“Two years he walks the earth.
No phone, no pool, no pets, no
cigarettes. Ultimate freedom.
An extremist, and aesthetic voyager,
whose home is the road…”
Christopher Johnson McCandless (Alexander Supertramp, May 1992)
It’s been a bit more than two short months since I’ve first watched the truly magnificent movie “Into the Wild”. Come to think of it, is a two-month period ever short when you realize that each single day of these eight weeks you’ve been thinking about something nearly all the time. I can’t recollect any other movie leaving a trace as deep as this in me, definitely none. It has also been the same two months since I bought the book by Jon Krakauer, which inspired Sean Penn to film the story and bring it to masses, which part I am. I remember the first ten minutes after the movie’s end. I was griping my already ex husband’s hand very hard, sitting with my legs crossed on the sofa, staring into the by then blank screen of my faithful laptop thinking, thinking, thinking... Thoughts came as a great wave, which swept away everything else, flooded every bit of my mind. Why? How? And yet again, why?? It stroke me how identical my views of the society, life, relationships and the meaning in general coincided with those of Christopher Johnson McCandless, whose tale of the quest to find himself and learn the answers to the crucial questions he faced by breaking away from the ordinary life and taking one of the bravest steps one can make in the nowadays turmoil of life, is narrated in the book and consequently the movie in the most capturing way. Leaving me speechless for quite some time and brooding over this heartbreaking story up to this very moment. An extraordinary young men, a graduate of a rather prestigious Emory College, the son of Billie and Walt McCandless, both involved in a pretty successful family business, which capitalizes on Walt’s in-depth knowledge and many-year experience in working for NASA, a lover of romantic literature such as books by Leo Tolstoy, Henry David Thoreau, Jack London (“Jack London is the king!” C.J. McCandless), Chris had no plans on waiting for life to happen to him but did in accordance to his own quote “if you want something in life, just reach out and grab it”. In 1990 he graduated with very good marks from Emory College and shortly after that donated $ 24,000 of his savings to OXFAM, got into his shabby but much loved Datsun and vanished from his family’s life to be found only two years after, having hitchhiked, traveled freight-trains and paddled a canoe throughout the US and even Mexico, and finishing his “Great Odyssey” by bringing into life his most cherished desire of living off the land in the untouched wildlife of the seductive Alaska, where he was found dead in early September 1992. Having lived in the Fairbanks Bus 142, left behind by the road builders, for nearly four months Chris did not make it only two weeks to be found and rescued. But the biggest tragedy of the whole story is not even in the fact that the moose hunters arrived at the bus two miserable weeks late, but in the fact that having found what he was seeking for, the snowmelt swollen Teklanika river trapped Chris in the wild, preventing him from reaching the civilization and telling the tale of his quest and living on whatever the way he chose to. The circumstances tend to stand in our way no matter where and when and this is the most tragic and sad part of the story. Chris had died but his memory will live forever in the hearts of those whom he ignited with the desire to learn more about life and themselves, whose eyes opened more widely to the life we lead and the society, which integral part we all are. So I am saying what I need to say, I am saying thank you, thank you to Chris for changing my life and letting me understand what I have always wanted to do and be, something that was on the surface of my mind for quite some time yet always slipped away in the permanent current of everyday routine.
No phone, no pool, no pets, no
cigarettes. Ultimate freedom.
An extremist, and aesthetic voyager,
whose home is the road…”
Christopher Johnson McCandless (Alexander Supertramp, May 1992)
It’s been a bit more than two short months since I’ve first watched the truly magnificent movie “Into the Wild”. Come to think of it, is a two-month period ever short when you realize that each single day of these eight weeks you’ve been thinking about something nearly all the time. I can’t recollect any other movie leaving a trace as deep as this in me, definitely none. It has also been the same two months since I bought the book by Jon Krakauer, which inspired Sean Penn to film the story and bring it to masses, which part I am. I remember the first ten minutes after the movie’s end. I was griping my already ex husband’s hand very hard, sitting with my legs crossed on the sofa, staring into the by then blank screen of my faithful laptop thinking, thinking, thinking... Thoughts came as a great wave, which swept away everything else, flooded every bit of my mind. Why? How? And yet again, why?? It stroke me how identical my views of the society, life, relationships and the meaning in general coincided with those of Christopher Johnson McCandless, whose tale of the quest to find himself and learn the answers to the crucial questions he faced by breaking away from the ordinary life and taking one of the bravest steps one can make in the nowadays turmoil of life, is narrated in the book and consequently the movie in the most capturing way. Leaving me speechless for quite some time and brooding over this heartbreaking story up to this very moment. An extraordinary young men, a graduate of a rather prestigious Emory College, the son of Billie and Walt McCandless, both involved in a pretty successful family business, which capitalizes on Walt’s in-depth knowledge and many-year experience in working for NASA, a lover of romantic literature such as books by Leo Tolstoy, Henry David Thoreau, Jack London (“Jack London is the king!” C.J. McCandless), Chris had no plans on waiting for life to happen to him but did in accordance to his own quote “if you want something in life, just reach out and grab it”. In 1990 he graduated with very good marks from Emory College and shortly after that donated $ 24,000 of his savings to OXFAM, got into his shabby but much loved Datsun and vanished from his family’s life to be found only two years after, having hitchhiked, traveled freight-trains and paddled a canoe throughout the US and even Mexico, and finishing his “Great Odyssey” by bringing into life his most cherished desire of living off the land in the untouched wildlife of the seductive Alaska, where he was found dead in early September 1992. Having lived in the Fairbanks Bus 142, left behind by the road builders, for nearly four months Chris did not make it only two weeks to be found and rescued. But the biggest tragedy of the whole story is not even in the fact that the moose hunters arrived at the bus two miserable weeks late, but in the fact that having found what he was seeking for, the snowmelt swollen Teklanika river trapped Chris in the wild, preventing him from reaching the civilization and telling the tale of his quest and living on whatever the way he chose to. The circumstances tend to stand in our way no matter where and when and this is the most tragic and sad part of the story. Chris had died but his memory will live forever in the hearts of those whom he ignited with the desire to learn more about life and themselves, whose eyes opened more widely to the life we lead and the society, which integral part we all are. So I am saying what I need to say, I am saying thank you, thank you to Chris for changing my life and letting me understand what I have always wanted to do and be, something that was on the surface of my mind for quite some time yet always slipped away in the permanent current of everyday routine.
cool.. I'll definitely try to see it tonight! (yep, yesterday I felt asleep just after our icq talk))
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