但是,
Thank you.
This perhaps is the most desolate, wild and abandoned country in all England.
The mountains of the peak seem to be about the beginning of wonders to this part of the country,
and but the beginning of mountains, or if you will, as the lower rounds of a ladder.
It is from this ridge of mountains that all the rivers in the north of England take their rise.
In short, this whole country, however mountainous, and that no sooner will we down one hill but we mounted another,
is yet infinitely full of people, those people all full of business.
This business is the clothing trade, for the convenience of which the houses are thus scattered
and spread upon the sides of the hills, as above, even from the bottom to the top.
The reason is this, such has been the bounty of nature to this otherwise frightful country,
that two things essential to the business as well as to the ease of the people are found here.
And that in a situation which I never saw the like of in any part of England,
and I believe the like is not to be seen so contrived in any part of the world,
I mean coals and running water upon the tops of the highest hills.
This seems to have been directed by the wise hand of Providence for the very purpose which is now served by it,
namely the manufactures.
Out of the sleep from the gloom of motion, soundlessly some nambule,
moans and booms the soul of a people imprisoned, asleep in the rule of the strong machine that runs mesmeric,
booming the spell of its word upon them, and moving them helpless, mechanic,
their will to its will deferred.
Space is either smooth or striated, and one way of thinking about smooth space is it's like a child playing in a field,
where all its fantasies are present at once, there's no limits on its thinking,
no limits to what it can do, and gradually it learns the rules of how to behave,
and that field starts to become people with rules and fences and boundaries that constrain it,
so it can't run free anymore.
A line of flight is something that breaks out of the striations of that space,
and those striations, both psychologically, physically and socially, are what bind us into modern life.
A line of flight is anything that creates a way out of that.
It can be a social connection, it can be a psychological fantasy,
it can be a practical act, something which helps you to break free
and challenges those rules, or moves between the fences to get you out.
With the exception of taking your boots off and climbing barefooted and without a chalk bag,
it's the purest form of climbing there is, if you're on site soloing things,
it's sort of the absolute commitment really.
I suppose it's got the greatest risk in many ways, the greatest reward.
But soloing is in fact, it's very much a selfish activity,
I mean it's selfish in the sense that everything that you get from it is for you,
but it's also selfish in the fact that if you do fall off you bloody add it.
Meanwhile, at social industries command how quick, how vast an increase.
In the germ of some poor hamlet rapidly produced here a huge town,
continuous and compact, hiding the face of earth for leagues,
and there were not a habitation stood before.
Abodes of men irregularly massed like trees in forests,
spread through spacious tracts, or which the smoke of unremitting fires hangs permanent
and plentiful as wreaths of vapour glittering in the morning sun.
Where so ever the traveller turns his steps he sees the barren wilderness erased,
or disappearing.
It were out of this world to start off with.
I mean it was a big place, a lot of noise,
but a dangerous place to work in because we were running hot slabs flying around the Hollywood show.
You'd got charges picking up and tearing around with them.
Well to you at that time when you were lad you didn't look to where there was tearing around with them.
But eventually you got used to it.
It was just one of the things in life you just got used to what you were doing and that were it.
It was a second nature to you eventually.
I guess I started work as a coal miner when I was 16, just on the east of the Pennines,
where the deep coal mines are. Mining started on the west of the Pennines
and then moved eastwards as technology increased and allowed people to access that deep coal, deeper-seated coal.
And I never realised that there were all these gritstone edges and places to climb.
So it was a real treat discovering all this, less than an hour from where I was brought up.
And I guess being a miner, spending a lot of time in the dark,
it was a real release really to come out to these places.
So climbing was fantastic but there was also just the light and being in the outdoors
and being with all that noise and the repetition of the work.
I guess not a lot of outlet for creativity.
And so climbing really fulfilled a lot of that.
I mean, what's interesting in Barnsley, for example,
saying a coal mining town, classic thing is you often get a really strong correlation between place and occupation.
So, for example, people live in a place, coal mining happened there,
and so there's a big overlap with that.
You don't really get that where metal haulers, there's no houses there, there's a shopping centre there,
but no one really lives there.
Within capitalism, anything, once it's brought into existence,
can be identified and commodified in some way.
And yes, you can get a kitsch version of lines of flight.
You get the Disney World version of fantasy.
But I think the saving grace of the line of flight is if you recall that its origin is not outside.
Its origin is from an interiority and from an intensiveness.
And I think that's why people keep going to extremes and keep moving
and looking for extreme experiences is that because they want that intensity, that unpredictability,
the discovery of a direction that they didn't know before they set off.
It's very hard to think of individual experiences because there are so many and so many of them are the same.
And the best experiences are often just the kind of endless procession of days out at the same places,
doing the same things and there'll be little highlights in there,
but a lot of it is just being out on an almost constant basis.
