotions were similarly amplified: The highs were higher; the periods of despair were deeper and darker. To a self-possessed young man inebriated with the unfolding drama of his own life, all of this held enormous appeal.
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Jon Krakauer |
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3cf601d
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When an individual is raped in this country, more than 90 percent of the time the rapist gets away with the crime.
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rape-culture
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Jon Krakauer |
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1d050e8
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Curiously, Chris didn't hold everyone to the same exacting standards. One of the individuals he professed to admire greatly over the last two years of his life was a heavy drinker and incorrigible philanderer who regularly beat up his girlfriends. Chris was well aware of this man's faults yet managed to forgive them. He was also able to forgive, or overlook, the shortcomings of his literary heroes: Jack London was a notorious drunk; Tolstoy..
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Jon Krakauer |
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761265d
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Bouldering isn't really a sport. It's a climbing activity with metaphysical, mystical, and philosophical overtones." -John Gill-"
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climbing
philosophy
sport
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Jon Krakauer |
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e64af48
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he was ready, perhaps, to shed a little of the armor he wore around his heart, that upon returning to civilization, he intended to abandon the life of a solitary vagabond, stop running so hard from intimacy, and become a member of the human community.
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Jon Krakauer |
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572d353
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But there are men for whom the unattainable has a special attraction. Usually they are not experts: their ambitions and fantasies are strong enough to brush aside the doubts which more cautious men might have. Determination and faith are their strongest weapons. At best such men are regarded as eccentric; at worst, mad. . . .
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Jon Krakauer |
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18a597d
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I was irresistibly drawn to write about Latter-Day Saints not only because I already knew something about their theology, and admired much about their culture, but also because of the utterly unique circumstances in which their religion was born: the Mormon Church was founded a mere 173 years ago, in a literate society, in the age of the printing press. As a consequence, the creation of what became a worldwide faith was abundantly documente..
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Jon Krakauer |
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29791aa
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weeping...betraying a sense of loss so huge and irreparable that the mind balks at taking its measure.
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Jon Krakauer |
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3289ed5
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only between 5 percent and 20 percent of forcible rapes in the United States are reported to the police; a paltry 0.4 percent to 5.4 percent of rapes are ever prosecuted; and just 0.2 percent to 2.8 percent of forcible rapes culminate in a conviction that includes any time in jail for the assailant. Here's another way to think about these numbers: When an individual is raped in this country, more than 90 percent of the time the rapist gets ..
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Jon Krakauer |
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52681ee
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What distinguishes that summit above the earthly line, is that it is unhandselled, awful, grand. It can never become familiar; you are lost the moment you set foot there. You know the path, but wander, thrilled, over the bare and pathless rock, as if it were solidified air and cloud. That rocky, misty summit, secreted in the clouds, was far more thrillingly awful and sublime than the crater of a volcano spouting fire (HENRY DAVID THOREAU, J..
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Jon Krakauer |
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d7c8c5c
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Both Elizabeth [Smart] and Ruby [Jessop] were fourteen when they were kidnapped, raped and "kept captive by polygamous fanatics." The main difference in the girls' respective ordeals...is that "Elizabeth was brainwashed for nine months," while Ruby had been brainwashed by polygamist fanatics "since birth." Despite the similarity of their plights, Elizabeth's abusers were jailed and charged with sexual assault, aggravated burglary, and aggra..
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mormonism
polygamy
religion
religion-and-children
women-s-rights
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Jon Krakauer |
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cbab236
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Statistically, the odds that any given rape was committed by a serial offender are around 90 percent," Lisak said. "The research is clear on this. The foremost issue for police and prosecutors should be that you have a predator out there. By reporting this rape, the victim is giving you an opportunity to put this guy away. If you decline to pursue the case because the victim was drunk, or had a history of promiscuity, or whatever, the offen..
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criminal-justice
david-lisak
rape
rape-culture
rapists
violent-crime
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Jon Krakauer |
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13941e6
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Many decisions are made in our lifetime, Most relatively insignificant while others life altering
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Jon Krakauer |
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521385b
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Now, should we treat women as independent agents, responsible for themselves? Of course. But being responsible has nothing to do with being raped. Women don't get raped because they were drinking or took drugs. Women do not get raped because they weren't careful enough. Women get raped because someone raped them. JESSICA VALENTI The Purity Myth
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Jon Krakauer |
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24e47ac
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Women don't get raped because they were drinking or taking drugs. Women don't get raped because they weren't careful. Women get raped because someone raped them.
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Jon Krakauer |
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15439f8
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I didn't doubt the potential value of paying attention to subconscious cues...problem was, my inner voice resembled Chicken Little: it was screaming that I was about to die, but it did that almost every time I laced up my climbing boots.
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everest
fear
mountains
nature
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Jon Krakauer |
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c6b7750
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Early on a difficult climb, especially a difficult solo climb, you constantly feel the abyss pulling at your back. To resist takes a tremendous conscious effort; you don't dare let your guard down for an instant. The siren song of the void puts you on edge; it makes your movements tentative, clumsy, herky-jerky. But as the climb goes on, you grow accustomed to the exposure, you get used to rubbing shoulders with doom, you come to believe in..
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Jon Krakauer |
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4d750f6
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books possess an ounce-of-weight to minute-of-entertainment ratio that compares quite favorably to intoxicants.
