Into the Wild

I took a break from the Brothers Karamazov to read Jon Krakauer’s book Into the Wild. The two books have some similar themes related to the passions of youth and the need of the young to find meaning in the world. Krakauer’s book is about Christopher McCandless, a suburban youth raised in Annandale, Virginia, near D.C. I’m only half way through the book, but so far, McCandless strikes me as almost a caricature of youth. He is strong-willed, refusing to take direction from authority. He is idealistic, railing against the hollowness and materialism of American existence.

After graduating with a high grade point average at Emory University, he donated about $24,000 he had in his name to a charity and began tramping around the country. He cut off contact with his family and adopted an assumed name. After a couple of years, he hiked into the Alaskan wilderness near Denali with minimal gear. He didn’t bother with a map of the area. He ended up dying, most likely of starvation, in the summer of 1992 about 20 miles from the Denali National Park’s highway.

Of more interest to me in Krakauer’s book is the way Krakauer dealt with some similar impulses and the lessons he learned after living to tell the tale. Krakauer made his way up to the Stikine Icecap in the Alaskan panhandle region to climb the Devil’s Thumb.

In any case, it seems that for most people, the passions of youth cool down over time. Krakauer talks about it. Dostoyevsky talks about it. In particular, I remember in college getting unusually angry over a passage in Catcher in the Rye to the effect that an immature person can die for a cause, it takes a mature person to live for a cause. For some reason, I had an emotional response to the minimization of the value of going out in a blaze of glory for some cause or another. Older, possibly wiser, and certainly more mellow, I have come to agree with the proposition about the value of living for a cause rather than dying for it.

This has been Stream-of-Consciousness Theater.