---

Try not to regret the past too much. Most often, the past drops away from you because it’s ripe.
Colette, letter to Germaine Patat (undated)

Literature & Art Across Frontiers: You didn't care if you were brave or weak. You just became nothing
One of the great things about life is that it can always get worse, just when you think it can't. Some kinds of storytelling are built on this grim joke, and Touching the Void is a very pure and powerful illustration of it.
Indeed, it's full of the most acute moral dilemmas, terrible physical suffering and unbelievable endurance. Several earlier attempts to turn Joe Simpson's best-selling book into a feature film have failed. When life is stranger than fiction, fiction often fails. It shirks the void, trying to tame it. Non-fiction can leap over the edge, shouting: Shut up! This really happened.
Yates has been vilified, even assaulted by a fellow climber, but Simpson says Yates saved both their lives. Simpson wrote the book, while recuperating from his injuries, in order to defend his friend's actions.
Yates is no less candid and it's clear that surviving has had its own toll. Simpson has grown stronger; Yates appears to live with a terrible doubt about his own character.
Much of the writing on the film bangs on about the triumph of the human spirit. There is that, but it's just as much a great film about human frailty and regret.
· Touching the Void [link first seen at Simpson's website ]
· · Barista: The Day After Tomorrow: This movie was awful. Everything was absurdly amplified and accelerated: centuries of gradual change isn't fast enough, it had to be compressed into weeks
· · · See Also Critic: Coverage of best-sellers is like absurd comic theater (( Love in the Time of Cold War))
/· · · · See Also Transcript of The Poor Editors' regular Saturday-night poker game with Dick Cheney
· · · · · The production of souls is more important than the production of tanks…. And therefore I raise my glass to you, writers, the engineers of the human soul Summer reading suggestions with Cold War River ((Clinton Book Sets Non-Fiction Sales Record: Clinton's My Cold River sold more than 400,000 copies in the United States in its first day of release))
· · · · · · See Also What you should know about jobs in publishing ((Who'd have thought that the biggest reviewing-controversy of the year would be Cold River and the Pillar of Storge @ Amazonia))
· · · · · See Also How the terrorists' own words can help us stop them: Making two fundamental errors. The first is imagining that the enemies can be beaten back, largely unilaterally, with Cold War tools