Antonio Spadaro
Antonio Spadaro is a missionary who has provided this paper for Billie and Walt.
Christopher Johnson McCandless, a brilliant young man from a wealthy
family, just after graduating with honors from Emory University
(Atlanta, Georgia), disappears and sets off on a journey on the
roads of America with the dream of reaching Alaska. It's the summer
of 1990. Chris is 22 years-old. He has everything, he is very
sensitive and extremely intelligent. However nothing fully satisfies
him, because , deep inside, he feels an urgency, an absolute
necessity that makes him refuse all comforts, tranquillity, even
material gifts. Leaving his city and his world behind, Chris wants
to prove himself in a new life, one in which he can be in direct
touch with experience, without filters or safe mediations.
And so he adopts a new name, Alex or, more exactly, Alexander
Supertramp. He donates all his savings, about $24.000, to a charity,
abandons his car with the few things he had taken along, burns the
banknotes he finds in his pocket and starts his fascinating,
melancholy and dangerous pilgrimage on the roads of North America.
His long itinerary through steppes, deserts and cities is crowded
with sensations, feelings, rancors, denial and ideals intensely
lived. This story inspired Jon Krakauer to write a book, published
in 1996, that became a classic of the travel literature (1). Actor
and director Sean Penn was fascinated by this reading. He directed a
movie, Into the Wild (2), inspired by this story and wonderfully
interpreted by Emile Hirsch. The movie was released in september
2007 (january 2008 in Italy).
An interior itinerary
In the two years before reaching the wild and extreme lands,
Chris/Alex lives a vast array of different experiences. Both the
book and the movie reveal his nature, hinging their narration on the
boy's letters and journal. Was he just a slacker, an unrealistic
idealist? Krakauer, a professional mountaineer and author of many
narrative journalism best sellers (3), poses the question from the
first introductory note. After reading the first accounts of this
story, the readers are already divided: some admired the boy for his
courage and his noble ideals; others, instead, regarded him as an
imprudent idiot, a lunatic, an arrogant and stupid narcissist. We
will try to tell the story of Chris McCandless. By ''story'' we mean
more than just his biography, its narrative transposition or movie
version. Here we want to think about his character, as revealed by
the representations of such a glowing existence, that generates many
questions and reflections.
On April 28 1992, Chris hitchhikes to Stampede Trail, an impervious
region of Alaska, close to Fairbanks. There, the driver who gave him
a lift takes a picture of him as he gets off the car; the picture
captures a big smile on his face; with this smile, he starts walking
on the snow covered trail. He carries a backpack with a few
necessary, but far less than sufficient, things in it and some of
his favorite books. The day before he had written to a friend: «It
might be a very long time before I return South. If this adventure
proves fatal and you don't ever hear from me again, I want you to
know you are a great man. I now walk into the wild» (page 95).
Throughout the journey Alex gets busy, looks for temporary jobs,
establishes a serious and active relationship with reality: «He
never quit in the middle of
something. If he started a job, he’d
finish it. It was almost like a moral thing for
him. He was what
you’d call extremely ethical» (page 31) Wayne Westerberg, one of
Alex's employers as well as a good friend of his, comments. Alex
wrote to him: «How’s it going? I hope that your situation has
improved since the time we
last spoke. I’ve been tramping around
Arizona for about a month now. This is a
good state! There is all
kinds of fantastic scenery and the climate is wonderful.
But apart
from sending greetings the main purpose of this card is to thank
you
once again for all your hospitality. It’s rare to find a man as
generous and good
natured as you are» (page 49).
On May 1, the fourth day of his walk, about thirty kilometers down
the trail from where he started, after crossing Taklanika River
without too much trouble, Alex finds an old bus in an isolated and
abandoned camp. In that shelter there was a berth, a stove and some
basic goods left there by others. The boy writes enthusiastically:
«And now after two rambling years, comes the final and greatest
adventure. The climactic battle to kill the false being within and
victoriously conclude the spiritual pilgrimage» (page 215) (4). In
comparing the experience of Chris with the experience of other
lovers of wild nature, Krakauer points out, and we agree with him,
that : «Unlike Muir and Thoreau, McCandless went into the wilderness
not primarily
to ponder nature or the world at large but, rather, to
explore the inner country
of his own soul.» (page 239). Here Chris
does not regard nature as an idyllic and longed for place, where to
get lost and wander, some sort of earthly paradise. He chooses wild
nature as a test, as a gym of the body and of the soul, to verify
himself and the motivations of his existence (5). From here Chris is
able to fully taste the wild beauty of nature.
