I’m going to paraphrase Thoreau here… rather than love, than money, than faith, than fame, than fairness… give me truth. Why do we travel? Why do we go to new places, immerse ourselves into adventures and talk to new people? Why do we feel the need to get out of our comfort zones, explore new realities and break-down our preconceived ideas? I’m obviously not talking about taking vacations. I am referring to travel: those kinds of trips when it’s not about the destination, as much as it is about the journey in itself. The movie Into The Wild (based on the book by the same title) explores the answers to the questions above. Beautifully directed by Sean Penn and featuring a compelling Emile Hirsch, this isn’t just a movie, it’s also a poem about life. Based on his real story, it’s a tribute to Christopher McCandless’ adventurous spirit and his curiosity for discovery beyond his comfortable world. And discovery of what, one might wonder? Of new places, landscapes, people?

Yes, but most of all, discovery of the truth that can be found all around us. The core of mans’ spirit comes from new experiences. I might not feel identified with Christopher (aka Alexandre Supertramp) all along his quest for truth during his journey. backpack dpuBut there is something that I can definitely relate to and it is his preference for experiences rather than for material things. ppb backpack strapsMaybe because he had always lived in a family of abundance, it was easier for him to feel a certain disdain for things. 2be backpackHe knew all those things were tying him down up to a certain extent and, to experience life to its fullest, he’d have to let go and live a more raw existence – at least for a while.fjallraven 13l backpack

He took things even further, letting go of the people that knew him too. I understand that it is that detachment from the daily routine that enables you to look at the bigger picture in life. When you are too caught up in your problems and your own little world, even small issues can seem like a big thing. backpack dvd rewriter driverWhen you quit it all, your horizons are bound to expand like never before. tmt backpack by t-techIf you travel while maintaining a regular job “back home” I don’t think you’d be able to look at things the same way you would when you let go of everything, at least materially. air backpack 2core largeBut letting go of people, that does seem more extreme – crucial for Christopher though. When you want something in life, you just gotta reach out and grab it.

If you like to travel, near or far, question your own existence and position in the world, dig until you find a deeper meaning to the things you do and see all around, Into The Wild is going to speak to you. Let the images take you on a trip, let the quotes inspire you and let your body flow to the moving soundtrack by Eddie Vedder. Enjoy it, because they don’t make movies like this one everyday. And above all, no matter how much you need to let go to find the truth, keep in mind the ultimate message that the movie delivers at the end: Happiness [is] only real when shared. All quotes by Christopher McCandless. Watch Into The Wild Subscribe to the Backpack ME Newsletter Tips, fun stuff, and TONS of inspiration! Straight to your inbox!I usually don’t bother with bestsellers (even when they’re more than ten years old), but I’m now listening to Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild, about the short and strange life of Christopher J. McCandless, whose claim to fame was being found dead in Alaska after tramping around the American West for a few years.

The second most prominent character in Into the Wild is the author of the book, John Krakauer himself. I don’t count this a bad thing that the author injects himself into the narrative. On the contrary, I think it makes for an honest account to come clean about one’s interest in one’s subject matter. Krakauer wrote a passionate book because he obviously felt an immediate affinity for Chris McCandless. It is sympathy based on shared experience that makes it possible for a biographer to employ what Collingwood called the a priori imagination to enter into the life of his subject. Just before Into the Wild I listened to Dave Cullen’s well-reviewed Columbine, about the Columbine school massacre of 20 April 1999, which revealed all-too-clearly the author’s inability to inhabit the skin of his subjects. The a priori imagination has its limits: it is facilitated by sympathy and shared experience; it is frustrated by differences in temperament and inclination. Dave Cullen’s book is passionate in its own way, but you can feel Cullen’s struggle to try to get into the heads of the killers, and the careful reader will spot the points where, despite his efforts, he manifestly fails to do so.

