The Edge, by the Dr.

But with the throttle screwed on, there is only the barest margin, and no room at all for mistakes. It has to be done right... and that's when the strange music starts, when you stretch your luck so far that fear becomes exhilaration and vibrates along your arms. You can barely see at a hundred; the tears blow back so fast that they vaporize before they get to your ears. The only sounds are the wind and a dull roar floating back from the mufflers. You watch the white line and try to lean with it... howling through a turn to the right, then to the left, and down the long hill to Pacifica... letting off now, watching for cops, but only until the next dark stretch and another few seconds on the edge... The Edge... There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. The others- the living- are those who pushed their luck as far as they felt they could handle it, and then pulled back, or slowed down, or did whatever they had to when it came time to choose between Now and Later. But the edge is still Out there. Or maybe it's In. - Hunter S. Thompson

In the excerpt I've chosen as an epigraph, Dr. Thompson was writing specifically about motorcycles and death. But the concept of The Edge and the description match the rush & thrill of just about any activity that forces adrenaline to seep out through your epidermal pores and erases any trace of quotidian thought from your brain. What's so beautiful and euphoric about The Edge is exactly what is so downright dangerous and delinquent about it; when you're ripping through a hollow vortex, at the center of which is you, there is no room for conscious thinking, just instinct and instant muscular reaction.

There is just something vital and ineffable, almost holy, about great velocity - it's like moving Zen. The evacuation of the conscience. It's greatly valued and increasingly rare (and, as such things invariably go, increasingly exploited) to experience a moment of purity and focus, undistracted by something vapid and ordinary and emotional - an ethical dilemma, a billboard advertisement, a stockyard of self-reverie - something which taints and distills the essential Experience of Existence. Such a moment, when it is reached, qualifies as transcendent. Reaching The Edge can be achieved by riding a motorcycle at terminal speed, skydiving, engaging a bear in fisticuffs, or, I've learned, by skiing.

More so than most earthly things, there is something decidedly lunar about skiing. The puffy garb that arms you against the cold is almost Storm Trooperian in its weight and surface area coverage. The body motions, shifting from up-to-down and left-to-right with most of the body weight distributed forward and down, seem to defy gravity to a certain degree. The dusty, foamy tail kicked up in your wake by the carving action of your edges is distinctly astral, and the crater/callus juxtaposition of the mountain - the multifarious ridges and valleys with their assorted corrugations and dimples - all is suggestive of a luminous world which all of us have glimpsed by night, but so few have actually felt underfoot.

It is only fitting, then, that you experience something of another world through skiing. The faster you crank your speed, the wider your optical aperture opens, the deeper the rush of your senses as the world itself rushes by you, almost liquid, the emptier your mind becomes. Freedom from thought. The moisture leaps to your eyes and spits out the corners as you meet the wind head-on and your knees bend and ankles whip from side to side like a typewriter roller on amphetamines and your speed keeps climbing with your hissing, S-shape turns so if you catch an edge or simply just fall you will keep sailing at highway speed (professional racers approach 100 MPH) only no longer balanced on your feet but bouncing and careening downhill for maybe 100 feet but you know this so your body locks you in and there is simply nothing to do but act and react: thrill.

It is comforting to know that when this world gets to be too much (or too little) to handle, there is still another world for us to escape to right here, and an Edge to (perhaps asymptotically) approach.