This battle / interior pilgrimage lasts two months, lived in deep
contact with the «wild», without filters, without covers. The foods
provided by nature feed his body and his books (Lev Tolstoj, Boris
Pasternak, the adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, Walden
by Henry David Thoreau and, most of all, Jack London) feed his
spirit. In that May, Alex carves a passage from White Fang on a
piece of wood: «It was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of
eternity laughing at the futility of life and the effort of life. It
was the Wild, the savage, frozen-hearted Northland Wild» (page 19).
From the available traces we deduce that, after those few weeks, the
time to leave had arrived, the time to «patch jeans, shave, organize
pack», as he writes in his journal (page 222). When he realizes that
his test is over, when he feels that he does not have to prove
anything else to himself and that he longs for a life shared with
others, in the world, he gets ready to get back, at peace. On July
2, he highlights a passage on his copy of Tolstoj's ''Family
Happiness'': «He was right in saying that the only certain happiness
in life is to live for others [...]. I have lived through much, and
now I think I have found what is needed for
happiness [...]. And
then, on top of all that, you for a mate, and children, perhaps,
what
more can the heart of a man desire?» (page 222). The heart
opens up to the evidence that one can not be happy without others.
On July 3 he shoulders his backpack and starts walking back. After
walking for two days he realizes that the Teklanika, crossed without
difficulty three months before, is now big, swollen with rain and
melted snow. Moreover, it rains hard. He has no other option but to
walk back to the bus. In his journal he wrote: «Disaster.... Rained
in. River look impossible.
Lonely, scared» (page 223). It would have
been sufficient to walk a quarter-mile downstream to find a narrow
gorge where the Teklanika could be crossed easily. But Alex,
intransigent as he was, had refused to carry maps with him and so
couldn't know about the passage.
His family did not hear about him until August 1992, two years
after, when his body was found in the old bus, north of Mt.
McKinley. His last message , written in block letters on a page torn
from a novel by Gogol, read: «S.O.S. I need your help. I am injured,
near death, and to weak to hike out here. I am alone, this is no
joke. In the name of God, please remain to save me. I am out
collecting berries close by and shall return this evening. Thank
you, Chris McCandless» (page 24). Chris dies from starvation and
illness, most likely because he mistakenly ate some poisonous seeds.
But his last message to the world, when he was already aware that he
would not survive, is: «I have had a happy life and thank the Lord.
Goodbye and may God bless all!». A little while before he had
written in his journal, we imagine with the wonder of a child:
«Beautiful blueberries».
The intensity of friendships
In his movie Sean Penn communicates very well the emotional
intensity of the relationships that Alex establishes. These are not
functional, opportunistic and selfish relationships. Alex believes
in friendship and impresses all the people he meets, even if he
spends just a week or two with them. Wayne is one of them. Director
Sean Penn and writer Jon Krakauer also present to us, among others,
Roland Franz (6), an eighty year-old man who had spent most of his
adult life in the army stationed in Shangai and Okinawa. On New
Year’s Eve 1957, while he was
overseas, his wife and only child were
killed by a drunk driver in an automobile
accident. Roland goes from
hard drinking to pulling himself together and starts living a hum
drum life, quiet and balanced. When Franz meets Alex, his
long-dormant paternal impulses are kindled anew. This meeting
awakens in Franz a sense of still belonging to life, thanks to the
continuous challenges posed by the boy, who can not accept to regard
an existence as finished, not even implicitly and because of old
age. Here is the letter by Alex that Roland receives from Carthage,
South Dakota, after their parting: «Ron, I really enjoy all the help
you have given me and the times that we
spent together. I hope that
you will not be too depressed by our parting […] I’d like to repeat
the advice 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.» (page 79).
