Most people will have heard of the Stubai Alps, but how many could locate the Alpi Breonie di Ponente? Not many, but it scarcely matters, as they are the same thing, near as damn it. We are in the Alto Adige or rather the Südtirol - the spoils of war granted to Italy under the Treaty of Saint Germain in 1919. During the fascist period, a policy of deliberate Italianisation was pursued by the authorities. This involved the cooption of language "experts" to dream up Italian equivalents to well-nigh all German place-names. Thus we obtained not only "Bressanone" for Brixen and "Bolzano" for Bozen, but also such wonderful concoctions as "Villabassa" (Niederdorf), "Rio di Pusteria" (Mühlenbach), or "Monte Croce di Comélico" (Kreuzberg) etc. etc.


Andy Hartley and I were making our way through this equivocal linguistic landscape en route for Masséria (Maiern) in the Val di Ridanna (Ridnauertal), our starting point for an all-out assault on just a few of the peaks in the main Stubai chain. I'd been to the Stubai once before, in the summer of 1977, when Carol and I did our Grand European Tour in our Ford Transit camping-van, with nine-month old Victoria strapped smilingly into her travel seat. Relunctantly acknowledging that parenthood might just put a bit of a crimp on my climbing activities, I'd cunningly arranged our itinerary so as to at least have the opportunity to "case" some of the more celebrated alpine valleys. I had recently acquired a copy of Walter Pause's "Klassische Alpengipfel". He listed no less than seven eligible peaks in the Stubai group alone. The area had to be checked out. We drove up the Stubai valley and camped near Ranalt, just opposite Maiern on the other side of the range in fact. I remember entertaining thoughts of knocking off Habicht (3277m) straight from the valley, but gallantly allowed myself to be persuaded otherwise! As it was, Andy and I had two Pause peaks on the list for our projected four day expedition. Pause is an enthusiastic proponent of that genre of high-flown purple prose, in German, which can invest even the most shapeless heap of scree-slag with a "wildromantisch" aura. Of one of our intended peaks he writes:

...den Wilder Freiger erkennt man sofort am alles überstrahlenden Gletscherplatt. Breit und mächtig glänzt es rechts der schwarzen Tribulaune, anziehend - auch wenn dem Gipfel die Eleganz der zugespitzten Form fehlt.

He was looking from the Austrian side. From our side the mountain looked a lot pointier. But we hadn't go there yet! By the time we'd got parked, had a bite of lunch and packed the gear, it was after two in the afternoon before we left Maiern (1419m). Still, allowing for our probable fitness deficit, Andy had proposed that, for our first half-day, we climb no further than the Teplitzer Hütte (2586m). Guide-book time: three-and-half hours. That should get us in nicely in time. I heaved my rucksack onto my shoulders. Despite what I fancied to be ruthless packing, it felt ominously heavy. Rope, harness, crampons, ice-axe. It soon adds up. But that's the price you pay for wanting to travel on glaciers. No point in complaining. We set off, settling rapidly into that rhythmic plod, which, in theory at least, patiently but remorselessly consumes height and distance. It was hot in the afternoon sun and we were grateful that the first part of the hike in was through dense forest - although it was steep enough as we followed the path up the true left bank of the mountain torrent. I'd carefully kept a small towel to hand and was very soon making good use of it to wipe the sweat pouring off my face. We emerged from the forest onto the Agglboden, a flat-bottomed alpine pasture of open and sunny aspect. We crossed the river and continued on up to the next level, a steep-sided gorge with an impressive drop down to the raging waters below. Now the climbing started in earnest. This was hard work. Plodding on, I was less and less able to consciously absorb the scene. One step, another step, one step, another step. We flopped down by a little stream to rest, seeking out what little shade there was as a respite from the merciless sun. All too soon we were continuing on our way again. Finally we made it to our next rest-place, the Grohmannhütte (2254m). Andy got there sufficiently ahead of me to be emerging from the hut with a couple of Apfelschorles just as I arrived. This was no gamesmanship though. I was finding it tough. We thankfully downed our drinks and continued stubbornly on up. Andy wasn't finding it easy either, but seemed to have a yard or so on me. The Teplitzer was not so far now, but that last bit was a steep pull. Keep going, slowly maybe, but don't stop. I was beginning to get cramps in my thighs. As the wind got up, I stopped to put on my jacket. Succumbing to temptation, I lay down for a while. What bliss! Dragging myself to my feet, I gritted my teeth for the last, seemingly interminable climb. Finally, mercifully, I was at the hut. I was just about done in. Finding our room, I collapsed on a bunk. Those first day hut grinds were never easy, but were they as bad as this? Probably, even certainly, but I had not been haunted by the anxiety that I might be getting past it. Training will cure lack of fitness, but not the effect of the years. We were well over the official time. Were we up to our ambitious three-and-a-bit-day programme?

