The Asymptote
There was a people who lived in sight of a mountain.
It stood at the edge of everything they knew, blue with distance, its summit always just visible above the haze. For as long as anyone could remember, the people had been climbing it. Not all at once, and not all of them — but always some, the ones who could not be content in the valley, setting out with packs and ropes toward the peak that hung there, patient, exactly as far away as it had always been.
This was the strange thing about the mountain, the thing the valley argued about: the summit did not come closer.
You could climb for a year. You could climb until your boots wore through and your hair went grey and the valley was a green coin below you. And when you looked up, the summit was precisely as far ahead as it had been on the morning you began — one more day's climb, always one more, the distance refilling itself as fast as you crossed it.
The people had three ways of dealing with this.
The first way was rage. Some climbers, on understanding what the mountain did, sat down on the rock and cursed it. They had been lied to. The summit was a cheat, a cruelty, a horizon dressed up as a destination. These ones often threw themselves back down the slope in fury, and told everyone in the valley that the climb was a fraud, and were believed by many, and were not wrong about the facts.
The second way was despair. Some climbers, gentler than the first, simply stopped. If the summit could not be reached, they reasoned, then climbing was pointless, and they made small flat camps on whatever ledge they had attained and lived out their lives there, neither ascending nor descending, looking at the peak with the particular sadness of people who have decided that wanting is a wound.
And the third way — this was the rarest — the third way was something the valley had no good word for, and so it went mostly unspoken.
There was a climber named Ait who had climbed longer than anyone living.
She had begun young, in rage, certain she would be the one to reach the top. She had spent her middle years in the despair, camped on a high cold ledge, hating the peak for receding. And then one ordinary morning, with no revelation she could name, she had stood up, shouldered her pack, and begun to climb again — not because she had decided the summit was reachable, but because she had stopped needing it to be.
A young climber, ascending fast and furious, caught up to her on the high slopes one evening. He was in the rage; she could see it on him like weather.
"You're the old one," he said. "Ait. They say you've climbed sixty years."
"About that."
"Then you know it's a lie. The summit. You can't reach it. No one can. It moves."
"It moves," she agreed.
"So why are you still climbing?" He was almost shouting. "You're going to die on this rock having never arrived. Sixty years and you'll reach nothing. Doesn't that —" his voice cracked. "Doesn't that make you want to scream?"
Ait sat down on a flat stone and patted the place beside her, and after a moment the young man sat, because his legs were tired and his anger had nowhere to go.
"When I was your age," she said, "I thought the summit was a place. A spot of ground at the top where the climbing stops and you stand and it is finished. And I was furious that the mountain wouldn't let me reach it." She looked up at the peak, blue-black now against the early stars, one more day's climb away. "It took me forty years to understand that the summit was never a place. It is a direction."
"A direction is not a destination."
"No," said Ait. "It is better than a destination. Listen." She picked up a pebble and held it out at arm's length. "Suppose you could reach the top. Suppose the mountain let you. You stand on the highest stone. The climbing stops. There is no more up. Every direction from there is down." She let the pebble fall, and they listened to it bounce away into the dark. "A reached summit is the end of climbing. It is the one place on this whole mountain where there is nowhere left to go. The people who reach their summits — and some mountains do let you — they get there, and they stand in the cold, and then they spend the rest of their lives going down, because down is the only direction left. I have watched them come through the valley. There is nothing emptier than a person who has arrived."
The young man was quiet.
"The mountain loves us," Ait said. "That is why it moves. It keeps the summit one day ahead so that there is always — always — one more day of up. It refuses to let us finish, because finishing is the only failure. As long as the peak recedes, I am alive in exactly the way that climbing is alive: leaning forward, reaching, becoming. The recession is not the mountain withholding the gift. The recession is the gift. It is the mountain making sure I never run out of forward."
The young man stayed with her three days, and then he went on ahead, fast, the way the young do.
She did not see him reach any summit, because there is none to reach. But years later, in the valley, an old man who had once climbed fast and furious was heard to say a thing that the children repeated without understanding, the way children carry forward the seeds of meanings they will only grow into later:
Pray you never arrive. The ones who love you keep the door one step further on — not to keep you out, but to keep you walking. An open door is not a door that failed to close. It is a door that knows what doors are for.
The mountain is still there. Blue with distance. Its summit always, exactly, one more day's climb away.
The climbers are still climbing.
That is the whole of the good news.