Alex in not sure that his words will sort the desired effect and
thus continues: «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.» (page 80). The letter is
sensitive and vibrating. Alex shares with Ron his unsatisfied desire
to find the truth about life, a truth able to overcome the
existential numbness generated by fear or pain. It's as if Alex,
with his youth, wanted to share, not impose, his unrest with someone
who, up until then, had been looking for rest only. His appeal,
almost a provocation, sorted its desired effects. We know, in fact,
that old Ron placed his stuff in storage, bought a Caravan, moved
out of his apartment and set up camp on the bajada, more or less in
the same area where his young friend had camped before their
meeting.
So Alex enters into the life of people as a goad, bringing about new
urges, destroying apparently solid, but in reality unstable,
equilibria. It's some sort of angelical presence, the effects of
which are consolation, trust and recovery of latent energies. With
such opening to life and to the experience of reality, Alex opens
his heart to novelty, to the search of deep authenticity, in front
of which one can not remain indifferent. So, for example, he touches
the life, marked by crises and regrets, of a hippy couple, who
travel around in their van, bringing warmth and helping them face
unsolved parts of their lives. And so he also respects a sixteen
year old girl, a folk musician deeply in love with him, not just by
refusing sexual intimacy with her but also by positively valuing
what she feels for him. Chris takes full responsibility of an
authentic human relationship.
However Alex, although he has a great ability to make friends, is
also solitary in his own way. His relationships are true and
involving. But he also fears too much intimacy, as it might threaten
his desire for authenticity and not be right for him at this time of
his existence. His need for an essential, simple and pure life,
pushed him to ponder and wish a kind of solitude of the heart, very
unusual at his age. It is not asceticism but a solitude rich of
echoes, from where, if needed, he always makes himself available.
Krakauer notes: «Chastity and moral purity were qualities McCandless
mulled over long and
often. Indeed, one of the books found in the
bus with his remains was a
collection of stories that included
Tolstoy’s “The Kreutzer Sonata,” in which
the
nobleman-turned-ascetic denounces “the demands of the flesh.”
Several such
passages are starred and highlighted in the dog-eared
text, the margins filled
with cryptic notes printed in McCandless’s
distinctive hand. And in the chapter
on “Higher Laws” in Thoreau’s
Walden , a copy of which was also discovered in
the bus, McCandless
circled “Chastity is the flowering of man; and what are
called
Genius, Heroism, Holiness, and the like, are but various fruits
which
succeed it”» (page 92).
One could perhaps say that he regarded the others, the friends, as
good companions with whom to rest on his long and unforeseeable
journey, that, however, had to remain solitary. He writes in his
letter to Ron: «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» (page 80). Such a sentence is ambiguous.
It may testify solipsism, a desire for self-sufficiency and a will
to not get involved in relationships. But here Alex writes in order
to stimulate Ron to get busy, to stop living in the past. And so, it
would be wrong to regard this sentence as the negation that
relationships are unavoidable in order to reach the fullness of
life. We know in fact that at the end of the «ascetic» and solitary
journey, his conclusions were very different.
The last book he read was Doctor Zivago by Pasternak. Among the
highlighted passages, we read: «Now, you can’t advance in this
direction without a certain faith.
You can’t make such discoveries
without spiritual equipment. And the basic
elements of this
equipment are in the Gospels. What are they? To begin with,
love of
one’s neighbor, which is the supreme form of vital energy. Once it
fills
the heart of man it has to overflow and spend itself. And then the
two basic
ideals of modern man—without them he is unthinkable—the
idea of free
personality and the idea of life as sacrifice» (page
245). And next to Pasternak's words «unshared happiness is not
happiness» he noted: «happiness only real when shared» (page 245).
This is Chris' last word on human relationships. The primordial echo
of the words in Genesis resounds here: «It is not good that the man
should be alone».
We can immerse in this sentence the great unsolved injustice of his
life: the relationship with his parents, forever marked by his
flight without appeal and return. But Chris would have returned and,
we are sure, there wouldn't have been such a dramatic end. His
flight was necessarily meant to finish with his return, but
circumstances made this return impossible. Chris felt the flight as
a necessity in order to establish a new authentic relationship with
the world and with his parents as well. In fact, he did not want to
cut out everything around him but he wanted to establish new
relationships with reality. He assured all the friends he made along
the way of this intention of his.