Still, once we'd polished off our Knödelsuppe and Schweinebraten, morale began to improve and, further encouraged by a Weissbier or two, it became positively buoyant. We stepped outside to get our bearings. The mountain opposite the hut was clearly not the Zuckerhütl, as we had originally assumed, but rather the Sonklarspitze, the bigger mountain being hidden from our gaze. We could see our next day's goal, the Beckerhaus, the self-styled Wolkenschloss, perched melodramatically on its spectacular rock promintory. In the clarity of the evening light, the stratification of the mountain landscape became explicitly apparent. The scene at our level, where the clinging vegetation was still able to sustain a little life, retained a greenish hue. Next came a discrete band of warmly glowing, russet-coloured rock. Finally, the high peaks and glaciers in starkly contrasting black and white. It deserved to be painted in a semi-abstract style. All I could do was take a photograph. We turned in, resolving that next day, come what may, we would at least drag ourselves up to the Beckerhaus.

Andy had booked us in to the comparative luxury of a Zimmer, thus sparing us the mass grunting, coughing, snoring and worse of the Lager. This, and the fact that no alpine start was required, gave us the chance of a good night's rest. And, sure enough, waking the next morning, we felt a whole lot better. The weather was fair, with occasional clouds obscuring the summits. We breakfasted, packed and set off. We quickly settled in to a decent pace. This was more like it. We could progress steadily, while enjoying the scene around us. I was pleasantly surprised when we even managed to overtake one party: so we weren't the slowest pair on the mountain. We stopped for a rest above a steep scree-slope which looked dramatically down on a moraine lake of perfect aquamarine. We calculated it must in previous times have been an arm of the Ebener Ferner now, like all the alpine glaciers, in significant retreat. We pushed on, climbing and traversing until, slip-sliding down a mess of moraine, we reached a narrow tongue of the glacier. It was "dry", in other words, pure ice. Only 100 metres or so. Hardly worth putting on crampons. We teetered nervously across. There was no real distance to fall, but a slip and dead drop onto the hard ice was not an attractive proposition. We then had to scramble strenuously up the moraine on the far side, and after that there was little let-up. I was determined to keep going now. Silently, I repeated my mantra: kleine Schritte, nur nicht stehenbleiben. I was a little bit ahead of Andy at this stage, which afforded me the justification to stop to let him catch up. We rested briefly, had a drink and then attacked the final steep part up to the Beckerhaus (3190m). We were now above the 3000m mark, and I, at least, was beginning to feel it: the hollow feeling in the stomach, the sudden greedy panting, the heaviness in the legs. Andy seemed to be faring slightly better and went on ahead. I plodded on with frequent little rests, but eventually made it to the hut just a few minutes behind him. We were tired enough, but pleased at having managed it pretty much within guide-book time. A week or so of this and we would be properly fit. Only we didn't have even a week. This was no preparation. This was it.
According to our schedule we should be climbing the Wilder Freiger (3418m) that same afternoon. For the following day we had earmarked the Wilder Pfaff (3458m) and the Zuckerhütl (3505m) combined with a descent back down to the Teplitzer, in order, the next day, to have time to get back to the car and drive to Andy's place in Gera, near Santo Stefano in the heart of the Dolomites, and then, for me, on to Treviso airport and back to Brussels.

