At that stage of my youth, death remained as abstract a concept as non-Euclidean geometry or marriage. I didn't yet appreciate its terrible finality or the havoc it could wreak on those who'd entrusted the deceased with their hearts. I was stirred by the dark mystery of mortality. I couldn't resist stealing up to the edge of doom and peering over the brink. ... In my case -- and, I believe, in the case of Chris McCandless -- that was a very different thing from wanting to die.--Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
Before he was a writer, Krakauer was a mountain climber. Before writing Into the Wild, his previous books had all been about mountaineering. Like many men and women who climb mountains, he wonders why he does it. He also wonders whether the emotions and self-revelations won by confronting death, supported on a cliffside by fingertips and poorly anchored pitons, or on an ice wall by crampon tips and an ice axe, can ever justify the devastation that his actual death would visit upon his family and friends. Like all adventurers, all radicals, all visionaries, all prophets -- he wonders at the cost to be paid for deviating from the average, the cost not to himself but to those he loves.
In his book, Krakauer devotes a chapter to describing his own experience at the age of 23, attempting a solo first ascent of a peak in Alaska. During that climb, he stared at the face of death. He tells the story not as autobiography, but to explain why Chris McCandless walked into the wild. The only difference between the two, as Krakauer sees it, was that he was lucky and lived, and McCandless was unlucky and died.
Sean Penn's film of Into the Wild, of course, is now showing across the country. The movie is beautiful, exhilarating, funny, and heartbreaking. It faithfully adheres, for the most part, to the conclusions drawn in Krakauer's book about the life of Chris McCandless.
What the film cannot show, however, given the limitations of time and the film medium, is that McCandless's life as portrayed is really Krakauer's painstaking reconstruction of a life from fragmentary clues, from conversations with family members who knew him as a child and with persons who met him only briefly during his wanderings. To some extent, I suspect, the Chris McCandless that emerges is actually a picture of Jon Krakauer, modified to account for the known events of McCandless's life.
I think Krakauer may agree. I think, in fact, that Krakauer suggests as much in his book.
Nevertheless, few people could be as well positioned as a mountaineer to get under the skin of an oddball like Chris McCandless -- Alex Supertramp -- and to intuit the urges and motives that drove him to the post-college life he chose. McCandless was a seer, a prophet, a crazy man -- a person not willing to live an unthinking life amongst the herd, but driven to grasp and feel reality, sensation by sensation, minute by minute. It is the same drive shared by anyone who hikes, camps, climbs, or travels without reservations and guided tours. But he pushed his craziness to the brink of death, and over the brink; the rest of us push it only far enough, perhaps, to embrace discomfort as a road to experience. McCandless insisted on absolute purity in pursuing that dream; the rest of us keep a Visa card in our wallets, just in case.
The book and the movie arouse grief for the shortness of his life, a life that held so much promise, and for the gap his death left in so many other lives -- his parents, his sister, the elderly man who saw him as a grandson, the teenaged girl who dreamed of him as her lover. But it also reminds us how precious is every moment of life, and how wasteful we are of those moments. McCandless, for all his journal writing, for all his reading of Tolstoy and Thoreau and Jack London, sought to experience every blade of grass, every drop of rain, every ray of sunshine. He died at 24, but he experienced more life in those 24 years than many of us will in 90.
At the end of his life, he was ready to return to society, to live to some extent among the humanity that he had never rejected. Happiness must be shared, he notes.
See the movie, by all means. But read Krakauer's book as well.
He was alone. He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life. He was alone and young and willful and wild-hearted, alone amidst a waste of wild air and brackish waters and the seaharvest of shells and tangle and veiled grey sunlight.--James Joyce
