With New Year's Day one of those habits has been installed that is difficult to understand: to go to the mountain with joy, as if the new year began at the tip of a hill and wipe out all the dirty of the old year. An even more difficult custom to understand is that the sport share of the day can be met with the ski breaks of Garmisch-Partenkirchen. And if it were at least New Year; if this time of anguish did not extend to every day of the feast the intention to go to the mountain, an insatiable necessity. At the slightest opportunity, we all go to the tops. Petrarca is to blame for everything.
Francesco Petrarca, on April 4, 1336, and at the age of 32, the climb to the Mont Ventoux and its later texts, which open not only the tradition of the mountain chronicles, but above all the way of the modern feeling of the mountain, to climb without further. Still in Petrarca it is not total, as the text ends with a feeling of guilt and reads some words from San Agustín de Hipona: “et eunt homines admirari alta montium (...) et relinquunt se ipso,” that is, man will admire the heights and forget about himself. But it certainly overcomes the skepticism of the pastor that Petrarca himself finds on his way – he climbs to the top, what for? – and it gives way to the conquest of how useless it will be achieved later.
But well looked at, is this not our present, but the proclamation of the useless, the superfluous, the demonstration of a new utility, that we do not begin to relieve the burdens of the body, but those of the soul, rather than those of the body? Don't we worship the body as a contemporary god in the name of gods like health, productivity, excellence? And it seems to me that the conquest of the useless in general is not so insignificant, so insignificant, that we let it die so easily.
Bidali zure iritzi artikuluak iritzia@argia.eus helbide elektronikora
ARGIAk ez du zertan bat etorri artikuluen edukiarekin. Idatzien gehienezko luzera 4.500 karakterekoa da (espazioak barne). Idazkera aldetik gutxieneko zuzentasun bat beharrezkoa da: batetik, ARGIAk ezin du hartu zuzenketa sakona egiteko lanik; bestetik, egitekotan edukia nahi gabe aldatzeko arriskua dago. ARGIAk azaleko zuzenketak edo moldaketak egingo dizkie artikuluei, behar izanez gero.
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