I can easily imagine someone being indignant and scandalized that I mention Chris McCandless and the Columbine killers in the same context, but it’s not really that much of a stretch. It is obvious from the portraits of them that all were angry young men. Sure, McCandless is smiling in in last photograph when he knows that he is going to die, and Krakauer writes that, “He is smiling in the picture, and there is no mistaking the look in his eyes: Chris McCandless was at peace, serene as a monk gone to God.” He found peace, but he had to punish his family with his absence and silence in order to find that peace. This is somewhat less vindictive than mass murder, and certainly morally preferable, but it is a difference in degree, and not a difference in kind. The idealistic temperament is intrinsically punitive. All these angry young men were precociously intelligent, and really didn’t know how to make a place for themselves within the bureaucratized and institutionalized world of technological civilization.

McCandless wasn’t just another vagabond, he was a vagabond as a matter of principle. Among the pleasures of Krakauer’s book are the many quotes from books that Chris McCandless had taken with him to Alaska in his backpack, passages underlined by McCandless in Tolstoy and Emerson and others. People took McCandless for a tramp at first sight, but it is obvious from the book that when he opened up it must have been a shock to discover that he was educated and articulate and had chosen his unconventional life as a matter of intellectual conviction, which is a rare thing. But erudition, intelligence, and an ability to articulate one’s insights into life, admirable though they are, are not enough. One can be well read in the classics, and have great insight into the way the world works, and still get things wrong. Angry young men often mellow with age, but when they die as angry young men and leave only the actions and the opinions of angry young men, they never give themselves the chance to mellow, and they stand as symbols to angry young men ever after.

The written word never mellows: Litera scripta manet (as it says on the Reed College library book plate). In many of the incidents described by Krakauer, as well as the journals and photographs left by McCandless, there is something theatrical, something smacking of superfluous and self-conscious symbolism, like making a fire with one’s remaining currency. McCandless, like Wittgenstein, gave away his money and intentionally impoverished himself. It is a perennial impulse that often converges on a perennial gesture. The idea of it is noble, but few have the nobility to pull it off with grace and honor. This is insufficiently appreciated: one can glimpse a noble ideal, and make a gesture in that direction, perhaps even a profound gesture. But life is more than gestures. After the gesture, one must go on living or make of the gesture also a farewell to life. There was a pervasive idea in the pre-modern period that truth is to be found at the fons et origo of the world. The world as it is, the world as we find it, was thought to be corrupt, decadent, and nearing its end.

Truth was not to be found in such a world. Truth was to be found by going back into the past, and especially back to the primordial origins of the world. It was believed the the Golden Age of man was long past, and as the clock of history ran down matters only became worse, and the further distant we grew from our origins, the further we grew apart from truth. One of the more absurd consequences of this idea was the fetish for “ancient wisdom.” Our medieval forebears did not believe that knowledge increased as civilization progressed, because they did not believe that civilization progressed. Civilization, for the medieval mind, was in permanent and terminal decline until the end of days. To find wisdom, knowledge, and truth, then, one did not look to the latest book, but to the oldest book. To feed this desire for ancient wisdom, ancient wisdom was created from whole cloth. Books were written and credited to the authorship of ancient sages like Pythagoras or Hermes Trismegistus.

Puerile and mediocre nuggets of “wisdom” were passed off to credulous seekers who thought that what they were reading was profound because it was old, though it was in fact neither. All of these ideas are familiar sentiments today — too familiar, frighteningly familiar. Despite our modernity, there are regions of the mind that are still thoroughly medieval. The modern version of the idea that truth is to be found in the distant past, dimmed from our sight, inaccessible, and therefore all too easily romanticized, is the idea that truth, wisdom, and knowledge are to be found in a primordial experience. The primordial experience as we imagine it today is the experience of nature, and especially nature in the form of the untrammeled wilderness. Many seekers of the modern world, from the “back to the land” movement of the 1960s counter-culture to contemporaries who see themselves following in the footsteps of John Muir and Henry David Thoreau, imagine that only by abandoning civilization and going into the wild can one be truly alive and come face to face with the truth of the human condition.