Coincidentally, a friend of mine reminded me the other day that he is going to the Bach Fest in Leipzig in June. (I have attended the Fest in the past and highly recommend it.) At one of the concerts, Sir András Schiff will play all six Bach Partitas (BWV 825–830), a performance that will last approximately 2 hours and 40 minutes. (I saw Schiff perform the Bach piano concertos BWV 1054-5 last month in San Francisco and he was marvelous.)
I was struck by the similarity between Alex and András. During the several hours of his climb, Alex was required to execute a complex sequence of physical moves with precision and without error. When András plays the Partitas, he will be doing the same thing over a comparable period of time. In other words, the activities of both men are amazing feats of physical dexterity/endurance and unwavering mental concentration over a long period of time during which neither soloist is allowed to make even a single mistake. (On the obvious difference in the risk of the two activities, see below.)
In one sense, the name of the documentary, Free Solo, couldn't be more misleading. The adjective "Free" suggests that the activity is one of spontaneous improvisation, when, in reality, Alex spent years of roped practice on the face of El Cap getting down the moves he was going to need to execute on various difficult passages of his climb (at one point in the film, Alex rattles off a list of such moves). In just the same way, it is the years that András has spent practicing the various devilish passages of Bach that allow him to step out on the stage to give a performance.
Towards the end of the documentary, Alex makes some remarks about "performance" and the "warrior ethic:"
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For [my girlfriend] the point of life is like, happiness,. To be with people that make you feel fulfilled; to have a good time. For me, it’s all about performance. Anybody can be happy and cozy. […] Nobody achieves anything great because they are happy and cozy. It’s about being a warrior. It doesn’t matter about the cause, necessarily. This is your path and you will pursue it with excellence. You face your fear, because your goal demands it. That is the goddamned warrior spirit. I think the free-soloing mentality is pretty close to warrior culture; where you give something 100% focus, because your life depends on it.”
What Alex says about performance and pursuing your path with excellence, whatever that path may be, applies equally well to being a rock climber or a concert pianist. Neither activity produces any tangible good for the world. Imagine a son who says to his father: "Dad, what I want to spend the rest of my life doing is climbing rocks." Or "... playing the piano." Either way, the father could easily conclude that the son had not made a particularly wise career choice. But, it matters little. What matters is that the son has chosen a challenging activity that he will pursue with passion and excellence. Whether he makes a good living doing what he does is entirely secondary.
I've been reading Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics lately. Aristotle defines happiness as: the active engagement of the soul in conformance with excellence. I think you can describe Alex's and Andras' activities as: the active engagement of the soul and the body in conformance with excellence. And, in that, both are achieving true Aristotelian happiness.
Of course, the one enormous difference between András and Alex is that if András makes a mistake, he doesn't die. The one possibly disturbing thing in Free Solo is that it seems fairly certain that Alex will perish some day when he does, inevitably, make that one random mistake. On the other hand, as Alex points out in the movie: we all will die some day. The difference for Alex will be that he will die having lived his life the way he wanted to. In listening to Alex, I was reminded of the following passage from the end of James Joyce's short story The Dead:
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Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.
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