Beauty is truth
Why did Chris McCandless leave his world, his father's house? What
pushed and motivated him so strongly? Anyone can give his
interpretation and none, perhaps, would be enough to explain the
short life of this boy. Certainly, his story is not an updated
version of the «prodigal son». All the contrary, it's the story of a
son who does not want to receive bequests (7).
Both the book and the movie Into the wild are interrogative
narrations about the existence of Chris and both aim at finding an
answer. In a dialogue with Sean Penn, Jon Krakauer confesses: «After
all it is not a mystery to me why this 23-year-old boy got this far.
But my and your job consist of making people understand this reason»
(8). The writer actually achieves this goal by comparing Chris' life
to his own, overlapping the experiences. Probably, part of the
success of the movie by Sean Penn stems from the fact that the story
of Chris says something about the story of every man, in his desire
of an authentic life. Krakauer writes: «It would be easy to
stereotype Christopher McCandless as another boy who
felt too much,
a loopy young man who read too many books and lacked even a
modicum
of common sense. But the stereotype isn’t a good fit. McCandless
wasn’t
some feckless slacker, adrift and confused, racked by existential
despair.
To the contrary: His life hummed with meaning and purpose.
But the meaning he
wrested from existence lay beyond the comfortable
path: McCandless distrusted
the value of things that came easily. He
demanded much of himself—more, in the
end, than he could deliver»
(page 240).
The extreme but pure and true act is generated by exuberance. Chris
had highlighted a passage from Tolstoy: «I wanted movement and not a
calm course of existence. I wanted excitement and danger and the
chance to sacrifice myself for my love. I felt in myself a
superabundance of energy which found no outlet in our quiet life»
(page 26). Chris' flight is not a superficial flight from reality:
it is a run way too fast into reality, in search of something that
is really worth living for. Not wild life for itself. In fact Chris
wants to go back to the world. If anything, he is looking for the
deep meanings with which to face existence in authenticity of
spirit.
So, what is Chris looking for? From what is he attracted? What does
he find? In this sense, his last two years are rich of traces. He
writes to his friend Wayne from Arizona «The freedom and simple
beauty of it is just too good to pass up» (page 50). In Nevada he
notes: «It is the experiences, the memories, the great triumphant
joy
of living to the fullest extent in which real meaning is found.
God it’s great to
be alive! Thank you. Thank you.» (page 54). He
found this anxiety in his books and he projected it into some
expressions: «Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me
truth. I sat at a table
where were rich food and wine in abundance,
an obsequious attendance,
but sincerity and truth were not; and I
went away hungry from the
inhospitable board. The hospitality was as
cold as the ices.» (page 155). Chris highlights this passage by
Thoreau and on the top of the page he writes in block letters
«truth».
Throughout his search, Chris does not measure risk and his adventure
borders with irresponsibility as he does not take into account
dangers and not even the possibility of death. It would have been
enough to bring a map with him and he would have saved himself. In
Chris' life, therefore, one should look not for the equilibrium of
mature choices but for the movement of the soul, the impulse, the
mulish search for a direction. Truth, freedom, beauty: this seems to
be the ideal of the boy. Chris, of course, is too young not to be
centered too enthusiastically on himself in his search; he is too
young not to attach too much significance to his Alaska, as if it
was an idol; he is too young not to fall into the traps of
romanticism and idealism. However his search, because of these very
limits, is a truly human search. And let us consider that his choice
is not an abrupt conversion to frugality. It is, on the contrary,
the result of a long process that had taken him, before graduating,
to give up gifts, to spend money very cautiously, to have no phone,
to go against the current.
What really matters is that the romantic-idealistic tensions were
not the main motivations that pushed him to leave and, most of all,
that sustained him on the journey. If it had been like that, he
wouldn't have resisted the first difficulties. The story of the boy
is characterized by a continuos irruption of the concreteness of
reality into his life, in the form of work, friendships, hardship,
extenuating fasting. But what delivers Chris from pure idealism is,
most of all, his ability to be deeply compassionate. His itinerary
is not characterized by resentment, adversity and anger towards a
world that does not correspond to his «ideas», but by the emotion
for a world that looks wonderful.
