Touching the Void

I read “Touching The Void” this week. It’s the story of Joe Simpson and Simon Yates epic climb and disastrous descent of Sinula Grande in the Peruvian Andes. The story is palpable but sometimes clouded in climbing terms that make it difficult to follow or picture in your mind. It was a first ascent of a 21000 foot peak.

On the way down Simpson fell and broke his leg badly at his right knee. Simon, rather than abandon his “dead” friend lowered him down some 3000 feet to the glacier. Just when they would have reached the bottom Simpson went off a cliff and hung precariously in a crevasse. No way to climb the rope and no way to communicate to Simon in a bad storm and at night. Simon began to slip and held the rope as long as he could. Figuring Simpson to finally have expired he cut the rope.

I won’t get into the discussion of whether a climber should ever cut the rope or not. To me this was not the most important theme of the book. I think Simpson wrote the book to expunge the demons of that terrible experience as well as to tell the story and liberate his friend from any guilt over cutting the rope. Simpson said he would have done the same thing, there was no choice.

To me the most important theme of the book was the voice in the void. After Simpson drops into the crevasse he begins to hear a "voice". He describes it as something outside himself. It's not a part of him and he actually fights with the voice from time to time. Tragically Simpson never seems to ask where that voice came from. His focus is always on the void itself and his epic struggle, amazed at each small victory and his ultimate survival. At the end of it all he marvels at the irony that his experience, far from killing him, had made him a successful businessman with speaking and writing engagements. He even returned to climbing.

Throughout the epic portion of the book all the thoughts and words that don’t belong to Simpson are italicized. He doesn’t capitalize the words of the voice but he might have. Simpson touched the void. In titling the book I don’t know what Simpson intended the void to symbolize, if anything at all. Perhaps he merely meant the void of darkness or the void of the crevasse. As I read, I realized that there is a void for all of us. The void is not a crevasse at the bottom of Sinula Grande, the void is that thing which makes us ultimately human. No animal wrestles with its own impermanence. Only man can see that he is here today but may not be here tomorrow. It’s not just a struggle with life and death but with the lack of power we have over our life and death. Ultimately we cannot do anything to overcome this. There are forces which are more powerful than we.

The smallness of being human is a void of power, a void of control. In light of the universe we aren’t even specks of dust. We are tiny, insignificant beings. Whether we live good lives or not makes no difference to the universe. It keeps spinning either way. Simpson seems to take this in stride as he encounters the void. But that’s what makes the voice so interesting to me. Simpson touches the void, accepting the possibility of death without asking the most important question. This is the real tragedy of the story. Many will read this book as an epic struggle for survival and one man’s ability to overcome the odds. Unfortunately, each small success seemed to take him further away from the most important thing.

Only once does he speak of anything outside himself. He mentions the hope that his mother is praying for him. Other than that its simply “Should I sit here and wait for death to come or should I take one more step, possibly fall and have it be over quickly?” Throughout there is the voice that urges him onward.

In our powerless and small lives, with our limited perspective, we need something larger than ourselves to speak out of the void and give us perspective. Just as Simpson crawls back to camp, standing up to make sure he is heading the right way, the voice in the void is constantly giving him that perspective. It doesn’t come from within. Simpson makes that clear. He speaks of a struggle where this voice is urging him on and he battles it, trying to ignore it. He always relents and “obeys” the voice. But if it doesn’t come from somewhere deep within his psyche, where does it come from?

I envy Simpson. I don’t envy him this experience or his nightmares since. In fact he may have convinced me that I don’t need to climb any 21000 foot peaks in my lifetime. I don’t need to put myself in that situation. I don’t have a desire to “conquer” nature that way. What I envy is that he has heard the voice of God. He was urging him onward. He never suggests that this voice was an answer to his mother’s prayers. He never makes that connection. I recognize that voice and it seems strange to me that Simpson didn’t. He heard God clearly but never questioned Who’s voice it was. Perhaps he did but didn’t mention it in the book.

And that’s the amazing thing about this book. It’s an incredible experience and written so that I almost felt the cold on my own hands, the frostbite, the pain of the broken leg. Reading it almost made it feel like I touched the void too. But I have a larger context to my story and that makes all the difference.

A rat in a maze may come across food by luck but ultimately the rat needs input from outside the maze if he is ever to be anything but a lucky rat in a maze. At the end of it all Simpson remains blinded to this. His life philosophy is that everything is random chance. “Do you play your cards, go all in or walk away from the table… I’ll never know.” How sad. That statement makes this a story of a grand tragedy rather than a story of strength and survival. I don’t know Simpson’s intentions but I feel quite sorry for him. Ironically it may be his survival that has doomed him to this philosophy.