KEY POINTS:
No one will say this at the state funeral for Sir Edmund Hillary but Tuesday's service is not only a farewell for a man but also for his world.
In broad outline and small detail, it has largely disappeared - for the better and the worse.
When the
world's tallest mountain was "conquered" in 1953, Keith Holyoake described the feat as a perfect Coronation gift from "loyal little New Zealand".
Well, we weren't little then and we aren't little now, except in our own imaginings. There may not be a lot of people here but New Zealand is a big place. Just one province, Canterbury, is famously the same size as Switzerland and you could actually fit most of Europe - south of Poland - within our borders
So we've never been little but we were loyal - in 1953. It may not sit well with some but we were still part of an Empire then - if not in fact, then surely in outlook. Ed Hillary was one of the team in a British Everest expedition. If they hadn't gone, he wouldn't have been there.
Ironic then that within days of his death, we're once again debating how best to achieve the false hope of the unilateralists and become a republic - as if swapping one European model of governance for another will make us the people we're supposed to be. It won't. Spared the constitutional encumbrances of history, the ruling class in our republican paradise may find it easier to have their wicked way with us but that's all.
The ideological mountaineers of the 21st century have yet to convincingly explain why we should knock this particular bastard off.
It wasn't something we worried about in 1953. Bolstered by an inherited history, we had a sense of our place in the world that was surer - and less neurotic - than it is now. Many today will say that sense was false but they can't deny its reassurance.
Ed Hillary was feted in London and given an honour by the Queen that a small group of politicians have since decided no one else will receive.
Yet, by amplifying his achievement, those gestures also amplified us. They were signs we'd been embraced by a world we now increasingly seem inclined to ignore.
Not next week though, when the world comes to Parnell to honour a man who enhanced us all. And when the world does pay its tribute, we may privately choose - on behalf of our own self esteem - to give thanks that Ed climbed his Everest when he did.
It's easy to imagine the clamour if his expedition was leaving now; the calls for prohibition, the demands that "fragile eco-systems" be protected. Dire predictions of what "could" happen if this "act of environmental vandalism" were allowed to proceed spring easily to mind.
Many today would argue that Everest should be left alone. "It's not Everest anyway," these voices would insist. "That's just a colonial relic, the surname of a 19th century British Surveyor General. Before he got the measure of the mountain, it was Peak 15 and long before that, the Tibetans called it Chomolunga - Goddess Mother of the World - and the Sherpas called it Sagarmatha - Goddess of the Sky.
"What right have we in the affluent West to 'conquer' a Goddess?" the critics would ask.
"Hands off Chomolunga/Sagarmatha/ Peak 15/Mt Everest."
Fortunately, we don't have to wrestle with the seismic change in attitudes that has occurred in the past 50 years. But there are other troublesome matters to consider, not least how best to remember Sir Ed.
Despite him making it clear that when he "kicked the bucket", (will anyone on Tuesday speak so plainly?) he sought no memorial other than continued support for his work with the Sherpas, we now find ourselves mired in argument about other options, chief among them the possibility of a national holiday.
Well, let's have one, by all means, if we think we deserve it. But let's not delude ourselves that doing so will make it easy for Kiwis to spend a day in the mountains. Because we won't.
Given a day off, most of us will simply sleep in or get drunk or roam the North Shore looking for people to bash. A mad few, as mesmerised by the peaks as Sir Ed was, will go where he went. But only a few. And they would have gone anyway.
In 1953, on Mt Everest, a public holiday would have been as useful as an empty oxygen cylinder.
"Morning, Tensing, old son. What're you doing tomorrow?"
"Heading for the summit, Ed. As quick as I can."
"I don't think so, mate. Tomorrow's a public holiday. We've all got a day off."
Fifty years on, a holiday is not how we should remember a man whose autobiography Nothing Venture, Nothing Win describes an incident in the Home Guard when his platoon - and their foes - arbitrarily called a midday halt to a mock attack: "'We always stop at 12 o'clock for lunch', I was told. This was too much and I never attended another Home Guard parade." If we must have a memorial other than the one Sir Edmund wished then it should reflect the philosophy of the man; a philosophy cogently expressed in this quote from his autobiography: "Sound and sensible methods are indeed highly desirable and should be encouraged but it is true that over-emphasis on safety can impair confidence and greatly affect performance."
Before and since 1953, New Zealanders have made much of the need to create a level playing field, regardless of how that may lower the mountains.
Perhaps it's time to admit that lives shape people as tectonic plates shape mountains and a life without risk cannot be a life of achievement.
Whatever it is, the best memorial for a hero will be something that creates many more.