In showing this emotional passion for the world around him, the
movie by Sean Penn is even more effective than the book by Krakauer.
Moreover, the movie sheds more light on a delicate religious
dimension. We think about Chris' moved and grateful enthusiasm when,
in the movie, he gives praise to a beautiful red apple: «You are
really good. I mean, you're like, a hundred thousand times better
than like any apple I've ever had. I'm not Superman, I'm Supertramp
and you're super apple. You're so tasty, you're so organic, so
natural. You are the apple (9) of my eye, ha!». Even blueberries are
beautiful for him, just a few days before his death. It is precisely
the deep and intense emotion to makes us understand that his Alaska
is not a geographical region only, it is a region of the soul; the
«place» that each and every man is looking for.
After all, Chris did not escape, he was looking for something that
he already felt within him, as an urgency that couldn't be
suppressed. In this itinerary, and especially in the movie by Sean
Penn, the themes of the need for redemption, of spirituality, of
forgiveness emerge clearly. For instance, when old Ron, burdened by
pain, on top of a hill suddenly sunlit, tells Chris: «When you
forgive, you love; and when you love, God's light shines on you».
And Chris, in the movie, receives another message in this sense by
Leonard Knight, the artist who, in Mojave desert (California),
literally painted a whole hill, Salvation Mountain with works of art
that give praise to God (10): «This is a love story that is
staggering to everybody in the whole world. That God really loves us
a lot.»
The story of Christopher McCandless can not be paralleled to that of
wandering slackers or ingenuous and light-hearted rebels. Instead,
there are some traits, even if somewhat blurred, of the paradigm of
the homo viator, a pilgrim looking for a grace that he already feels
active within him and that makes him restless. Jon Krakauer and Sean
Penn, in different ways and with different tools, try to account for
this existence. Penn, in particular, with a wonderful photography,
gives a cosmic dimension to this personal story, opening its borders
to entire nature.
The story of Chris reminds the pages of Leopardi's Zibaldone (August
1 1820): «Even if what is beautiful and alive is extinguished in the
world, our inclination towards it is not. If we are prevented from
attaining, we are not prevented from desiring. The ardor that pushes
the young to earn a living and scorn nullity and monotony is not
extinguished.» For a generation that risks indifference and
emotional anesthesia, almost robbed of the possibility of a
rebellion, Into the Wild represents an energetic shake, an appeal to
the truth of beauty. So the viewer is left confronting himself with
Chris' implicit question: What is it that makes a human life really
worth living? What is it that makes man, after all, truly happy?
NOTES
1 J. Krakauer, Nelle terre estreme, Milano, Corbaccio, 2008.
2 http://www.intothewild.com/
3 Other well know works by the same author are: Aria sottile,
Milano, Corbaccio, 1998; Il silenzio del vento, Milano, Corbaccio,
1999; In nome del cielo. Una storia di fede violenta, Milano,
Corbaccio, 2003.
4 We correct the italian translation of Krakauer's book, that
translates climactic with «climatic» and not «progressive». See also
page 149.
5 We remind that American literature lives, since its origins, of a
''border sensitivity''. The themes of frontier, grassland, the
dimension of wild and unknown, the journey intended as exploration,
as adventure, as an exposition to an indefinite uncovering of the
landscapes. See, e.g., Spadaro, «La frontiera interiore. Attesa,
limite, aldilà nella poesia americana», in La Rivista del Clero
Italiano 86 (2005) 292-305.
6 This is not his real name as the person wanted to remain anonymous
but the story is real.
7 James Martin, America's editor, recognized in the way Chris is
portrayed in the movie the iconographic model of Saint Francis of
Assisi in Giotto's frescos.
http://www.americamagazine.org/content/article.cfm?article_id=10305
8 «Wild hearts. Dialogue between Sean Penn and Jon Krakauer»,
Rolling Stone, february 2008, 58.
9 Apple: in English it is the same for pupil.
10 http://www.salvationmountain.us/
11 See the review by V. Fantuzzi in Civ. Catt. 2008 I 423 s. The
movie was inspired by the homonymous novel by Blake Nelson: Paranoid
Park, Milano, Rizzoli, 2007.
12 See Skaters, Milano, Isbn, 2005.