Two Sherpas Quotes

“The bureaucrat? A conservative, of course, like anyone canonised. A hinderer. That's what the old Sherpa would say. And at the same time: a holy man. A guardian, the Grail's custodian, a Joseph of Arimathea eternalised in his crypt of laws, edicts, and amendments, provisions and standardised protocols all in keeping with arbitrary norms: therein lies their value. That the key, the old Sherpa would point out. The arbitrariness.”
― Sebastián Martínez Daniell, Two Sherpas

“Then, for a moment, silence dominates the path to the summit of Everest. If the furious race of monsoon winds blasting the outlines of the Nepalese mountain range can be considered silence.”
― Sebastián Martínez Daniell, Two Sherpas

“That's why he delays several seconds, during which time the silence of the mountain recovers its protagonism. If the thunderous hum of hundreds of turbines from the underworld blowing icy air between the peaks of the Himalayas can be considered silence.”
― Sebastián Martínez Daniell, Two Sherpas

“Actions, thoughts, interpretations, dialogues and soliloquies, sufferings… are nothing more than intermittently surging projections, stamps on the surface of the knowable. Symptoms. The real is in the out-of-sight, permeating from an aberrant beyond. It’s inaccessible. And yet we keep conforming to the merely perceptible.”
― Sebastián Martínez Daniell, Two Sherpas

“Although it could be argued that every voyage already contains, in latent form, the possibility of its deviations. That they’re never random. That nor are they predestined. But they are larval, that much is true. They are crouched in their embryonic cocoons. They float, foetal, on the trail of amniotic becoming. Waiting for a catalyst.”
― Sebastián Martínez Daniell, Two Sherpas

“It’s a brief moment before the word is returned to the box of the irreversible, before it makes itself present with its flotilla of tragic predestinations. A regrettable loss, a true disaster. The life of a man. A young man, with enormous potential, intrepid, full of projects. A life in full bloom suddenly cut down by the bloodlust of the giantess, of this mineral titan indifferent to the fragility of mortals. Another existence reduced to the germinal point of senselessness, another proof of the pompous futility of human destiny. The young Sherpa feels terrible. He takes his eyes off the abyss.”
― Sebastián Martínez Daniell, Two Sherpas

“One minute it represents the pinnacle of gregarious engineering, the most refined Apollonian mechanism of social regulation; the next it’s a groping homunculus spewing pus and other people’s blood onto the last remnants of a massacred autonomy.”
― Sebastián Martínez Daniell, Two Sherpas

“They see it as perfectly logical for Sherpas to summit. They ought to think of us as Titans, deities with powers unattainable by mere mortals.”
― Sebastián Martínez Daniell, Two Sherpas

“If the two Sherpas were Impressionist painters, the older man would be Renoir, and the younger Monet.”
― Sebastián Martínez Daniell, Two Sherpas

“The old Sherpa lingers for a moment on that expression: sun protection. He thinks it could be a noble title in the proper empire. 'Sapa Inca, Viracocha's Chosen Brother and Great Sun Protector of the Tahuantisuyo.”
― Sebastián Martínez Daniell, Two Sherpas

“And so he breaks the silence. If the deafening noise of the wind ravelling over the ridges of the Himalayas can be considered silence.”
― Sebastián Martínez Daniell, Two Sherpas

“Shall we get up?' the old Sherpa hears at the exact moment when, contemplating the figure of the fallen Englishman, he was already thinking that he would never find a way to reconcile his desire for egalitarianism with his misanthropy.”
― Sebastián Martínez Daniell, Two Sherpas

“It was said that when Sir Robert showed her his will, Lady Houston tore it to pieces and told him that bequeathing her only a million pounds was an insult to her integrity. From that afternoon forward, Sir Robert had his food professionally tasted in an effort to avoid being poisoned.”
― Sebastián Martínez Daniell, Two Sherpas

“The young Sherpa -- eight at the time -- had been nursing exaggerated expectations. Then again that was childhood, or at least it was his: a constant assemblage of outrageous predictions, a permanent fleeing from the referential framework. He didn't even know what he might find on a farm. But he assumed it was something wild, indomitable. The very thing that would bring about the greatest unpredictability.”
― Sebastián Martínez Daniell, Two Sherpas

“What he can do, it seems, is lie there Britishly upon the mountain.”
― Sebastián Martínez Daniell, Two Sherpas

“The Mahayana Buddhists believed that it was possible to democratise Nirvana. That just about anyone could achieve a state of enlightenment. Like Zen doctrine, which owes much of its cosmological framework to it, the Mahayana interpreted Buddhism as method rather than as worship.”
― Sebastián Martínez Daniell, Two Sherpas

“These people...' says the old Sherpa.”
― Sebastián Martínez Daniell, Two Sherpas