I love Leslie Stephen’s essay “A Bad Five Minutes in the Alps.”
Stephen had a reputation as a writer and thinker in his day but is probably best known today as the father of Virginia Woolf. He asks you to picture — perhaps best as a fiction — this:
He left the inn for a stroll before dinner, lost the trail and then slipped while trying to return on a ledge. He found himself clinging to the side of the mountain as if it were a pane of glass. He had one foothold. He thought he could last 20 minutes before his strength ran out. A couple of hundred feet below him was a torrent. He tried not to think about what his remains would look like.
So what do you do when you see the end? How do you make the most of the life that’s left?
Stephen did a quick theological review and found that he still thought Jonathan Edwards and his allies were talking nonsense. He tried to think of great things, but he kept returning to the life he had at the moment — to his position on the cliff, to his companions at the inn.
The one metaphor that made sense to him was a memory of a boat race many years ago. He was losing badly and had no hope of winning. Yet he rowed for all he was worth.
Life is a gift, and the proper response is to accept a duty to live it completely. You just always do your best.
His mind kept coming back to the here and now, and he noticed a possible handhold he had overlooked. It was just out of reach, and he’d have to lunge. His strength was already ebbing, but what did he have to lose?
Stephen lunged and missed. He slid down the rock. But almost immediately he landed on another ledge that had been hidden from view. It was a clear shot back to the trail.
Astonished, he consulted his watch and saw the drama had taken just five minutes. He still could make it to the inn in time for dinner.
It’s a fine essay. I like it because it tackles that question about how you go about making the most of the life that’s left to you.
Maybe it’s a question for people of a certain age or of a certain cast of mind.
• Sources: I came across a reference to it in Sarah Bakewell’s new book and found the essay online here:
It’s Chapter 5 in Leslie Stephen, Essays on Freethinking and Plain Speaking; London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1873.
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