Children can be harsh judges when it comes to their parents, disinclined to grant clemency. - Jon Krakauer

We Americans are titillated by sex, obsessed by it, horrified by it. When an apparently healthy person, especially a healthy young man, elects to forgo the enticements of the flesh, it shocks us, and we leer. Suspicions are aroused.

he was ready, perhaps, to shed a little of the armor he wore around his heart, that upon returning to civilization, he intended to abandon the life of a solitary vagabond, stop running so hard from intimacy, and become a member of the human community.

Most climbers aren't in fact deranged, they're just infected with a particularly virulent strain of the Human Condition.