It’s clear from the 2021 film celebrating the late Marc-André Leclerc’s life and accomplishments as one of the most daring and gifted alpinists of his generation, that climbing mountains for him was a spiritual practice. As the film suggests, a lot of people in the climbing industry didn’t really get Marc-André—he was always disappearing on secret climbs and didn’t seem at all compelled by the typical rhythms of professional athleticism. My favourite part of the film is the way it contrasts the incredulity and confusion of industry people with absolutely precious interviews in which Marc-André has a chance to speak for himself: “When I’m in the Mountains, life is so incredibly simple”.
When you hear Marc-André talk about rock climbing and alpinism, he often returns to the word “adventure”. When you watch the film, you can see the word is a touch point for March-André (I love, for example, in the trailer, when he talks about his record- breaking and unprecedented climbs: “It’s more just to have casual fun adventure”). It’s a familiar word, sure, but hearing Marc-André call his solitary free-solo and on-sight ascents of mountains on some kind of “quest to the gods” (I think these were the words Alex Honnold used) an “adventure”, I get the feeling that he is not using the word in exactly the same way that I do.
There is clearly, for Marc-André, much about the experience of pure alpinism that is simply ineffable, and maybe the word “adventure” acted for him as a totemic way of pointing to that mystery’s interior—something he knew because he saw and experienced it, but which the normal conventions of human language fail to articulate.
I learned after watching the film that Marc-André kept a blog which documents some of his biggest adventures. The blog is still live, and it contains some of the most remarkable spiritual writing I have ever read. When I found the blog, I quickly read every post, deeply thankful for this brief chance to know some of Marc-André’s thoughts in writing (his prose is remarkable), and as I expected, the word “adventure” kept coming back.
We’ll look at one of my very favourite of these posts next time.
A PhD Program and a Lesson in Solitude
I have never been on an adventure of the kind that Marc-André talks about. Neither have I enjoyed many mountain-top experiences of the metaphorical, spiritual variety. When I try to think about an analogy from my own life, the closest thing that comes to mind is my recent experience completing a PhD program in Philosophy. I started my program at University College Dublin in fall 2019, and finished just as my funding came to an end in September 2023. Getting close to the end I started telling people that this was the hardest thing I had ever done in my life.
I had a lot of fun as a Master’s student. It was the ultimate life of leisure: reading ancient Greek, thinking, learning, writing, and sharing the fruits of these labours with dear kindred-spirits. The PhD experience did not feel like this at all. Of course writing a dissertation during a pandemic an ocean away from my department contributed to the difficulty, but what I found most challenging was bound to have come up no matter where or in what circumstances I did the program. It was an internal challenge.
As I think is the case for a lot of high achieving young students, one of the most exhilarating parts of formal education is navigating the real (or imagined) expectations of your professors. There are few arenas in life where you can come to the end of a project and are given the chance to so clearly understand that you have “done a good job” (with a grade-point data set to prove it). For me, the process of writing a PhD dissertation, by contrast, was like walking in a desert and in the dark. As my supervisor Dragos Calma told me at a crucial point in the process, “You have to shine your own light”.
I think that getting to the end of the project and actually handing it in (again, the most difficult thing I’ve ever done) really amounted to learning how to embrace a practice of solitude. Coincidentally, I think that solitude is also part of the inner-meaning of adventure for Marc-André. More on that next week.
It’s still nice to hold it.