Photo from the GoFundMe, posted by Tom & Daniele's friends
Story first posted on Twitter.


The climbers Tom Ballard and Daniele Nardi are lost on Nanga Parbat in Pakistan, the world’s ninth-tallest mountain. They have been out of contact for ten days.

Immense efforts have been made to search the mountain. A team of Spanish & Pakistani mountaineers led by Alex Txikon; two Pakistani military helicopters; drones, to survey places that people can't reach due to avalanche risk. €141,000 raised to fund it. Now we must fear the worst.

Ballard is the son of one of the world's top female mountaineers, Alison Hargreaves. She soloed the six great north faces of the Alps in a single season—a first for any climber. She climbed Everest without the aid of Sherpas or bottled oxygen.

She died in 1995, descending K2.

"The Alisons of this world want to achieve things they find barely possible," said her husband Jim, in memory. "When she decided to climb Everest, she wanted to do it in the best style she could, without oxygen or Sherpas, because she wanted to have as little between her and the mountain as humanly possible."

She dedicated the climb to her children, Tom (then aged six), and Kate, aged four. When she died, she was damned for leaving them. Her husband understood. So does Tom. 

"Tom climbs like his mother, and he possibly has even more talent than she did," said his father in 2003, when Tom was 14. A decade later, Tom came to the attention of the world climbing scene in his own right.

"Tom Ballard is a man in his strong-shouldered, rough-handed, sun-tanned prime. He's 26 years old, he's just soloed the 6 great north faces of the Alps in a single winter season, & the eyes of the climbing world are suddenly seemingly where he wants them - fixed directly on him."

Jack Geldard and Nick Brown profiled Tom Ballard in 2015 for UKClimbing.com in an exceptional feature about how he was carrying on his mother's legacy

The feature includes the last known images of Alison alive -- scratched, pink tinted, developed from a roll of film recovered from a body found on the glacier below the mountain. That body was her climbing partner Rob Slater. David Rasmussen found him, and the film, and developed the pictures.

​I was in two minds whether to include these pictures on Twitter, and decided not to: it seemed too morbid. Here, though, where it is a little quieter, I would like to. Because Alison is on top of the world.

I write because I am reminded of another young alpinist, Hayden Kennedy, who died in Montana in October 2017. He was, again, astonishingly talented. it was, again, too soon. He was just 27.

 The story is another tragedy. Hayden Kennedy just... gets to me. I don't fully understand why, to be honest with you. There are a million tragedies every day: why this one? It asks the hardest questions about what it means to love someone and to set them free; perhaps that's part of it. About what it means to live, amid the inevitability of death.

We're going to have to leave that question open. Let me keep telling this story.

One of the things is, Hayden was a writer. Fuck, could he write. This story, published just two weeks before he died, The Day We Sent Logical Progression. ("Sent" means successfully climbed. "Logical Progression" is the name of a route.)

Fuck.

"Over the last few years, however, as I’ve watched too many friends go to the mountains only to never return, I’ve realized something painful. It’s not just the memorable summits and crux moves that are fleeting. Friends and climbing partners are fleeting, too. This is the painful reality of our sport, and I’m unsure what to make of it. Climbing is either a beautiful gift or a curse.

This is a story about the day we sent Logical Progression, a big-wall route in Mexico. The route was amazing, but it wasn’t all that hard. The experience was incredible because I was with three good friends: Chris Kalous, Kyle Dempster, and Justin Griffin.

There’s no easy way to say this, but half that team is now dead."

In 2012 his father, Michael Kennedy - also a noted alpinist - wrote to his son about losing friends in the mountains. Jack Roberts on Bridalveil Falls near Telluride. Bean Bowers, back country skiing in Colorado. Carlyle Norman, who died alone, in Patagonia. Bjørn-Eivind Årtun.

"We knew you were in the mountains, but we hadn't heard anything for several days." He wrote of the fear he & his wife felt in 2012, waiting to hear news from his son's climbing expedition in Patagonia. A silence Tom Ballard and Daniele Nargi's families have known too well this last week.

"Then a post from Colin Haley appeared on Facebook: ,Today we got to watch history being made.... Hayden Kennedy and Jason Kruk made the first fair-means ascent of the SE Ridge of Cerro Torre...[in] about 13 hours to the summit from a bivy at the shoulder.' Someday, you'll understand the intense relief we felt on reading those words."

