The Very Basic Core of a Man's Living Spirit is his Passion for Adventure
The following is a profound little excerpt from Jon Krakauer’s magnificent book — Into the Wild. In this passage, Krakauer is quoting a letter written by a free-spirited young wanderer, Christopher McCandless, to an older gentleman named Ron, a kind-hearted man whom McCandless befriended during his travels.
In the letter, McCandless, shortly before his tragic death, encourages Ron to abandon his routine and possessions and get out there and taste life. In the end, the old man takes this young vagabond’s advice, buys a van and some camping gear, and moves to a campsite outside of town.
I'd like to repeat the advice that I gave you before, in that I think you really should make a radical change in your lifestyle and begin to boldly do things which you may previously never have thought of doing, or been too hesitant to attempt.
So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future.
The very basic core of a man's living spirit is his passion for adventure.
The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.
If you want to get more out of life, Ron, you must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life that will at first appear to you to be crazy. But once you become accustomed to such a life you will see its full meaning and its incredible beauty.
And so, Ron, in short, get out of Salton City and hit the Road. I guarantee you will be very glad you did. But I fear that you will ignore my advice. You think that I am stubborn, but you are even more stubborn than me.
You had a wonderful chance on your drive back to see one of the greatest sights on earth, the Grand Canyon, something every American should see at least once in his life. But for some reason incomprehensible to me you wanted nothing but to bolt for home as quickly as possible, right back to the same situation which you see day after day after day.
I fear you will follow this same inclination in the future and thus fail to discover all the wonderful things that God has placed around us to discover.
Don't settle down and sit in one place. Move around, be nomadic, make each day a new horizon. You are still going to live a long time, Ron, and it would be a shame if you did not take the opportunity to revolutionize your life and move into an entirely new realm of experience.
You are wrong if you think Joy emanates only or principally from human relationships. God has placed it all around us. It is in everything and anything we might experience. We just have to have the courage to turn against our habitual lifestyle and engage in unconventional living.
My point is that you do not need me or anyone else around to bring this new kind of light in your life. It is simply waiting out there for you to grasp it, and all you have to do is reach for it. The only person you are fighting is yourself and your stubbornness to engage in new circumstances.
This book was a milestone. McCandles’ adventures and Krakauer’s relation to them were fascinating and inspired me - I read it about twenty years ago - and I had been a Thoreau-o-phile before then. It was a toughly written book, too, which is its own literary style that, not only because of its subject matter and relationship to a condition of nature we’ve lost in the West, makes one feel life’s hardships more tangibly and with more of their weight than a lot of squashy literate, “literary” tracts allow (fiction and non), where it seems nothing is really at stake except perhaps the traditional “conflict followed by resolution” that anyone who went through a certain literary education has been trained to locate and find deficient if it is not present. In this vein, Cormac McCarthy said before he died that he can’t read fiction (I think he even included Proust) if it does not involve questions of life and death. Into the Wild had this quality, its writing and its subject.
On the issue of adventure vs. security, despite what I just said, I’ll be the guy here to ask the question of whether security has not gotten a bad rap in the American (U.S.) tradition, or any tradition (there are plenty of them that have scorned security), especially security one seeks when one is responsible for the welfare of others, e.g. parents. I am skeptical that all security and the seeking of enough of it in one’s life (for oneself or others) necessarily means one has precluded adventure or exposing oneself to risk, although there is plenty of deathly security, and there is a tendency in security not to upset the apple cart, and too much security of the wrong kind is definitely a form of degenerate stagnation.
Deathly security is also frequently associated with living in one place as opposed to being on the road, the assumption being that one must always be on the road to avoid deathly security. I question that too, although I see where it comes from, i.e. the idea that being always “in motion” is desirable. But it also can be a form of being completely lost.
I also don’t think the adventurers have given the “securitors” sufficient credit for providing the support system on which the adventures to some degree depend for their romantic enactments.
Nonetheless, I still admire McCandles and Krakauer and anyone who takes those kinds of risks and thus turns life into art.
Of all the styles of writing that speak to me the most, the explorers evoke real passion in me. There’s an shared understanding of life being a physical quest as well as a journey on other levels.