Into The Wild

I know I’m supposed to be literary and serious with this review. I know I’m supposed to criticize Krakauer’s inclusion of personal anecdotes and his bias perspective. I know I’m supposed to take a stand on either side of the Chris McCandless debate and call him a suicidal moron or a glorified idiot or a romantic hero. But, honestly, I don’t give a shit about the debate. I think it’s reductive and insulting to give in to it anyway. Here was a young man, a life, a being struggling to live his life in the most meaningful way possible. Now, I can say that he based his ideas of a romantic and true life on some unsound sources. Jack London never lived in the wild, Chris. He was a fiction writer. But still, he found some sort of truth in his words and chose the life that he chose. I wavered throughout the book. I went back and forth between the images of his sister and parents and the underlined passages in the books found by his body and the obvious sides I took after reading each. He was selfish to be so reckless with someone his family loved so dearly, he was brave to live his life in a way that he believed to matter. I closed the book yesterday afternoon somewhere in between those. Somewhere between knowing he was selfish and knowing that we’re all selfish if we’re really living a life that matters. After all, living the life we WANT by definition is selfish.

I did something after I placed the book on my small stack of read books that was kind of stupid. I know myself fairly well at this point in my life. I’m sure I will look back at forty and laugh at my seeming self-awareness in my twenties, but one thing I won’t ever be able to deny is how I know, and always have known, how fearful I am. I am very quickly and suddenly terrified: by visual images, scary sounds, the idea of eternity, certain astronomical discussions, any theme of apocalypse, and most definitely creepy children. I don’t even want to talk about that scene in The Ring where the little girl crawls out of the television because OH MY GOD NOW I AM THINKING ABOUT HER GREY, DRIPPING SKIN AND AM GOING TO HAVE NIGHTMARES FOR DAYS!

Thanks a lot.

But after reading the last few paragraphs of the last chapter, I became curious:

At some point during this week, he tore the final page from Louis L’Amour’s memoir, Education of a Wandering Man. On one side of the page were some lines L’Amour had quoted from Robinson Jeffer’s poem, “Wise Men in Their Bad Hours”:

“Death’s a fierce meadowlark: but to die having made
Something more equal to the centuries
Than muscle and bone, is mostly to shed weakness.
The mountains are dead stone, the people
Admire or hate their stature, their insolent quietness,
The mountains are not softened or troubled
And a few dead men’s thoughts have the same temper.”

On the other side of the page, which was blank, McCandless penned a brief adios: “I HAVE HAD A HAPPY LIFE AND THANK THE LORD. GOODBYE AND MAY GOD BLESS ALL!”

Then he crawled into the sleeping bag his mother had sewn for him and slipped into unconsciousness. He probably died on August 18, 112 days after he’d walked into the wild, 19 days before six Alaskans would happen across the bus and discover his body inside.

One of his last acts was to take a picture of himself, standing near the bus under the high Alaska sky, one hand holding his final note toward the camera lens, the other raised in a brave, beatific farewell. His face is horrible emaciated, almost skeletal. But if he pitied himself in those last difficult hours—because he was so young, because he was alone, because his body had betrayed him and his will had let him down—it’s not apparent from the photograph. He is smiling in the picture, and there is no mistaking the look in his eyes: Chris McCandless was at peace, serene as a monk gone to God.

I have to find that picture, I thought, as I tentatively opened my web browser and typed “Chris McCandless photos” into google image search. This is the fifth image that came up, and it is the abovementioned picture:

I thought about that picture all day yesterday, all while writing this review, all throughout breakfast and watching a recorded episode of The Colbert Report. There is something about that picture that scares me. Undeniably. I’m not afraid to admit it. It’s visually frightening: the gaunt face, the hair, the clothes, the legs that seem to not exist underneath the spaceless khakis. But more haunting than anything is his smile. He’s smiling. He knows he’s dying, he detailed it in his journal, he wrote a note for immediate help acknowledging that he was near death, and yet he was smiling. It haunts me that, even in the last moments, even when he knew that he had made a mistake and that this journey had led to his death, he did not waiver. He smiled. He smiled because he knew that he had lived a life that, to him, had the most meaning possible. It’s not my meaning. It’s most likely not yours. And he was undeniably an idiot for at least not taking basic supplies like a machete and a compass and some decent hiking boots. But it was his life, and he lived it the way that he wanted to. Entirely. How else could a person smile when they know they are hours from death? I think the debate over Chris McCandless’s life and death comes from the fact that these ideas of beauty and truth are entirely subjective. What was Chris’s truth is not everyone’s. But I don’t think anyone would disagree with the statement that they would feel incredibly fortunate to be able to know in the end that they lived their respective lives with as much beauty and truth as they could grasp.

Click

I was so happy to wake up this morning to a sense of guilt for not having written on this blog lately. It was a wonderfully refreshing way to greet the day.

Here's something I should have explained a lot sooner: I am not okay with, in any capacity, writing about people in my life on a public blog when they are completely unaware of it. I, for this reason, have tried to make this blog as anonymous as possible, but any one who knows me or knows one of these men could easily identify these stories as themselves or their friends. People are not stupid. Case in point, and a moment of personal revelation: I no longer talk to my brother, my best friend, the most important person in my life, because of something that I wrote about him on a blog that his girlfriend found through a friend of hers. And it wasn't even something bad. So, maybe I should have been more clear about this: I will not be writing about men that I date until they are over and done with and completely out of my life. Take it from me, it is not worth losing something as important as a person over something as silly and inconsequential as a blog.

Would I like to blog about all of these dates with Nine? YES. Don't ever mistake this as laziness. All last night I was conjuring sentences and funny quips about the dinner he made me, about the kissing, about the AMAZING way he talked to me when I was giving him head, etc. This is probably not the right mindset to be in when you have a penis in your mouth, nor is it the right mindset to be in when you are trying to emotionally connect with someone (with or without the penis in your mouth). But do not take my silence as ambivalence. It's not. It's respect for these men who may turn into something more. This isn't just a weekly review of books. Books are stagnant and unfeeling and can never google something that might lead to something that might lead to this blog. This is also a weekly review of dates, and as entertaining as it would be for you all to watch as I have weekly dates that lead to hilarious blog posts, it would be pretty demoralizing for me. It's also not the point of dating. Dating, if there is any success to it, leads to emotional and physical connection. That may just happen from time to time in this process. And it might just happen, although I'm not suggesting that it be with Nine, that it leads to the ultimate in emotional and physical connections. That is far more important (and the greater purpose of this whole thing, read the subtitle) than updating the blog on a regular, weekly basis. Sorry.

Now, the book reviews? I have no excuse for that. But I kinda just assumed that no one was reading those anyway...

Obviously I was wrong! Expect Julie and Julia tonight and Into the Wild tomorrow. Really! I already have notes prepared!

The Tenth Book

The furnace broke. Again. As of right now, the radiator next to which I sit IS warm. I refused to say the F word at the risk of jinxing myself again (you know, the f-i-x-e-d word), but for now I am warm. And warmth makes me happy.

Of course, in light of the plummeting temperature, I had to camp out at a friend's for the duration, scrambling to remember everything for my dog and forgetting my lap top in the meantime. Hence the lack of book review.

I don't want to get too far behind, so I'm going to post this week's book, which I've already started and will review this weekend along with Julie and Julia. The latter will simply be a tirade of enormous proportions about how much Julie Powell sucks, a thorough outline of which I've already written so as not to forget any gems of shaking hatred, so it should be a cinch to write (unlike the word "cinch," which I apparently don't know how to spell).