By Thomas Shor
I enjoyed it more for being a true story. The author described a superstitious world that seems to belong in the distant past but was actually the 1960s. In this remote part of the world, lamas were everywhere, making proclamations and performing rituals to bring good fortune. As a fan of science would expect, their results were unreliable. Sometimes the great holy men achieved great things. Sometimes it all failed. Almost as if they weren’t controlling anything at all… The principal figure in the story, Tulshuk Lingpa was frequently described as a drunk, crazy person. There were a few anecdotes, but I didn’t feel like I ever got attached to him as a person or really understood his character. Still, I was rooting for him in his attempt to open the gate to Shangri-La. I don’t believe that it is a real, physical place, but I was hoping his ascent ended with a mysterious disappearance or something like that. Enough to wonder if something mystical did happen. Nope. He died in an avalanche. Another man, who tried to make the climb with him, claimed to see the green valley beyond the glacier in front of them and smell the flowers. It’s hard not to attribute such things to a lack of oxygen in the high altitude. Apparently the author is going to join us via Zoom and the book club meeting tomorrow night. I wonder how that will impact my feelings toward this book. I don’t expect much of it will stick with me beyond: crazy lama did crazy lama stuff until it killed him.
I enjoyed the conversation with the author and I really appreciated that he joined our Zoom meeting from Bhutan! He described himself as a skeptic/atheist/secular humanist but made it clear that he did not intend to inject his interpretation of the events. He described them in the book as they were described to him by participants and it is up to the reader to determine what is “real.” I appreciated that.