Now I am off again—flux, change. I often feel a need to be inactive, and from that develops a ‘lust for adventure,’ the desire to venture something, to expend myself to the limits of my abilities. A sense of happiness, when ideas and love of life correspond. A mountain, scenery begin to live.

But I am mad enough to contend that above all else the inexplicable gives meaning to life.

I only know that I can earn my bread at an advanced age, and that is all. I would like to secure as much liberty as possible at the least possible expense, no more.

The 300 kilometer journey is like the ascent to the summit, an eternity and a nothingness at the same time. There are no time values running through a book of such adventures.

Here I experience the infinity of the elements. I am merged in them, no longer oppose them, swim.

The overwhelming landscape has made me still more of an individualist, detached from humanity, perhaps even morbidly absorbed in fantasy.

Why are you afraid of the word happiness in this connection? I believe that a human being cannot experience anything more blessed than to feel part of the world and to draw strength from this knowledge. The word happiness I just find so terribly hackneyed.

It moves me very much that this expedition time and again becomes a journey into childhood. I sit there and am composed only of memory, childhood, experience. Everything which I have heard, read or seen belongs to me just like my hands, my eyes and this horizon of glass, which has stamped my life more than anything else. My father showed it to me and my mother let me set out. Until this expedition I had not realized where my life was leading me.

These distant strips of horizon, translucent as frosted glass, have attracted me magically ever since my first mountain excursions as a child. Bright, transparent strips belong to my strongest childhood memories. Now I know that it is the horizon which I am captivated by in the mountains.

The air is thin, I keep trying to breathe deeply. On the way back I ask myself, not for the first time, why I don’t stay below, why don’t I just stay below as the hermits did? Why not take up my quarters in one of these secluded districts, which so attract me, for the rest of my life? I know that I could not do it. I am inwardly just as dependent on the civilized Occident as on my expeditions.

Uschi, the woman I was married to, thinks that these journeys into self experience distance me ever more from other people and lead to a sort of morbid preoccupation with fantasy.

“The way is the goal” is a Buddhist saying, and mad as Wilson might seem, I have taken this persevering Don Quixote, who always carried with him in his rucksack some mementoes of the for him unattainable Enid Evans, to my heart. He is dearer to me than the legion of all those who anxiously build their little houses and preserve their lives for their old-age pension.

They can all produce a reason for wanting to talk to me. I believe the main reason for it is the longing of frightened and lonely people to experience through me some fantasy in their own lives.

Is it this impulse to seek, to venture the leap into the unknown, which many perceive and which so few follow? Is my generation in Europe therefore sick, because it lives in conflict, hungry for adventure but instead locked up in a little house and garden?

I don’t consider myself to be enlightened, but are you sure you see reality as it actually is? I am seeking and I suppose it is immaterial what I do. The only important thing is that I remain in motion and don’t become settled.

“And what do you do for the community?” Nothing. On the contrary, I love experiments, adventure, I am therefore a danger to this industrious, timid and unimaginative society.

“I think you are running away, or in a mid-life crisis,” says a man of similar age to me in Vienna. If being for activity and against bureaucracy, for uncertainty and against middle-class sufficiency, for the last wild places on earth and against the exploitation of nature constitutes flight, then, gladly, I am on the run.

How should such a person, to whom pleasant well-being and the feeling of security in a society are important, understand that I have my most intense feelings of existence only when, through strain and most extreme exertion, I achieve the bounds of human possibility, and attempt to push these bounds still further? That I can endure my loneliness better when I am far away from other people?