Sunday, June 17, 2007

Looking in the mirror

I just finished reading Into the Wild today. It's about a man named Christopher McCandless who had an upper-middle class upbringing in suburban Virginia. After graduating from Emory University in 1990 with near-perfect grades, he donated thousands of dollars of savings to charity, cut off contact with his family, and embarked on a cross-country trip. A little more than two years later he was found dead, apparently having starved to death, in the Alaskan woods outside Denali National Park. I'm not really giving away the story, since most of what I've just written is expressed by the author in the opening pages.

What struck me most were the similarities between McCandless and myself, particularly in terms of the contradictions he struggled with. Some of these qualities are not uncommon to be sure (i.e. not wanting to be told what to do), but the characteristics we may have shared run deeper than that. Despite his fierce independence, he struggled with the desire to both be alone and not lose out on the benefits of sharing intimate time with others. He rejected, on philosophical grounds, many aspects of "American life," but simultaneously excelled, and at times seemed comfortable, within that same institutional framework.

Part of what the author conveyed in the book regarded correspondence he had received from people who read a magazine essay on McCandless that was the predecessor of Into the Wild. Many people were harshly critical of McCandless's behavior, calling him reckless and incompetent. However, I would surmise that many of them would probably see similarities between themselves and McCandless if they took the time to look. In fact, most have probably engaged in similarly risky behavior and were lucky enough not to suffer the potential consequences, or perhaps they weren't courageous enough to act on their convictions and desires in the first place.

I don't condone the fact that McCandless made some unnecessarily risky decisions (decisions that under different circumstances may have put others in harm's way, and undoubtedly led to emotional despair for his family), but in the end he was pursuing his dreams in a way that most of us never do, and only he paid the consequences for it.

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