Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Red Brown's avatar

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.

Expand full comment
Julie Dee's avatar

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.

Expand full comment
20 more comments...

No posts