book recommendation: into the wild by jon krakauer

The 2007 film Into the Wild stirred me so greatly that I had to know more about the life of Chris McCandless. Luckily, I found that this movie was actually based on a book by a man named Jon Krakauer, a writer who had similar feelings of intrigue after finishing an article he was asked to write about McCandless in Outside magazine in 1992, soon after the young man's death. For the next three years or so, Krakauer immersed himself in extensive research, meeting with family members, friends, and acquaintances, collecting journal entries and letters, and even visiting the exact spot in the Alaskan wilderness where McCandless starved to death, to find some answers to the questions surrounding the tragedy and to see a little more clearly what it was in the first place that made the 24-year-old "supertramp" leave everything he knew behind.

A little summary: In 1990, 22-year-old Chris McCandless, remarkably intelligent and fed up with middle-class life and modern society in general, graduated from Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. A month later, he donated his entire savings to charity (over $20,000), drove out west, and never spoke to his family again. Abandoning his car a few weeks after embarking, he became a permanent hitchhiker, relishing in tramping around the U.S. for the next two years, meeting interesting people along the way, living a minimalist life-style, completely independent of responsibility and every element of his former life. Alaska was his last big adventure in the spring of 1992, where he lived in an abandoned bus in the wilderness for four months in complete solitude before starving to death.

So why did he go? And what is so interesting about his particular story anyway? As Krakauer points out, there have been many men, young and old, just like Chris who left society to be on their own, sometimes doing very dangerous activities in remote parts of the earth, who were either found dead or never seen or heard from again. Krakauer himself strongly identified with McCandless, being an avid mountain climber as a youth and young adult, once climbing the dreaded Devil's Thumb in Alaska with stubborn determination, an act he thought, "would fix all that was wrong with my life...in the end, of course, it changed almost nothing." Maybe it is that, upon finding out who Chris really was and what his life had been like, it's a little easier to see why he wanted to get out and it's almost admirable to see him actually try to discover a life of what he called truth.

I don't think he should have severed his relationship with his family; this is not what I admire. His lack of understanding in the area of forgiveness is not something we can scorn, but rather only something to be saddened by. What is beautiful about the story of his walk into the wild is that he was willing to give up everything he had in worldly terms (a college education, possessions, career, modern distractions) to find truth. He knew none of these tangible things could fill him up or make him happy. Only truth. And to me, this is a such a clear testament to the fact that our souls are not satisfied, not really, until we find it.

I think he missed it. But I also think he was very close. In a letter to an elderly friend he met along the way to Alaska, Chris writes, "You are wrong if you think joy emanates only or principally from human relationships. God has placed it all around us. It is in everything and anything we might experience. We just have to have the courage to turn against our habitual lifestyle and engage in unconventional living." Chris knew the splendor of God's creation, that it was praiseworthy and to be enjoyed. But he vastly underestimated the beauty of humanity because all he could see was that it is fallen, and therefore missed the truth that is Christ. Reading a post on the blog, "Of First Importance" last week, these statements reminded me so much of Into the Wild: "He (John, who recorded one of the Gospel accounts) tells Jews that the truth and self-expression of God has become human. He tells Greeks that the meaning of life and all existence has become human. Therefore, only if you know this human being will you find what you hoped to find in philosophy or even in the God of the Bible. The difference [between any other great figure and Jesus] is the difference between an example of living and one who is the life itself."

It is not for me to judge and say he missed it, for in that bus it is possible he came to the truth as he neared his end. We at least know that he realized isolation doesn't really work; several of the notes marked in books he was reading at the time indicate this, including his exclamation, in all caps, quoting a line from another book, handwritten in a page of Doctor Zhivago: HAPPINESS ONLY REAL WHEN SHARED.

Bottom line: great book and well worth the read.