Life & Mortality Quote by Edward W. Howe

Howe nails a peculiarly American kind of self-sabotage: the heroic pose without the heroic obstacle. “Storm imaginary Alps” is a jab at people who narrate their lives like an epic expedition, manufacturing drama to justify inertia. The Alps are grand, romantic, legitimizing; if you’re battling mountains, you’re a protagonist. But Howe’s punchline is brutal: they “die in the foothills,” never even reaching the real work, still furious at “difficulties which do not exist.”

The line works because it turns complaint into a character flaw, not a circumstance. He’s not denying that life contains hardship; he’s mocking the psychological need to inflate it. Imaginary problems can be safer than real ones. They let you rehearse struggle without risking failure, and they supply a ready-made villain when things don’t change: the world, the odds, the “mountain.” The cursing is key. It’s not quiet fear; it’s righteous indignation, the performance of adversity as moral alibi.

Howe wrote as a late-19th/early-20th-century Midwestern newspaperman, a tradition that prized plainspoken skepticism toward self-mythologizing. In a culture selling uplift and grit, he punctures the fantasy that suffering automatically equals progress. The subtext is almost managerial: stop romanticizing your obstacles, audit them. If the mountain is imaginary, the only thing being conquered is time.