I am not McCandless

(Note: I know that some of this can be expanded upon, but as far as this blog is concerned, this will suffice. This is more surface thought than anything else.)

Before I left Syracuse to go on this little adventure at least three different people, all of which are strangers to one another, recommended that I read Into the Wild. They that I was about to do something similar to what Chris McCandless had done. Well, I suppose in that I was going to leave my home and bum around the country, Chris and I are similar. But we differ in that he was only interested in wandering around the country, for whatever reason, whereas I'm wandering to rock climb. I'm not interested in what Jack London or Thoreau has to say about nature and what it can tell us about society.

The strange thing is, that even though I make the claim that I am not Chris McCandless (in the sense that we share a similar vagabond project), I can only make that claim from that one book. While reading Into the Wild, through Krakauer's words, I was getting merely a glimpse of a human being that actually existed, yet I only get it through the authorship of one who didn't actually like what Chris had done. I never got to flip through McCandless's notebooks, or shuffle through the notes he made in the books he carried with him. I am at least thrice removed from knowing who he truly was. Krakauer thought Chris was a burden on those who knew him, but I don't think that's accurate. If anything, it appeared more that Chris cared about everyone in a similar way, yet remaining emotionally distant from them at the same time; like an indifferent humanist.

Still, I can only make that claim through my interpretation of the text of Krakauer's interpretation of others' stories and interpretations of who Chris was, and through his notebooks.

What I do worry about is that in the same way the Chris was susceptible to elegant prose, I am also in danger of being over-influenced by well written works. The words of Thoreau, Emerson, Tolstoy, and London are powerful and motivating. But I remember that the words they wrote, they did not live by. Thoreau wrote about his experience in the wilderness at Walden, where his cabin was less than two miles away from town, and frequently walked into town and interacted with those he was undoubtedly disgusted with. London went to Alaska once in his life, then died, as I believe Krakauer put it, an obese "fatuous drunk" in his Californian estate.

Even Emerson's claims in Nature are difficult to decipher, his motivations, how he thought people should live in the world is still a debatable topic among scholars. Even more so, the relevance of it seems to dwindle as more and more people become accustomed to experience the world with the augmentation of technological innovations.

Kierkegaard makes an interesting point in that as more and more of the world become accessible to the modern human, the ability to strike wonder and amazement into one's being become so diminished that soon the seven wonders of the world will be nothing more than those seven things people thought were amazing at one time in a primitive history. Every few years those seven wonders change, and it wouldn't surprise me if it had something to do with how many people have visited those wonders. What will we soon be left to do? Travel "from star to star," as Soren would imply until we are bored with that?

With Chris, as I am worried I'll fall victim to it, without realizing that, though there is a grain of truth within the writings of those I've listed, there are questions of whether or not it was merely poetic romanticism. If Thoreau or London or Emerson or Tolstoy truly wanted people to live in a certain way in the world, as expressed by their writings, why did they not attempt to do likewise? It's easier to be a professor and lecture about being in the world, yet another thing to be the student who attempts to live in the world in that way. It's almost a shame that Chris (as far as I know), didn't attempt to sift through the lines of those books and make something more of coherent philosophy of being, displaced from the preacher status that so many of his idolized authors held.

It's a difficult space to occupy, I think. Being a student trying to live the philosopher's life as though you were their thought experiment. In the end, I can't say I'm trying to do something completely different, because I too am influenced by those I've read, but I'm doing my best to keep in mind that their words could merely be poetic dribble.