There exists an ecstasy that medicine itself has named after wine: l'ivresse des sommets — "the drunkenness of the summits" — the French phrase for what English calls mountain sickness, used by climbers to describe the strange inebriation that grips them above four thousand meters. Shortened breath, floating thoughts, sudden euphoria alternating with causeless melancholy — everything indicates that as the air grows thin, something is set free in man. The peaks intoxicate, literally. They alter the chemistry of the body as an alkaloid would, and that is no doubt why, since time immemorial, humanity has placed its gods up there.
Verticality possesses a magnetism no horizon can offer. Where the sea cradles, the mountain summons; where the plain soothes, the peak calls. From Olympus to the pagodas of Tibet, from Mount Sinai to Machu Picchu, every civilization has sensed that altitude is not merely geographical but ontological — that to climb is to change one's nature. From Petrarch inaugurating modern alpinism on Mount Ventoux in 1336 to today's base jumpers hurling themselves from Norwegian crests, let us explore the many faces of this vertical inebriation.
Mountain Sickness: A Physiological Drunkenness
Above three thousand meters, the human body enters a singular regime. The partial pressure of oxygen drops, the blood thickens, the brain demands more than the breath can supply. This is what physicians call altitude hypoxia, and its symptoms resemble those of alcoholic drunkenness with uncanny precision: headaches, disinhibition, impaired judgment, euphoric fatigue, sometimes visual or auditory hallucinations. Reinhold Messner, who descended Everest alone in 1980, recounted conversing with an imaginary companion walking at his side.
This drunkenness is not merely an unfortunate side effect: it is an integral part of the summit experience. Many climbers describe, beyond seven thousand meters, a second state in which time dilates, fear vanishes, and each gesture takes on a ceremonial slowness. "Up there," wrote French alpinist Lionel Terray, "one is no longer entirely oneself, and that is why one climbs." Danger becomes secondary; consciousness floats above the laboring body.
Tibetans and Sherpas, genetically adapted to altitude through variants of the EPAS1 gene inherited from the Denisovans, partly escape this drunkenness. But they recognize it in the eyes of strangers and name it, with poetic precision, "the great altitude sickness" — as if the summit were a living presence capable of striking down whoever dared approach it without ritual.
Nietzsche and the Philosophy of the Heights
No thinker has celebrated the ecstasy of heights with greater incandescence than Friedrich Nietzsche. It was in the small village of Sils-Maria, in the Swiss Engadine, at 1800 meters, that he conceived the eternal return and wrote, in an almost hallucinated fever, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. "Up here, the air is subtle and pure, danger is near, and the spirit fills with a joyful malice," he noted. Thought itself, in his eyes, demanded altitude. Serious philosophy could only be elaborated with one's feet in the snow and one's head in the wind.
This intuition is not merely metaphorical. Nietzsche physically experienced, in his long walks around Lake Silvaplana, an exaltation not unrelated to mild hypoxia. High altitude favors a slight euphoria, an associative acceleration of thought, a sensation of inner transparency. This is clear drunkenness — the kind that does not numb but sharpens, that does not make one forget but see. Zarathustra descends from his mountain as Moses did from Sinai, but he comes down joyful, because he has breathed the air of the gods.
The entire Western contemplative tradition, from the Desert Fathers perched on their pillars to the monks of Montserrat or Mount Athos, had sensed this equation between material and spiritual elevation. One does not meditate in the plains. To truly think, one must dominate a horizon — and accept that this overhang alters the very chemistry of thought.
The Dawn of Alpinism: Conquering Mont Blanc
For centuries, the high Alps were considered a maleficent territory, peopled with dragons and tormented souls. Apart from a few chamois hunters and smugglers, no one dared venture there. Everything changed on August 8, 1786, when two men from Chamonix — the physician Michel-Gabriel Paccard and the crystal-hunter Jacques Balmat — reached the summit of Mont Blanc, at 4810 meters. The Genevan scientist Horace-Bénédict de Saussure, who had offered a prize to whoever succeeded the ascent, climbed it himself the following year. Alpinism was born.
What was at stake was not merely a sporting feat. It was a revolution of the gaze. The Romantic painters — Caspar David Friedrich with his famous Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818), William Turner and his Alpine landscapes — and writers like Shelley or Byron, transformed the high mountain into the territory of the sublime. What was terror became ecstasy. What was hostility became invitation. The peak no longer frightened: it attracted, magnetized, intoxicated.
The nineteenth century then witnessed a multiplication of conquests. The Matterhorn, that haughty triangle whose profile defies all climbing, fell in 1865 to the audacity of Edward Whymper, but at the cost of four lives on the descent. The rope broke on the slab, and the equation became clear: the ecstasy of the heights has a price. It is this ambivalence — between rapture and tragedy — that founded the modern alpinist myth and that has continued, ever since, to attract those whom the safety of the plains leaves unsatisfied.
