Talking Kilimanjaro

Reading this WSJ story about a woman scaling Mt Kilmanjaro with cellphone still operational at the peak left an incredibly sad aftertaste. Thanks to the baneful combination of cellphone and social media, the value of an unique human experience has a very different currency than it did fifty or hundred years ago. The first time I ever heard of the mountain was reading the Hemingway short as a teen. Without any pictures, any point of reference except the lines from this story, that name invoked a feeling - a certain atmosphere. It was the only association I ever formed with Mt Kilimanajaro

Then they began to climb and they were going to the East it seemed, and then it darkened and they were in a storm, the rain so thick it seemed like flying through a waterfall, and then they were out and Compie turned his head and grinned and pointed and there, ahead, all he could see, as wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun, was the square top of Kilimanjaro. And then he knew that there was where he was going.

This WSJ writer with all her exertions to keep her phone working all the way to the top managed to make what must have been a fantastic trip as mundane as waking up on a Monday morning to the phone alarm to get ready for work. She might as well have stayed home.