Last week I finished reading The Prestige, which was an exceptional book. I bought it in Shinjuku for the bus. The book store had a very limited selection. For some reason it had an awful cover, but it was cheap. It was quite a surprise how good it was. Very well done. Very strange ending.
Now I am finally reading Into The Wild as someone left it in my house. It is even more unsettling than The Prestige. I am a bit disturbed by how much I completely associate with a lot of what Chris McCandless was feeling. He was a lot more motivated and confident and bright than I am. That is probably what keeps me alive. A good deal of what he was doing was quite admirable. Just a few small mistakes and it turns a great adventure into a death spiral. Strange what a cultural touchstone he has turned into however.
3 comments:
It was oh so long ago that I read Into the Wild and slept in the yard for a month. Even though I know how it ends and he made a couple of bone headed mistakes, I admire what he did and understand what was going inside his head. One interesting thing I always go back to in the book in the section where Krakauer talks about how McCandless was influenced by the great nature writers who were in many ways hypocrites, but I wonder if that make their influence any less powerful or taints McCandless 's journey. Can I go out?
The hypocrisy of nature writers usually comes from the fact that nature doesn't give us many really useful lessons when it is approached outside of the abstract. Uless we want to start eating and bullying each other like squirrel on gopher violence.
I think the kid was trying to find a mountain on which to be holy, but we don't have a system or guide set up for how to find such a place. The risk of death is part of that initiation, the fact that he died was unfortunate, but if it hadn't been possible, it wouldn't have been the journey he was looking for.
I think that is the point I wanted to get at
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