Sunday, October 21, 2007
To: Outside Magazine
I have learned so many things about this Chris McCandless in the past week that I am still trying to just process the information. I will not criticize his of being a suicidal person, but it makes me wonder why he would want to go out into the wild by himself in the first place. It almost seems like this was a very ingenious version of suicide because he was so unhappy with his life that he figured he would end it in nature. Chris loved the woods so he might have figured instead of killing himself and upsetting everybody he would let nature do it for him while at the same time coming to terms with his own existence. In this sense he was killing two birds with one stone, but again I do not want to think him so twisted as this. So on the other hand maybe he just wanted to find so peace and quiet too discover himself in the process and just out of inexperience and ignorance he did not prepare properly for this excursion. I really d not understand why Chris would have left home in the first place, I mean he had a lot of things going for him. Chris had a very comfortable life and loving parents and he was amazing in school, so he had a ton of things to be thankful for. His reasoning was that all of this material stuff was pontless and he resented our way of living in todays society. This is why I think that to a point, and for all of his book smarts, Chris Mccandless lacked common sense. A person with half his genious could have looked into the feature and figured, well I might want to bring extra supplies and this and that etc. with me so I don't die out there. Its like he wanted to go out and meet his demise in the forest which again brings me back to my first thought that he was a twisted soul that wanted to invent a new way of committing suicide without actually doing it yourself. To be perfectly honest i really do not know what to think of this kid. His lack of insight almost makes me feel no sympathy whatsoever for his foolish mistakes. The only reason I feel sorry for him is because of the torture that he must have put his family through. Chris McCandless was a brilliant student, but perhaps maybe not so brilliant of a person. In the end he probably recieved exactly what he asked for.
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I agree with the last sentence of your response that "he got what he asked for," but that is about all. I think that McCandless was prepared to leave everything behind not because he thought it to be worthless but because he saw it as baggage, holding him down and trying to prevent his struggle for survival. Most people have a deep need for independence at some point in their lives, but rarely is that so strong as that experienced by McCandless. What eventually brought him down was not stupidity or lack of common sense, without these he could never have survived in the wild. It was his fear of commitment and responsibility to anyone but himself and his intense need to pursue new and unventured territory. He stopped at nothing to simply live, and this combination of needing independence, thrill, and novelty eventually led to his downfall, if not in in Alaska, then in some other daring adventure that he would have engineered.
But I do not question for one moment the motivation that he had in doing what he did. He likely wanted to see and experience the world, and it's possible that the risk of death inherent in his Alaskan adventure made it seem even more intense. As said by Jon Krakauer about his earlier years, "At the time, death was a concept I understood only in the abstract... I was stirred by the mystery of death; I couldn't resist stealing up to the edge of doom and peering over the brink. The view into that swirling black vortex terrified me, but I caught sight of something elemental in that shadowy glimpse, some forbidden, fascinating riddle.
That's a very different thing than wanting to die." There is little doubt that McCandless felt the same way about death, he didn't want to die. But the risk of death was something that enhanced his experience, but it ended up being too big.
In reality, I don't feel sorry for McCandless either, but not because I see him as foolish. He was not perfect, andhe felt that society chained him down. Peace and quiet were not what he sought, in fact it was adventure and struggle, something that would have been terribly lacking to him if he had gone into law school. His lack of preparation when entering the wild was out of design, not ignorance, and was to enhance the feeling of his union with nature and eliminate the feeling that somebody was trying to undermine his personal achievements. He did have a lot to be thankful for, and that probably bothered him. He wanted to earn everything in life and to feel competent. As he said, "I read somewhere about how important it is at some point in your life, not necessarily to be strong, but to feel strong." He got what he asked for, and a lot more than he expected.
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