The Himalayas, Frontier of the Sacred
At the turn of the twentieth century, the gaze rose higher. The Himalayas, that diadem of fourteen summits exceeding eight thousand meters, became the new horizon of vertical adventure. George Mallory, the legendary British alpinist, disappeared on the slopes of Everest in June 1924 with his young companion Andrew Irvine. Did he reach the summit before he died? No one knows. But his answer to an American journalist who asked him why he insisted on climbing that mountain remains one of the most famous lines in the history of alpinism: "Because it is there."
This answer contains the entire philosophy of vertical ecstasy. The mountain needs no other justification than its mere upright presence in the sky. It exists, it taunts, it magnetizes. Climbing it serves no purpose — and that is precisely what makes the act pure, unburdened of all utility, free as a work of art. The ascent is a metaphysics in act, an athletic proof of human freedom.
Reinhold Messner, the first man to climb all fourteen eight-thousanders without supplemental oxygen, pushed this logic to its limit. For him, refusing the bottle meant forcing oneself to dialogue truthfully with the mountain, to experience without cheating the ecstasy it dispenses. At the summit of Nanga Parbat or Everest, he describes a total transparency, a feeling of being traversed by wind and silence, in which the ego dissolves into the glacial blue of the sky. Tibetans call this experience gakyil, the wheel of joy. The Sufis would call it fanā, extinction in God. The alpinist simply says: "I was there."
Flying Without Engines: The New Aerial Ecstasy
If the horizontal conquest of the summits is now largely accomplished, another vertical ecstasy took flight at the end of the twentieth century: that of free flight. Paragliding, invented in the 1980s in the French Alps, allows tens of thousands of practitioners to know what only birds of prey and dreamers had known until then: the sensation of floating in the third dimension, carried by an invisible thermal, hundreds of meters above the valley.
More radical still, the wingsuit transforms the human body into a wing. Clad in webbed suits that multiply their lifting surface, the aerial daredevils throw themselves from cliffs and glide at two hundred kilometers per hour, brushing rocky ridges, threading narrow gorges like seagulls launched at full speed. The Norwegian Espen Fadnes and the Swiss Géraldine Fasnacht have made this discipline a cosmic choreography, where the slightest error is fatal but where mastery provides, they say, "the purest sensation of being alive."
At the extreme of vertigo stands base jumping — leaping from a fixed point (cliff, bridge, antenna, building) with a parachute. A few seconds of free fall, the roar of air in the ears, then the brutal opening of the canopy: it is, condensed in less than a minute, the most intense experience of aerial drunkenness humanity has ever invented. The neurochemist Andrew Newberg has shown that these jumps trigger a massive release of dopamine, endorphins, and noradrenaline — a neurochemical cocktail whose euphoric effect can last several hours, and provoke a genuine addiction.
Urban Heights: Philippe Petit and Modern Vertigo
The vertical ecstasy is not the exclusive domain of mountains. The twentieth century, by raising forests of skyscrapers, created a new territory for extreme tightrope walkers. On August 7, 1974, the Frenchman Philippe Petit stretched a cable between the two towers of the World Trade Center in New York, 412 meters above the void, and walked across it for forty-five minutes — eight crossings, salutes, a bow, almost a dance. "When I see three oranges, I juggle; when I see two towers, I walk," he would say to explain his act, which would remain the purest poetic gesture of the last century.
Today, urban climbers like Alain Robert — nicknamed "the French Spider-Man" — scale the facades of the Burj Khalifa or Taipei 101 without rope or safety harness. On social networks, a new generation of young Russians and Ukrainians, the roofers, film themselves perched atop the world's tallest structures, suspended by one hand above the void. Their drunkenness is ambiguous, traversed by the desire for digital vertigo as much as by that of real heights. Several have lost their lives, but their videos continue to circulate, chilling testimonies of an era in which the summit has become viral performance.
The Vertical Call
From the conquest of Mont Blanc to wingsuit jumps in the Norwegian fjords, from Zarathustra descending his mountain to tightrope walkers suspended between two towers, it is always the same equation that plays out: to climb is to be born to something else. Height strips away. It frees you from the weight of things, from the noise of the plains, from the gravity of routines. It offers you, in exchange, a rarer air, a denser silence, and that clear ecstasy known only to those who have seen the world recede beneath their feet.
Perhaps this is why all religions have placed their gods at altitude. Perhaps this is why there exists, in each of us, a vertical fiber that quivers as soon as a summit appears on the horizon. We probably descend from primates who slept in trees to escape predators, and our brain retains the dim memory of that original overhang — that moment when, perched on a branch, the ancestor discovered the world from higher up and discovered himself.
To raise one's eyes toward a peak, this evening, is therefore not a trivial gesture. It is to answer a call that precedes us, surpasses us, founds us. It is to feel, in the hollow of the belly, that little anticipated ecstasy which says that one day, perhaps, we shall climb up there. And that up there, in the subtle and pure air of which Nietzsche spoke, something will be revealed to us that no plain could ever have told.