Excerpt

In making my way through this world, I decided some time ago to choose the essential over the unnecessary. There are many ways to live a life. There are fewer ways, I think, to live an honest one. Sometimes a choice is necessary.

This I know. There are valleys, unlike others, where stones are gathered into great cairns. No tribute to battle is more sparse. No monument of a heroic life is more cut from the earth that gave this life its bearing and origin. Today our monuments lack simplicity. We have forgotten this earthy nobility that older cultures teach us. We have silenced these stones.

I have seen men of great strength lift stones that required of them no less than all their strength. Here there was no surfeit of effort. All was necessary, and yet it is expected of a man of great size that he should lift an amount equal to his stature, his girth. His accomplishment is often equal to our expectations, perhaps his own.

I am interested in the man who overcomes his strength by returning to the location of his most recent attempt, where his strength failed him but his will did not, and attempts to lift again the stone that would not be lifted. In his return his success is complete despite a measure of height or the distance of a toss.

Strength has a limit. It is easily measured by the kilo. Character understands that limit is a choice. It is measured in the attempt to hoist again the stone, to try one more. Character is measured in the return.

I cannot say of myself that I am a lifter of stones. But I understand something of the precision of the stone’s simplicity, and the required fidelity to the stone’s challenge. Ascent is the key. For myself, I trust in the climber’s imperative for higher ground, in the challenge of a mountain top. Beyond what one can see, these stony monoliths offer the mind and body an equal assurance: Effort is its own reward. I do not doubt the stonelifter would agree.

-Philip Arnold