He was so proud of his son.

"Your ascent of the Southeast Ridge must have been exhilarating: a faultless line with a great partner on that iconic gold and white spire. For me, and for many others, this climb embodies the highest ideals of boldness, difficulty, commitment and self-reliance—the foundations of alpinism. And when you cleaned a third of the 360 bolts on the Compressor Route, you made a courageous first step in restoring Cerro Torre to its rightful place as one of the most demanding and inaccessible summits in the world. I never would have had the guts to take that step myself, even in my best days."

In early October 2017 Hayden & his partner Inge Perkins were skiing in the backcountry of southwestern Montana. Easy stuff, by all accounts. But"on Saturday Inge was killed in an avalanche. Unable to bear the loss of his partner in life, the following day, Sunday, October 8, Hayden Kennedy took his own life."

You can bear it until you can't, I guess.

In Hayden's writing, that story of two weeks before of the Logical Progression climb, you can see a man who was trying to come to terms with "the dual nature of sublime meaning and utter absurdity in climbing mountains".

Why do we do it, he asks? "There is no glory, no real answers, in sending and summits, yet we organize our entire lives around the myth that there are." A myth that many climbers and mountaineers ultimately give their lives for, too.

Hayden was trying  to understand that dark, that loss, that is inherent to mountaineering and climbing as endeavours. He was trying to find a way to live through it.

"Maybe the most genuine aspects of any tale are the sputterings and the silences, the acknowledgments of failure, the glimmerings in the dark. And maybe one genuine reason to try to share our stories about days we actually send something, when we are alive and at the height of our powers, is to try to bring back what’s past, lost, or gone.

Perhaps by doing so, we might find some light illuminating a new way forward."

You can see a man who was trying.

***

Updates about the search on Nanga Parbat are being shared on the Facebook page of Daniele Nardi, the Italian climber who was partnering Tom Ballard on the first winter ascent of the Mummery Rib.

People there, too, are trying to understand the loss. This loss. And that of others they have known. To defend the endeavour, though it extracts such terrible cost.

One comment, from Francesco Migliore, in approximate translation:

"The mountain is neither killer nor accursed nor murderer ... as one often happens to read in many posts these days. The mountain exists and lives... it changes and breathes. We humans want to climb it and give it a value... as Bonatti said, "The mountains have the value of the men who climb them".

The Nanga... like any mountain in the world... is not killer, but living can unfortunately interfere with those who climb on its walls... just this... Daniele and Tom rest in the womb of their alpine dream, but a mountaineer never, ever considers a mountain to be cursed because it is the very reason for his passion."

Tom, Hayden, Alison. They all said the same thing. 

“If you are given two options, take the harder one because you’ll regret it if you don’t,” Alison Hargreaves said in her final interview. “At least if you take the harder one and fail, you’ll have tried.”

​

I know it’s been declared gauche this year to count the books you read, but I see no reason to stop. My uncle has recorded every book he’s read since age 15 (he’s now about 75), and estimated back his childhood consumption for a pretty good guess at totality: perhaps 5,000 volumes, a million pages; full knowledge of the library that makes him him. He has kept much of it, and inherited more - I believe he and my aunt hold a chunk of my grandfather’s library, passed from one man of letters (a doctorate in Latin poetry) to another (a professor of law). Given time I will presumably inherit some part of this archive myself, to join the hundred-odd twentieth century classics I purloined from my parents (really, my father) around the time I left home, fifteen years ago, which I have still not read - and the many hundred more I’ve bought.

Celebrity things-fetishist Marie Kondo recently caused a media tremor by suggesting that one might not keep every volume: “Will these books be beneficial to your life moving forward?” she asked. There was outcry — so, being contrarian by orientation, of course I happen to agree. What is unread in it matters as much as what has been consumed: the library is a continual work in progress, a projection forwards as much as a means of looking back. Or rather, it is an archive of past projections forward, hope inseparable from memory. I own many volumes older than I am and will only come to own more. But still: nothing stays unless I believe I shall want to come back to it - a presentiment of a future return.

This one is new - book no.1 of 2019, James Salter’s first novel ‘The Hunters’ (1956) - but it’s also one that’s going to stay.

I’ll file it between the Saint-Exuperys and Mark Vanhoenacker’s Skyfaring (2015), and West With The Night by pioneering aviatrix Beryl Markham (1942/84). It’s about a pilot flying in the Korean War.

