Besides, often at difficult moments you'll catch yourself talking to the mountain, flattering it, cursing it, making promises or threats. And you wil… - René Daumal

If I were to tell this story the way history is usually written or the way each of us recalls his own past, which means recording only the most glorious moments and inventing a new continuity for them, I should omit these little details and say that our eight stout hearts drummed from morning to night in time with a single all-encompassing desire — or some such lie. But the flame that kindles desire and illuminates thought never burned for more than a few seconds at a stretch. The rest of the time we tried to remember it.
Fortunately the demands of daily work, in which each of us had his vital role, reminded us that we had come aboard of our own free will, that we were indispensable to one another, and that we were on a ship — that is to say, in a temporary habitation, designed to transport us somewhere else. If anyone forgot it, someone else lost no time in reminding him.

You see,” Totochabo pointed out to me, “I’m as fed up with all this as you are. I shall now devise a way of shutting him up with a spot of sham erudition.”
Raising his voice, he went on:
“If it’s half-wits you want, you’d better go and look for them somewhere else, for we know jolly well that beneath the perceptible form of sound is hidden a silent essence. It is from this, this crucial point at which the kernel of the perceptible has yet to choose to be sound or light or something else, from this hinterland of nature where to see is to see sound and to hear is to hear suns, it is from this very essence that sound draws its power and its ordering force.”
And with a wink in my direction, he whispered:
“That should silence them, wouldn’t you say?”
“For good,” I replied. “But when you say sham erudition, do you mean real knowledge?”
“My poor fellow,” he said, “how very thirsty you are!”
It was true and I set about treating my condition.

Era tardi, quando ci mettemmo a bere. Pensavamo tutti che era ormai tempo di cominciare. Quel che c'era stato prima, non lo si ricordava più. Solo ci dicevamo che era già tardi. Sapere da dove ciascuno veniva, in qual punto del globo si era, o se veramente un globo (in ogni caso non era un punto), e il giorno del mese di quale anno, tutto ciò era troppo per noi. Non si sollevano questioni simili quando si ha sete.