Into The Wilder Place

I have been focusing on Chris McCandless and his life as told in the book Into The Wild and the film Into The Wild, and then everything else produced about it.

More and more people journey to Alaska and visit his bus, like pilgrims visiting the tomb of a famous marabout or to visit San Diego at Compostela. And it is this connexion between people alive and people gone that has fascinated me.
First, this connexion mirrors the aboriginal connection between land, the open road, the wide open spaces, and Chris McCandless: it is a subtle attraction that is strong, yet is almost invisible to those of us standing nearby.
Second, the connexion between McCandless and people of the present is an equally strong yet invisible - and for many, very hard to understand or feel sympathy for - attraction that is a metaphor of the present for gods and heroes of history... it reruns the play of Power in the world, and how long its conversation with us - usually without the aid of words or language - takes...

... for the things of the world and universe which do not have language, yet which converse with us seem to speak in a language with a wave length so long and slow and deep that it requires 30 years on the average to get through the basic hellos, introduction all around, and howdy-dos.

I can observe the beginning of a spiritual connexion, and observe how one death seems to uncannily free other people who feel the need of the particular spirit clarity found at the end of their pilgrimage.

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