Conclusion

Summary

If risk can be mapped only temporarily, how can it be tolerated? What cultural mechanisms allow for risk to be endured, or better still, denied as a permanent feature of the landscape of modernity? Mary Kingsley suggests an answer with reference to mountaineering memoirs, her “most favorite form of literature,” despite the fact that she has never

…seen a glacier or a permanent snow mountain in my life. I do not care a row of pins how badly they may be written, and what form of bumble-puppy grammar and composition is employed, as long as the writer will walk along the edge of a precipice with a sheer fall of thousands of feet on one side and a sheer wall on the other; or better still crawl up an arrete with a precipice on either side. Nothing on earth would persuade me to do either of these things myself, but they remind me of bits of country I have been through where you walk along a narrow line of security with gulfs of murder looming on each side, and where in exactly the same way you are as safe as if you were in your easy chair at home, as long as you get sufficient holding ground: not on rock in the bush village inhabited by murderous cannibals, but on ideas in those men's and women's minds [i.e., the minds of the mountaineers], and these ideas, which I think I may say you will always find, give you safety.

(p. 329)