Meanwhile the Wolkenschloss was living up to its name. Looking out the window of the hut there was nothing but blank mist. Then it came on to hail. We retired to our bunks and promptly fell fast asleep. We woke an hour or so later hugely refreshed. With little enthusiasm we took a perfunctory look outside. There was still a lot of cloud about, but right where we were it seemed to be clearing. The decision was taken there and then. The Wilder Freiger was on! Within minutes we were on the ridge. Climbing with our lightened packs felt almost like flying. We opted to stay on the rocks, reserving the right to use the snow escalator on the way back down. At times, cloud threatened to boil up from the eastern corrie, but we climbed on in sunshine, negotiating our way around the various rock obstacles, pushing on up and up. Below the Signalkuppe we were welcomed by the reassuring prescence of fixed cables. This was a trade route, but in our little weather-window we had the place to ourselves. Up onto the summit of the Signalkuppe, topped by a mysterious confusion of what I presumed to be meteorological equipment. The Wilder Freiger proper was just a little bit further. We proceeded along a spectacular ridge, encountering, absurdly, a signpost indicating Achtung Landesgrenze. What sort of response was required of us? There was certainly little room for evasive action! And then, following a steep scramble up the final rocks, we were at the summit. Mere superlatives cannot begin to describe the gloriousness of our situation. All alone at the top of our mountain, bathed in sunshine, we looked out on a perfect sea of mist from which surged startling mountain peaks. It was exhilarating, a view as from an aeroplane, but much closer to hand. We were in it, a part of it, not just looking from outside. No mere satisfaction of curiosity, but a profound nourishing of what one can only call the soul. We tried to identify ranges and summits, but that somehow missed the point. "Even if we don't manage anything else, I'd be happy enough just with this." I agreed with Andy completely.

And that, in fact, is how it turned out. The next day turned cloudy and uncertain. After what we had experienced, we were not at all interested in a long and tiring day snow-plodding in the mist. We had a blissful day idling our way back down to Maiern and arrived in relaxed fashion back to Gera in the late afternoon. We could sincerely claim to have had a glimpse of that true spirit of mountaineering of which Himalayan explorer Tom Longstaff writes:

Mountaineering is but an expression of the basic instinct to explore the unknown... Since happiness is most often found by those who have learned to live in every moment of the present, none has such prodigal opportunities of attaining that as the traveller ... attainment of a set objective is but a secondary matter, the traveller should not anticipate the journey's end. So long as he loses consciousness of self, and is aware in all his senses of the present scene, almost any part of the world is as good as any other. Mountain or desert it is all one.

When I was at school we had a teacher* who recommended that we make notes on every book we read. [*It was John Boulter, Olympic athlete and British 1000m record-holder in 1969. He took us for French, although we always sensed his heart was never entirely in it. However, he led us on a brief tour around the whole of French Literature, a course which, although irrelevant in terms of exam results, was a source of long-term inspiration. He came late to a lesson one Saturday morning, with his pyjamas clearly visible under his jacket. He was newly-married at the time and we prurient adolescents fondly imagined that he had only minutes before torn himself from his young wife's amorous embraces! We called him "Boggle" Boulter. I can't remember why, but it was somehow perfect.] Each work, he suggested, should be the subject of a short précis, an indication of the major issues and a quotation or two, all on one side of A4. Accumulated sheets, carefully filed, would ultimately constitute an invaluable reference source. I never got round to it, of course, but the idea must have struck me as a good one or I wouldn't have remembered it. And now that I have read countless books, the contents of most of which have been effectively consigned to oblivion, I regret that I didn't follow Boggle's advice. There is something terribly humiliating about our capacity to forget. So much experience, so much interest, so much information, so much understanding, all just so much water under the bridge. Our instinct to gather together all this material in an orderly, structured, meaningful way is a very powerful one. In a sense, this diary is an expression of that instinct.

So it was with an intense combination of admiration and envy that I read Clive James' "Cultural Amnesia", which is the product of a whole lifetime spent reading with a pencil to hand. He has, with incredible ambition, sought to compile all the thoughts he ever noted in the margins of a book into a coherent whole, relating his copious reading to the catastrophic history of the 20th century and distilling from all of that a Weltanschauung of sorts. Clive James is a hard man not to like. Above all he is funny. He writes vigorously, intelligently, perceptively, on subjects ranging from Margaret Thatcher to Ludwig Wittgenstein. He is particularly strong on the group of pre-war (largely Jewish) intellectuals, writers and wits that constituted Viennese café society. His special favourite is Egon Friedell (of whom I had not heard previously):

Egon Friedell (1878-1938), a student of natural sciences who graduated to the twin status of cabaret star and polymath, was a figure unparalleled even in Vienna, where there were several learned cabaret artists and even a few funny polymaths, but nobody else who could be both those things on such an heroic scale. To think of an equivalent in an English-speaking context is impossible: you would have to imagine a combination of George Saintsbury, Aldous Huxley, Peter Ustinov, Kenneth Clark and Isaiah Berlin.