Books about flying share a core of feeling so achingly crystalline that not even other stories of near-death in the sublime (the Arctic, the desert, the mountains) quite touch. There is a sharp poignancy their writers know, that of cold air and low oxygen at altitude, and watching the sun rise and fall over the curvature of the earth. And there is one they do not, one that comes from the way these stories are about to become marooned in time, relic of a long twentieth century of kerosene and the jet engine, in which the planet seemed for a time a place where humankind might soar, and perilous though the risk we had not yet come crashing down. There will be solar sails, I suppose, but they will not be helmed by men.

Salter was recommended to me by Rishi Dastidar as a writer exceptional at the sentence level and worthy of study. I’m not sure I saw this: his prose is plainer than that led me to expect, though as spare and lean as these books usually are, with only the tiniest, carefully judged flights of lyricism. Instead I loved this book for the opposite reason: the narrative, and its ambivalence. Nothing happens, and nothing happens, and nothing - and then it does, and of course by that time the narrator doesn’t want it anyway. But perhaps all books about war are like this, or all the good ones. I don’t know: I haven’t read so many of them. Yet.

Location: Carnaby Street, London
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Soho has lost a lot of its neon fantasy lately - but some lives on in spectacular form. I started off thinking: I’m sure I’m meant to criticise this. But after some reflection: nah. I’ve got time for it, weaponised Instagram-bait as it is. Here’s why.

Amazon is hollowing out our high streets and replacing human-facing shop jobs with warehouse drudgery that leaves workers mere servants to a machine. It is hollowing out our material culture into price-arbitraged Alibaba drop-shipped disposable trash. And the media that might object to this turns instead to affiliate links and “service journalism” to stay afloat. An entire section of New York magazine is just an Amazon catalogue now. High street shops shutter and people stay away and the decline accelerates.

Meanwhile, Tinder and Deliveroo and Netflix (and high alcohol taxation and stagnating incomes and NIMBY-ist anti-nightlife zoning) mean our generation have… turned inwards. Culture shifts from the public to the domestic and digital, & away from the press of bodies in a crowded room to the tap of thumbs on a Twitch stream. This is bad for love, joy, solidarity and resistance. Bodily presence and shared experience are irreplaceable. People do better participating in the world. Hikikomori aren’t #goals.

This Christmas Visa did a full on feels-ad with local shopkeepers singing “All I want for Christmas is you.” And this neon spectacular is the same: it’s another big 'Fuck you Amazon', and the fact it’s retailers & a multi-millionaire rock band reminding us of this doesn’t mean they’re wrong. You will not remember the brown cardboard box of your 32nd Prime delivery next year, but you might remember this.

Sure, it’s designed to transmute into a spectacular digital image & circulate accordingly. But note how everyone takes their own photo, whatever the quality of their phone cam, rather than posting professional promo shots. This says: it matters that this was my experience. And in that, a germ of hope.

Work to be done yet on sustainable retail & imagining the city centre beyond consumption & bringing about the end of capitalism, sure. But the city I want looks more like this than it does an Amazon warehouse.

Location: Lobby of the Langham, London
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Placeholder for a desire to think more about hotels.

Perhaps it comes from participating in Precarious Gossips last month at Hotel Zoo, Berlin - or seeing that Helen Hester has been writing about them lately too (on rather more defensible, labour relations grounds). Or perhaps it’s because I’m reading ‘Tender Is The Night’ by F. Scott Fitzgerald, about a caste defined by the fact they live out of them, anywhere and nowhere.

The department store of the 1880s was instrumental in the production of modern subjectivity: it was “conceived as a technology of self-invention” through consumer choice, says Joanne Finkelstein (2007). Pace Lukacs she notes how “the inner self has been hollowed out and made into a subjectivity that becomes an object - to be groomed and improved.” Felix Guattari writes of the court of Versailles that subjectivity itself is understood to be a commodity. It’s all a performance of sensibility and taste; the flâneuse, rather more than the flâneur, “the real model for the modern consumer subject” – Kevin Hetherington, 2011.

The hotel, though… It seems as though it should be the same sort of space as the department store, a cosmopolitan public - and perhaps its bars and restaurants are, but the hotel really is not. It is something the opposite, a place of escape and avoidance.

But it’s nonetheless also productive of a subjectivity too. So of what sort?