Because It's There

More than 5,000 people have reached the summit of Mount Everest; last year, climbers left behind twelve tons of garbage. The relative ease with which a certain ambition and $40,000 of ready money can bring us to the summit of the world’s most famously imposing mountain obscures the fact that less than a century ago, Everest held roughly the same place in the public imagination that Mars does today.

While Elon Musk plans to launch spaceships to Mars because “civilization isn’t looking super stable,” English mountaineer George Mallory had a more memorably terse explanation in 1923 for his planned expedition up Everest a year later: “Because it’s there.”

Musk offers fear disguised as foresight. Mallory offered wisdom masked as glib arrogance. We owe it to Mallory’s memory, and to ourselves, to examine his gnomic reply a bit more closely.

It is unlikely that George Mallory meant simply to dismiss his questioner. The quote appears in the first paragraph of a New York Times article that runs to more than 1,000 words, most of them detailing the techniques and habits of mind that mark successful mountaineers. The unnamed author was either directly acquainted with high-level mountaineering, in which case Mallory would not have dismissed him as a piker, or developed a solid enough rapport with Mallory that the famous climber was moved to speak with him at length. In any event, the article contains far more material attributed directly to Mallory, which itself puts to rest any notion that he meant to cut the conversation short.

What then should we make of Mallory’s retort? It may have been simply a way to direct the conversation away from a topic with which the reporter could not have been sufficiently familiar, much the same as authors often reply curtly when asked where they get their ideas.

Mallory’s seemingly earnest generosity throughout the rest of the piece suggests strongly that he meant to say something important with those three little words. In this view, Mallory is hinting that, while everything else about his approach to mountaineering is worthy of being related to an interested audience, his innermost reasons for climbing in the first place are so personal, so distinctly his, that any attempt to describe them to others would distort them beyond comprehension.

Perceptual filtering refers to the process of taking in new information and interpreting it according to prior experiences and cultural norms.

In this, Mallory may have anticipated later research into perceptual filtering: the idea that each of us sees the world in significantly different ways, and that our experiences of common phenomena may not even be mutually intelligible. In choosing a brisk, bracing way to underscore this observation, Mallory implies that we would do well to take the same approach. If each of us experiences the world—and our jobs and careers—in distinctly personal ways, we can take that knowledge as proof of the importance and the power of simple empathy and kindness. This empathy needn’t be mushy and impractical; as Ian MacLaren put it:

Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.

This interpretation of Mallory’s quote is also a clear call to purpose and self-direction. Choose what you want to do and do it: you owe no one an explanation, since precious few people are prepared to understand your goals and motivations in the first place. Even more hearteningly, the world is scattered lightly with people whose experiences and perceptions are aligned closely enough with yours that they will understand you on a fundamental enough level to become valuable allies, partners, and even friends.

In an essay for Adventure Journal, Stacy Bare offers a reading of Mallory’s words that seeks some understanding of the man behind them. Mallory was a veteran of the Somme, Bare notes, and like many who returned from the War to End All Wars may well have seen a decisive break between his pre-war life and the one he was tasked with building when he returned home. “Because it’s there” can then be seen as a call to divest ourselves of the past, and to seek opportunities with radically refreshed eyes.

Live your lives on your own terms, create your own measures of the world and your own sense of meaning.

When trauma does not force us to break with the past, we can still do so by refusing to honor the limitations and preconceptions that once boxed us in. Again, Mallory calls us to live our lives on our own terms, to create our own measures of the world and our own sense of meaning.

One other interpretation suggests itself. Before his final, fatal assault on Everest, Mallory was already a celebrated climber, and had earned a rare honor. When climbing Mount Snowdon in Wales with some friends, Mallory left his pipe on a ledge beneath an overhang that had required the party to take a winding, looping approach to the further ascent. With the afternoon light beginning to fade, Mallory raced down along a route that all agreed was simply impossible. When he returned with his pipe, his route was documented and later named for him.

Mallory’s Pipe, as it is now known, may be an even better exemplar of the spirit Mallory meant to convey in his quip to the New York Times than his attempts to climb Everest. Life is simple, he seems to suggest. You have a humble goal, like finding your pipe (or leading a division), the challenges are immense, and life itself consists of the creative and dogged ways that you fail and succeed in pursuit of that goal.

Tackling the unbeatable and attempting the impossible is how we learn about ourselves and the world.

”Because it’s there,” then, may be shorthand for “because tackling the unbeatable and attempting the impossible is how we learn about ourselves and the world.” In which case, Mallory’s words have never been more vital, more insightful, or more valuable.