Into the Wild

There are no events but thoughts and heart’s hard turning, the heart’s slow learning where to love and whom. The rest is merely gossip, and tales for other times.
- Annie Dillard, quoted by Jon Krakauer in the book ‘Into the Wild’.

After watching and thoroughly enjoying Sean Penn’s movie adaptation of the book earlier this year; I found the book even more satisfying. While Sean Penn’s Chris McCandless is a hero, not a typical sitcom or movie hero, but a hero nonetheless. Jon K’s Chris McCandless is a more doubtful character, who probably lived his with a lot of conviction and idealism, but whose actions and intentions when put under scrutiny after his death, don’t really add up for a lot of people.

But it is an important story and an important life, in which Chris McCandless probably tried answering some questions that he was haunted by. Or more likely, tried testing the answers that he was convinced of. Some how Chris’s story is something personal for Jon K – the idealism, the fearlessness, the immoderation, the conviction, it is the stuff fairy tales are made of – and fairy tales are personal for all of us.

How often have we wondered if we were ready to pay or even capable of paying the price for living according to our convictions? How often, only too late, we think we somehow weaselled our way out of doing the right thing? And how we gradually start to believe that there has to be a reason for all the (seemingly meaningless) conventions that the world drags on.

McCandless pretty much takes the decisions we dream about taking but convince ourselves that they are impractical. So, while I am still wondering if I agree with Chris’s choices, while I am still not completely convinced if Chris was merely odd or genuinely rare, and I am still trying to take measure of the pleasures and pain that people who knew Chris had to go thru, and I am still trying to take measure of the pleasures and pain of being Chris – in short, I am not completely convinced of the answers, I am glad the questions have been raised -
Where is happiness? Why must I do what others do?

I am glad there was an honest attempt to answer them, tho, I am left wondering - how much can conviction bear the weight of our decisions? How do you know if conviction has a ring of truth? What leads us on?



But the beauty of Chris McCandless’ character, his honesty, his detachment, his unselfishness really come in perspective when you see how hard he worked and with what discipline; and how ghastly are the paths that many others take when they get off the beaten track. I am talking about the Bombay terrorist attacks, and the selfishness, the callousness, the frustration, the thoughtlessness, the dishonesty, the self-deceit these attacks reek of.