Sometimes there's just the release and the escape and none of the adventure,
and then sometimes there's plenty of adventure when you end up doing something hard or things go a bit differently to how you planned.
So there were certainly big adventures and I've always thought you can have adventures really, really close to home.
Quite often that soloing is very easy in relative terms and it's very comfortable
and it's very pleasurable.
And it is a fantastic feeling, almost an aesthetic feeling, to be on the crag without a rope
has got a wonderful sense to it, to look down from high up.
But it's also, in particular on the grit stone, on crags you know very well, it's just about routine.
It's often things you've done time and time again.
I really resist the idea that it's thrill seeking, which is what often people think climbing is about.
It's thrill seeking and I hate that, but I think that's because it just sounds shallow
and I don't want to think I'm shallow, but maybe I am and it is just about getting a thrill.
So I think somehow it's the way it connects to the rest of my life that gives those two places the meaning that they have.
I guess about routine, repetition, old friends, old roots, old moves, familiarity.
It's almost like a ritual sometimes I think.
Climbing works best when you're climbing without expectation.
It's almost like a meditative thing and it's certainly not about adventure or exploration at all.
It's just being away and out for a little while, out of the normal run of things.
Climbing.
Actually running the looms, when everything's going fine and you just sat there,
you can get rather swept away by the rhythm of it.
Sometimes that can do funny things to your head where you just have to stop and go outside.
Other times it can take you into really special places where you just sort of...
One part of you is aware of what's happening and concentrating on your job,
checking that nothing's going wrong, but the rest of you, the real bits of you,
sort of go off on flights to wherever rings your bells, you know.
Again, that's a good aspect of the work, that your mind is free to go where it will,
go where it needs to do.
For ordinary people, it was transferred.
So it wasn't really until mid-50s when we could buy the cheap vans and it was an A35 at less than 400 pounds,
the price of a motorbike.
But I started climbing in 1955 when I left the army and the reason I started,
my mother decided that she wasn't having her son come out from the army in waste his time
and signed me up for an evening class in Mountaineer.
What it did for me, I found that when I was climbing, everything else disappeared.
It didn't matter what I was doing at work or at home or anything like that,
everything else disappeared, it was just the next five feet, five feet of blind panic.
Your knees go like bees' wings and it's what climbing ought to be.
If you make a mistake, it's got to be drastic.
I have to be gripped up to the eyeballs.
Climbing is usable by anyone, however poor you are.
You can go out and get the same thrill that a racing car driver gets,
every bit as serious and as thrilling.
It can open to many of us to go to Hawaii and surf.
You don't have to go far, you can just go to Amsterdam.
I caught this morning Morning's Minion,
Kingdom of Daylight's Dofer,
dappled on drawn falcon,
in his riding of the rolling level underneath him steady air,
and striding high there,
how he rung upon the rain of a wimpling wing in his ecstasy.
Then off, off forth on swing,
as a skates heel sweep smooth on a bow bend,
the hurl and gliding rebuffed the big wind,
my heart in hiding stirred for a bird,
the achieve of the mastery of the thing.
The wages of work is cash.
The wages of cash is want more cash.
The wages of want more cash is vicious competition.
The wages of vicious competition is the world we live in.
One of the problems with my role is a dual role,
so I not only do teaching but I do work outside of teaching,
so you get a conflict between those two demands
because they both require more time than you've got.
It's trying to achieve well in both.
It's impossible.
Even if you work sort of 16 hours a day, you wouldn't do it.
I've always thought this was a completely wrong approach towards work,
and if you want somebody to do a job well,
you give them the time to do it.
And unfortunately, that's seen to be luxurious and expensive.
And so the pressures come from the fact that you've got,
if you are someone who has a pride in the work they do
and want to do really well at it, which I have,
then the pressure is often from the fact that I feel
I'm not able to do a good job in all the things that I'm being asked to do.
Clearly, the places that we now work in have changed,
but I think the character of work hasn't changed all that much at all.
Works hard, essentially.
It takes up a lot of time,
and we're all now under pressure in terms of our job tenure,
the hours we work, whether we're over or under employed.
We're forced to work in conditions that don't help us
to remain connected to the rest of life.
I think the continuity for me is that
people who always wanted some sort of release from that,
we all feel like that, more or less.
And the way out of that for a lot of people, myself included,
we kind of ameliorate that with what I think is a very superficial form of freedom.
That is, we buy things.
And I think because there's not a great deal of ourselves in there,
there's not an intenseness with it.
It's convenient and it's quick.
And I think what I'm interested in, and for me what climbing does,
is produce, I think, a slightly more intense feeling of escape or satisfaction.
Come on.
Come on.
Come on.
He thought it must be a feeling of endless bliss
to be in contact with the profound life of every form,
to have a soul for rocks, metal, water and plants,
to take into himself as in a dream every element of nature,
like flowers that breathe with the waxing and waning of the moon.
Come on.
Come on.