It is difficult not to suspect that Clive James rather fancies himself as a latter-day Egon Friedell. Well, Clive James is, if not a polymath, certainly an avid reader, who takes the idea of culture seriously, i.e. someone who didn't stop reading set books the day he graduated. He can also make you laugh out loud. His inherent qualities of common decency and natural humanity come through on every page. "Cultural Amnesia" is also inspirational in the sense that it makes you want straightaway to order all the books he writes about. If I have a reservation, it is that Clive James is too omnipresent in a book which amounts to some 850 pages. As a journalist he is unsurpassed. While still at school we used to devour his scintillating TV reviews, which we mined for clever things to say. But a whole book! It's a bit like going on a month's camping holiday with someone with an automatic compunction to be clever at all times. There are occasions when he might have benefitted from a teacher with a red biro writing "stick to the point"! I suppose it's Clive James' book and he can write what he likes, but too often you feel a bit like Old Mother Hubbard. Opening the book at what you imagine to be a particularly juicy chapter, you are disappointed when it barely touches upon its purported subject. I rushed to the essay on Heinrich Heine, hoping for an idiot's guide to a poet of whom I know too little, only to get a load of hot tips on how to deal with inconvenient fans. So, for James and Heine, both, celebrity is a terrible drag! Another slightly irritating trait is his weakness for the polyglot name-drop. We are constantly reminded, en passant, of his linguistic facility in German, French, Italian, Spanish, Russian and Japanese. I'm sorry, but I can't help being a bit sceptical. I've seen too many CV's claiming that their authors are "fluent" in French, say, when, in point of fact, they are barely able to order a beer. But if you must do the foreign name-drop, get it right! Schoolboy howlers like "der Stadt" or "ungülcklich" undermine confidence. Elsewhere, pointscoring efforts are converted into own goals through shoddy research. Regretting the demise of rote-learning and showing off his capacity to remember Tennyson's "The Brook", he proceeds to misquote it: "I come from haunts of coot and hern". "Hern"? A cross between a hen and a tern, perhaps?

So what theme does emerge from the "apparent randomness", as Clive James describes his own work? One consistently returning idea is that the only viable antidote to totalitarian inhumanity is "liberal humanism". These terms are never defined in any detail, but he means them to be more than just the usual euphemisms for capitalism and atheism . What James is really seeking to define is the sort of society which permits and encourages basic decency and intellectual curiosity. A world safe, in other words, for Clive James. It's a nice idea, but probably not enough. Despite his instictive revulsion at and morbid fascination for the totalitarian despotisms of the twentieth century, and despite his avowed admiration for the author, he has overlooked the central issue which Michael Burleigh identified so clearly in "The Third Reich" and "Sacred Causes". Nazism, Stalinism, Maoism are not just political movements, they are pseudo religions. In the absence of a genuine sense of the numinous, these spiritual Ersatz products fill the God-shaped space in the human soul. The only true antidote to mass psychosis is a human life nourished by a genuine sense of meaning and purpose. Literature and culture, however entertaining, however intellectually stimulating, can, at best, only hint at the possibility of this greater synthesis.

While I was studying at Leuven, our lecturer in semiotics (God help us) suggested that we really ought to read one book and see one film every day! Even at that impossible pace, you couldn't even begin to cover every game in town. It's the Jari Peteri syndrome. Jari is a Finnish friend, who, sensing a kindred spirit, has put me in the way of a number of Finnish books and films. Most of the material has been translated into Swedish, the other national language, so I am able to read it. There's some fantastic stuff, but already endless. None of it features in Clive James' book. How could it? Not even he can read everything. We can only conclude that it is not in the vain pursuit of what the Tao Te Ching calls the ten thousand things, that meaning and purpose can ultimately be found:

Returning is the motion of the Tao.
Yielding is the way of the Tao.
The ten thousand things are born of being.
Being is born of not being.