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books
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Jon Krakauer |
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8977055
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If you get killed," she argued with a mix of despair and anger, "it's not just you who'll pay the price. I'll have to pay, too, you know, for the rest of my life. Doesn't that matter to you?"
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Jon Krakauer |
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df3b799
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An extended stay in the wilderness inevitably directs one's attention outward as much as inward, and it is impossible to live off the land without developing both a subtle understanding of, and a strong emotional bond with, that land and all it holds.
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Jon Krakauer |
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5534ad2
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But perhaps the greatest attraction of Mormonism was the promise that each follower would be granted an extraordinarily intimate relationship with God. Joseph taught and encouraged his adherents to receive personal communiques straight from the Lord. Divine revelation formed the bedrock of the religion.
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history
joseph-smith
lds
mormonism
religion
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Jon Krakauer |
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9a68a99
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The very basic core of a man's living spirit is his passion for adventure.
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Jon Krakauer |
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69983e2
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I'd like to repeat the advice I gave you before, in that I think you really should make a radical change in your lifestyle and begin to boldly do things which you may previously never have thought of doing, or been too hesitant to attempt. So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of whi..
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Jon Krakauer |
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af39153
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At eighteen, in a dream, he saw himself plodding through jungles, chinning up the ledges of cliffs, wandering through the romantic waste places of the world. No man with any of the juices of boyhood in him has forgotten those dreams. The peculiar thing about Everett Ruess was that he went out and did the things he dreamed about, not simply for a two-weeks' vacation in the civilized and trimmed wonderlands, but for months and years in the ve..
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Jon Krakauer |
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32f7ac8
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is a sharp hurt I feel every single day. It's really hard. Some days are better than others, but it's going to be hard every day for the rest of my life.
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Jon Krakauer |
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2dcff76
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Launching a nice little war to divert national attention was a gambit no less appealing to nineteenth-century politicians than it is to their present-day counterparts.
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politics-of-the-united-states
war
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Jon Krakauer |
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7d0f745
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When Debbie was fourteen, she felt "impressed by the Lord" to marry Ray Blackmore, the community leader. Debbie asked her father to share her divine impression with Prophet LeRoy Johnson, who would periodically travel to Bountiful from Short Creek to perform various religious duties. Because Debbie was lithe and beautiful, Uncle Roy approved of the match. A year later the prophet returned to Canada and married her to the ailing fifty-seven-..
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Jon Krakauer |
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9febe35
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Whether one believes that the faith he spawned is the world's only true religion or a preposterous fable, Joseph emerges from the fog of time as one of the most remarkable figures ever to have breathed American air. "Whatever his lapses," Harold Bloom argues in The American Religion, "Smith was an authentic religious genius, unique in our national history.... In proportion to his importance and his complexity, he remains the least-studied p..
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Jon Krakauer |
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d1b4233
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We Americans are titillated by sex, obsessed by it, horrified by it. When an apparently healthy person, especially a healthy young man, elects to forgo the enticements of the flesh, it shocks us, and we leer. Suspicions are aroused.
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Jon Krakauer |
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83873c0
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One of the differences between us was that Marc wanted very badly to climb the Eiger, while I wanted very badly only to have climbed the Eiger. Marc, understand, is at that age when the pituitary secretes an overabundance of those hormones that mask the subtler emotions, such as fear. He tends to confuse things like life-or-death climbing with fun.
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mountaineering
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Jon Krakauer |
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2d50351
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His struggle to mold me in his image had been successful after all. The old walrus in fact managed to instill in me a great and burning ambition; it had simply found expression in an unintended pursuit. He never understood that the Devils Thumb was the same as medical school, only different.
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Jon Krakauer |
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871721c
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Danger has always held a certain allure. That, in large part, is why so many teenagers drive too fast and drink too much and take too many drugs, why it has always been so easy for nations to recruit young men to go to war.
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Jon Krakauer |
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7d9d306
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It is easy, when you are young, to believe that what you desire is no less than what you deserve, to assume that if you want something badly enough, it is your God-given right to have it. When I decided to go to Alaska that April, like Chris McCandless, I was a raw youth who mistook passion for insight and acted according to an obscure, gap-ridden logic. I thought climbing the Devils Thumb would fix all that was wrong with my life. In the e..
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hopelessness
inspiring
life-changing
love
teenage
young
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Jon Krakauer |
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d979401
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Police and prosecutors are morally and professionally obligated to make every effort to identify specious rape reports, safeguard the civil rights of rape suspects, and prevent the falsely accused from being convicted. At the same time, however, police and prosecutors are obligated to do everything in their power to identify individuals who have committed rape and ensure that the guilty are brought to justice. These two objectives are not m..
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justice-system
rape
rape-culture
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Jon Krakauer |
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87fe43a
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Unfortunately, the sort of individual who is programmed to ignore personal distress and keep pushing for the top is frequently programmed to disregard signs of grave and imminent danger as well. This forms the nub of a dilemma that every Everest climber eventually comes up against: in order to succeed you must be exceedingly driven, but if you're too driven you're likely to die. Above 26,000 feet, moreover, the line between appropriate zeal..
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Jon Krakauer |
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d0d19d7
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Sometimes I think it was like he was storing up company for the times when he knew nobody would be around
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Jon Krakauer |