Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.

This is how D.H.Lawrence's novel 'Lady Chatterley's Lover' begins, I've only just started it.

Lyrical as always, his writing.

Loved this quote so thought I would post.

Into the Wild

Photo by Gauravanomics at Flickr

I just saw 'Into the Wild' a few days back. Its based on a true story told by Jon Krakauer in his book 'Into the Wild'.

After graduating as an honours student, Christopher McCandless (portrayed brilliantly by Emile Hirsch in the movie), gives his trust fund to charity, abandons all his possessions and embarks upon a self-discovering journey under the pseudonym of 'Alexander Supertramp'. Eventually to reach his final destination, the Alaskan wilderness. In search of freedom from the oppression of society. And its materialistic obsessions. He sheds all the extraneous needs this civilization inflicts. And thus seeks to find himself by returning to that elemental human existence in the vicinity of nature.

But dies in the attempt, of starvation apparently.

Native Alaskans shake their heads and think of him as, as Jon Krakauer puts it, "half-cocked greenhorn who went into the bush expecting to find answers to all his problems and instead found nothing but mosquitoes and a lonely death". And some think that Chriss McCandless is needlesslessly being romanticised by his protagonists Sean Penn (who wrote the script and directed the movie) and Jon Krakauer.

Despite that this is a moving tale.

In his own words:

Two years he walks the earth. No phone, no pool, no pets, no cigarettes. Ultimate freedom. An extremist. An aesthetic voyager whose home is the road. Escaped from Atlanta. Thou shalt not return, 'cause "the West is the best." 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. Ten days and nights of freight trains and hitchhiking bring him to the Great White North. No longer to be poisoned by civilization he flees, and walks alone upon the land to become lost in the wild.

Alexander Supertramp
May 1992

------------------------

Here is the original article Jon Krakauer wrote about the guy. It is worth reading.

And this is another article I found: The Cult of Chris McCandless.