Krakauer's Into Thin Air

Picked up this book for no particular reason, perhaps due to a lull in my own personal ambitions, to read about individuals motivated by the simplest form of idealism- climb the highest mountain. It went quickly, and every time I put it down, I flashed to my own, minimal experiences of mountain climbing, or hiking into the folds of the Northwest Cascades on my own.
The sense of exhaustion, the difficulty of working in teams, the central paradox of sublimating the ego when clearly it was the ego that was the prime motive, were all clear to me. And yet, I was somehow proud to be from this strange, idealistic clan of the individual. In fact, most of my friends have paid some price or another to consider themselves part of this sensibility.
How to describe the experience of moving past one's limits, onto a slick, fractured rock face with only one's ebbing strength and the desperation of possible death to motivate?
I used to do that regularly. Probably between the ages of 19-25. Without a true, binding "vocation" to provide focus and self-discipline, without a material desire lashing me to the economic corpus bloating in the early and mid 90's, there was only discovery of my own physical and mental limitations to discover.
Without a religion, or a God to pray to and fall before, there was only Nature and Will to push me.
Having a son changed all that- at age 26. But it was interesting to see these grown men and women, who needed to continue to separate themselves from others, driven by some internal egoistic gratification that made the book compelling.
The First World Ego accompanied by the Third World Support. Perhaps nowhere more personified than there, on the face of Everest.
As I read it, I was simultaneously pulled in, and relieved that I was not experiencing this myself. Leaving the book to play with my children, then returning to the self-flagellation that propels each of these individuals gave me the balance to both tolerate the day to day grind, heavy with oxygen, and to appreciate the deprivation required to appreciate what I had.
But such a trapeze walk speaks of deeper ambitions still writhing, alive deeply in some unlit place.
Krakauer's gift is to allow each of us to see bits of ourselves in the climbers on the Lhoste Face, the psychological cwm we continually spin within.