Tears on top of the world

Everest isn’t what it was. There are queues. In peak season you can be two hours or more on the South Face awaiting your turn at the summit. But then finally the climber ahead of you steps down and you hasten up the steps carved in the ice, ignoring the litter of energy bar wrappers and discarded oxygen tanks, and you step onto – oh how the phrase comes instantly to mind – the top of the world.

You spread your arms in the gesture you practised in the bedroom. Your dollar-a-day Sherpa puts down your pack and his and kneels with the iPhone to frame you against the sapphire sky. ‘‘Get on with it,’’ comes a voice from the next in line. ‘‘It’s bloody freezing.’’

You maintain your Jesus-on-top-of-the-world pose and remind yourself that this moment validates your existence and that henceforth people will nudge each other and point at you and say ‘‘that’s the guy who . . .’’ but somehow it doesn’t feel as it should. There are mountains for as far as you can see and their silence seems indifferent, even mocking. And the crowd below you is impatient.

Nevertheless you grin for the photo and the Sherpa gives the thumbs up. As you step down, a hedge fund manager from Ottawa pushes you brusquely aside and takes your place, and that’s that. Your moment is over. It’s downhill from here.

And you are seized by a grinding sense of misery. This isn’t how it was meant to be at all. You stumble. You’re not sure what’s wrong. You feel an arm around your shoulder. The Sherpa is looking into your eyes and smiling.

To your astonishment you start to cry. ‘‘There there,’’ says the Sherpa, dabbing at your tears before they freeze, ‘‘it’s all right. Blub it all out, the hollowness, the disappointment. You’re not alone. Look.’’ And down the slope ahead you see the winners of Western society limping back towards the everyday world, leaning on their Sherpas and weeping into their puffer jackets.

‘It’s a natural reaction,’’ says the Sherpa, ‘‘to having your delusion exposed. In the words of our famous Nepali poet Philip Larkin, you have just ‘burst into fulfilment’s desolate attic’.’’ ‘‘Look,’’ says the Sherpa, and you notice for the first time that the snow is littered with hundreds of pieces of paper scrunched into balls and thrown away. The Sherpa unfolds one: ‘‘Go nude on a nudist beach,’’ he reads. He unfolds another: ‘‘Do a parachute jump.’’ Another: ‘‘Sigh on the Bridge of Sighs; Get within 10 metres of Richie McCaw.’’

‘‘Bucket lists,’’ says the Sherpa, with a snort of derision. ‘‘The details vary but they’re all the same. I shouldn’t laugh because I make my living from them, but honestly, what an infantile fad. As if life consists of things called experiences, to be collected like antiques. And that once you’ve got a bunch of nice ones you become fulfilled.

‘‘The hope is that by doing a different thing you become a different person. And the truth, as you just discovered, is that you don’t. You’re crying because the bloke coming down Everest is the same unsatisfactory bloke as went up it, the bloke you hoped to leave behind, the bloke whose dull life you sought to transcend.

‘‘There are no transcendent activities, my friend. No-one is leading the gleaming and glamorous life that you think you’re missing. There is only the here and the now and the ordinary. For everyone. And the wise find that plenty.

‘‘Now dry your tears and stand up straight and stop being a dupe.’’