Does This Mountain Have a Summit?── The distance that opens as you climb, and the fuel that doesn't run out

Does this mountain have a summit? I have been climbing a long time and I have not arrived. But as it has become clearer that I will not arrive, the way I climb has changed. The question that occupies me now is not whether there is a summit. It is what is happening to the person doing the climbing.

01Does this mountain have a summit?

There is another stack of material on my desk today, much the same shape as always. The same points at issue as last year, the same places I hesitate, the same corrections. The boulder I pushed up has rolled back down overnight. I have had that feeling many times in this work.

The Sisyphus that Albert Camus took up was a man punished by the gods. Push an enormous rock to the summit. The moment it arrives, it rolls back down. Push it up again. Forever. The worst punishment the gods could devise was labour that was futile and without hope.

Camus did not close the story in despair. After the rock rolls down, Sisyphus walks back down the mountain. During that descent he looks down on his own fate. A man who looks down on his fate stands above it. Camus ends with the line that the struggle toward the heights is itself enough to fill a human heart.

I do not read this as a recommendation to endure. I read it as a claim about order: meaning is not placed at the summit, it is generated on the side that climbs. If the meaning sits at the top, then the whole span before arrival becomes a means. And if you never arrive, all of it was waste. Reverse the order and there is no time left over to waste.

02The same year is not the same length

My first year in this work was impossibly long. There was so much to learn that a single day held three. My tenth year went by in no time. The workload had not fallen — it had grown. Still it was short.

Henri Bergson held that there are two kinds of time. One is the time a clock marks: a row of equal graduations, time as quantity. The other is time as it is lived, which he called pure duration. That one has no graduations. It stretches and contracts. It is time as quality.

A beginner's year is not long because the clock is different. It is long because the volume of things met for the first time is different. A first encounter with a kind of material, a first judgment, a first piece sent back. Each one leaves a mark. By the tenth year most of it is already known, and the known leaves no mark. So the year is short.

Seneca wrote two thousand years ago that life is not short. It is not short — we make it short. Time is given in sufficient quantity and is merely squandered. It is a hard thing to say, and the squandering he means includes more than idleness. It includes work done out of habit: the hours spent repeating a judgment without thinking it. On the clock that is working. In duration, almost nothing is flowing.

03The density of experience has a ceiling

Try to raise the density and for a while it rises. Anders Ericsson's work on expertise showed the effect of practice aimed deliberately at the one thing you cannot yet do, rather than practice done vaguely. I did the same. Go to the provision I did not understand. Write down the judgments I got wrong. Copy out other people's findings.

But somewhere the gain slows. It is the period usually called a plateau. For me it did not arrive as a sense that my ability had stopped. It arrived as a sense of the world filling up with the already-known. Fewer things look new. The same question comes round again in a slightly different shape. Density only rises while the material is still new.

The road forks here. Try to keep raising the density along the same axis and you will usually burn out, because you are increasing how much you burn after the material has run out.

The second and third are not retreats. They move the source of density from inside you to outside you. Your own headroom may be spent; other people's headroom is not. Connect to that and there is material still.

04Further up, you stop being understood

At some point explaining got harder. I could look at a piece once and know that something was wrong here. But when I tried to put into words why it was wrong, it would not come. What was invisible to the other person was visible to me, and the words to close that gap were not stocked anywhere inside me.

This is not a question of ability. It is the effect known as the curse of knowledge: once you know a thing, you can no longer accurately recall not knowing it. You forget the order in which you stumbled and over what. So you lose the ability to see why someone does not understand.

The distance opens not because the other person is lesser, but because the road travelled is different. Mistake that and the thing turns ugly. You grow impatient with people who do not follow, you spend less effort explaining, and you end up further alone. I walked a little way down that road once.

Suppose there is something to be seen from further up. If you do not carry it back down, what you saw exists only inside you. An understanding that cannot be translated ends when the person ends. That is a matter of loneliness, and it is also a matter of work.

05What does it mean to be clever?

When I was younger I thought cleverness was speed of processing: giving the right answer to a hard question, quickly. I no longer think so.

Keith Stanovich looked into what intelligence tests fail to measure. Being highly intelligent and being able to reason well sit on separate dimensions. It happens routinely that people who score highly cannot let go of a belief the evidence has gone against. The power to think fast and the power to update what you think exist separately.

An older division of intelligence overlaps here. The power to solve a novel problem on the spot peaks early and declines with age. The power to use what you have accumulated goes on rising for a long time. Compete on speed and, past a certain age, you lose continuously.

None of the three has anything to do with speed. If anything they run against it. The substance of cleverness lies not in how fast you produce an answer but in how readily you can put one down and pick up another — that is my answer for now. And it happens to be the side that does not fall away with age.

06When the end comes into view, do you fight it?

A day comes when the time remaining is the shorter half. In this work, it is the day when how many more pieces you will see, and how many people you can still hand something to, fall inside a countable range.

Do you fight it or accept it? That pair of options was a question for me for a long time. You fight because you cannot let go of the picture of yourself still climbing. You accept because it looks wise — but accept too early and you have simply started down.

I now think the pair itself is wrong. Fighting and accepting are both stances toward the ending. What actually has to be decided is not a stance but where the remainder gets spent. Decide a stance and nothing moves. Decide a use and tomorrow's schedule changes.

A question Kanzo Uchimura raised in his lecture on the greatest legacy for later generations bites here. What can a person leave behind? Money, an enterprise, a body of thought. He lists them, then concedes that few can leave money, few can build an enterprise, few can write down a philosophy. And as the greatest legacy available to anyone at all, he names a life lived bravely and well. Not what you achieved but how you lived — that, anyone can leave.

I read this not as moral instruction but as a question of allocation. Decide what kind of thing you want to leave and the use of the remaining time is decided with it. Results, or people, or a way of judging. Not whether to fight or accept, but what to hand over on the way out. From the moment that is decided, there is not much left to fight, and not much left to accept.

07Setting a goal that does not burn you out

I would like to burn completely. I would rather not burn out. The two look contradictory, but the research on burnout suggests otherwise.

What Christina Maslach and her colleagues found was unexpected. Burnout does not come from overwork alone. It comes when the workload is joined by a lack of control, a lack of reward, and a mismatch between what the workplace values and what you do. Which means the reverse also holds: even under a heavy load, people burn remarkably well when they can decide things themselves, when they can feel that something landed, and when the direction of the work matches what they want to protect.

So "don't push so hard" is not a prescription. What works is changing the kind of fuel.

Mieko Kamiya, in her study of what makes life worth living, described it not as a grand mission but as something found within the ordinary day. It is the observation of a psychiatrist who spent years among people living under sharply limited conditions in a sanatorium. What she saw was that the people who felt their life worth living had not necessarily accomplished anything large. What divided them was whether a sense of being of use to something was present in the daily round.

My own setting has ended up like this. Hold a direction rather than a destination. Cut the direction into units within reach — see this one page today more accurately than yesterday. And keep somewhere to hand things on. With somewhere to hand things on, the fuel does not run out on the days when your own growth has stopped.

Whether the mountain has a summit I still do not know. But the altitude has certainly risen. Things became visible because of the height, and because they became visible I stopped being understood by certain people. That distance is lonely. And yet the work of closing it turned into the next way of climbing.

Burning completely is probably not a matter of using up your own fuel. It is keeping the flame alive while passing it to someone else's wood. If it burns where it lands, your own fire growing smaller is not a loss. Camus does not say what Sisyphus was thinking on the walk down. I think it was the angle of the next push. For as long as he is thinking about that, the punishment has turned into work.