The man I rented crampons from told me not to look into the void while climbing Mount Whitney. I don’t know why he bothered to tell me this. The moment I felt darkness pressing into my side, I had to look.
He told me that if I buckled from a lack of oxygen, I would fold whichever direction my head was pointed. He said that’s how people died climbing mountains. I think he’s completely wrong. I was never worried about accidentally pitching into the night. I was much more concerned with the darkness snapping me off the mountain and swallowing me.
I like to describe the night surrounding Whitney’s snowy traverses as a massive snake or a bat, a piece of imagery I borrowed from a passage describing the face of Mount Hozomeen in “Desolation Angels” by Jack Kerouac.
“The wind whirls, desolate of song, shaking rafters of the earth, progenating night — Giant bat shadows of cloud hover on the mountain.”
“Desolation Angels” is Kerouac’s semi-autobiographical account of living in complete solitude for a summer as a fire lookout on Mount Desolation in the pacific northwest. Kerouac stares off into nothingness and rambles incoherently for most of the novel. It’s more like a magic eye picture than a story. On the surface it’s a senseless jumble of nothing, but if you stare at it long enough, a picture emerges.
Kerouac gives us the clearest idea of what’s hidden in the static after he stubs his toe on a cupboard:
“And you have been forever, and will be forever, and all the worrisome smashings of your foot on innocent cupboard doors it was only the Void pretending to be a man pretending not to know the Void.”
The genius of “Desolation Angels” is that its style is completely inextricable from its content. Just as meaning emerges from the indecipherable text, reality springs from an infinite void. This idea is called “maya” — a Sanskrit word roughly translating to “illusion” in English — in Hinduism and Buddhism. If you’re into physics, you can think of maya as an object appearing from an empty swirl of infinitesimally small particles pinballing around space. The entire novel is about the deep horror of this emptiness and the miracle of reality inexplicably emerging from it.
In my case, the existential horror of the void was amplified by genuine physical danger. I had never used crampons before or been at such a high elevation. Whitney is the highest peak in the contiguous United States. The path up to it is long, steep and icy. A hiker fell to his death off a switchback two days before we summited. My buddies and I started at midnight with the hopes of making it down the mountain before sunset the next day. We dramatically overestimated our ability.
My buddy Spencer was the first to get altitude sickness. His breathing became labored, his face turned greyish blue, and he had to stop every couple of minutes to lie down. He looked like Frankenstein’s monster wobbling up the mountain, his bodybuilding frame wrapped in a bulky ski jacket.
I was next. I was incredibly nauseous and weak. It felt like the trail folded into another dimension, and we were trudging sideways through time rather than forward to the peak. Or the primordial darkness had bent my brain, and time was limping along to the beat of my broken body.
We managed to summit, but the real trial was making it back down. We were deliriously tired and deprived of oxygen. Halfway down the mountain, I started seeing things. The first thing I saw was a tattered shirt stretched over a boulder. I assumed they were the clothes of the fallen hiker. When I looked at them harder, they dissolved back into the jagged face of the rock.
A couple of miles later, I told my friend Lee we should get water from the lake with all the boats and houses in the valley below. She told me the houses and boats were rocks. She didn’t laugh or express any concern. Her eyes were glassy, and I could tell she was seeing things too.
I started hallucinating hard when the sun started setting. The lichen, snow and grime clinging to the massive boulders strewn across the valley became line-drawn faces, symbols and words. Every rock looked like it had been hand-carved, rather than cleaved into a tangle of grooves and facets as it tumbled down the mountain. I caught myself stopping to read writing on rocks, which took longer and longer to unravel as the sun went down.
I was transported to Kerouac’s horrifying yet beautiful world of maya, where fanged beasts screamed through the night and mountains tore themselves loose from a vibrating field of emptiness. There was absolutely no barrier between my thoughts and physical surroundings. There was no metaphor. Every abstract thought passing through me took form.
About an hour after sunset, I saw Jesus in a tree trunk. The image was identical to a wooden icon of Christ that my mom had gotten me from Greece. He morphed into a woman, and the ridges of the bark turned into a swarm of alien hieroglyphics spiraling around her golden halo. The glow emanating from the halo was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.
Spencer pulled me away from the shimmering Jesus-woman and we made it to the car an hour later. We rolled onto campus around 2 a.m. I spent the rest of the week falling asleep in class, limping to the dining hall or in bed. We had hiked for 22 hours straight and had stayed awake for two whole days.
I understand that my experience was primarily a result of sleep deprivation and altitude sickness, but I was left with an idea that I’m willing to defend ferociously: Anyone who tells you that you should read to entertain or educate yourself is missing the point entirely. Reading violently restructures your reality.
I would not have seen the Jesus-woman on Whitney if my mom hadn’t gifted me the physical icon. The same goes for the golden glow it emitted. The image would have been much more inert had I not read Kerouac’s description of the immaterial golden ash dancing beneath his eyelids in “Desolation Angels.” Every artifact you find within a story bleeds into your senses.
The more you wring static text into a controlled hallucination, the more you will be able to extract meaning from maya. Kerouac intensifies this process by forcing the reader to strain harder against his disordered prose.
I love Kerouac because he treats language and perception like a kind of magic, which I think it is. Alternatively: I love Kerouac because he has a deep interest in reality, language and the connection between the two. The more I read and write, the more beauty, mystery and excitement that spills into my world.
Liam Riley PO ’26 is from East Tennessee. He likes giving book recommendations, the outdoors and shenanigans.
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