Book Review – The Moth and the Mountain, by Ed Caesar
A tortured WWI veteran launches an audacious quest to save his soul and climb Mt. Everest solo.
Maurice Wilson was fucking insane, and it's a shame there aren't more people like him. He manned a machine gun despite nearly being overrun during battle. He once parachuted from a biplane, just to test his nerve. And he wrote poetry. He was the rare seeker who totally committed to following his quest.
Wilson suffered from psychological trauma after the war, and wandered geographically and romantically for several years. When a period of fasting and reflection spurred the idea for a bold adventure in him, he lit out after it with a reckless and inspired purity of focus. His technical preparation was hyperbolically inadequate, yet he had the good-natured self-assurance of Pat Tillman, and the grit to prepare himself mentally for a crucible few people would consider.
Wilson was not unlike Chris McCandless in some ways. Both were propelled by inner turmoil to seek an epic, mostly-solitary crucible in the wild. Both were single-mindedly true to themselves above all, yet warm to those inside their inner circles, including recent strangers. They were both underprepared by any conventional measure, and were ridiculed in hindsight—almost exclusively by people who never attempted the kinds of feats they accomplished.
One of Wilson's strongest qualities was his ability to pursue ‘creative mischief’ in the face of setbacks that would have crushed most people. Ed Caesar had no easy task in sussing out the details of this forgotten adventurer, and he developed his own creative approach to assemble a fascinating and coherent narrative of his protagonist’s life a hundred years later. His open wondering about the missing pieces of the story brings the reader closer to both the author and his subject, and his writing paints an impressive portrait of Wilson's balls-out adventure through painstaking research and thoughtful conjecture.
Most of us have goals that are too modest. A few people have the opposite problem. The Moth and the Mountain is a real-life adventure tale that might nudge your own aspirations in a simpler, more visceral direction.