Sonic Youth

I'm reading the book Into The Wild by Jon Krakauer.  It's about this young guy who decides to escape the duplicity of 'modern life' for the 'sincerity' of self-subsistence in the wilds of Alaska. It was only ever meant to be an adventure and it's obvious that by the end, before he got ill, the young man was totally ready to embrace a return to civilisation.  In having explored to the extent he did, the wilder regions of the world, he also conquered  the barrens of his own internal landscape.  I don't want to spoil it for you but, yeah he doesn't make it Out of The Wild.  He dies after mistakenly eating a poisonous root.  I watched the film in Toronto's fancy schmancy Yorkville area on my first night out in the city.  I had just arrived not 4 weeks earlier, full of hope and drive.  Thinking back I was as naive about my future in Canada as the protagonist in the book had been about going where the wild things go and like him, I pretty much died trying.

But back to the book, and Jon Krakauer's writing.  It's awesome.  For example - here is how Krakauer explains the allure of rock climbing: 

"By and by your attention becomes so intensely focused that you no longer notice the raw knuckles, the cramping thighs, the strain of maintaining non-stop concentration.  A trancelike state settles over your efforts; the climb becomes a clear-eyed dream.  Hours slide by like minutes.  The accumulated clutter of day-to-day existence - the lapses of conscience, the unpaid bills, the bungled opportunities, the dust under the couch, the inescapable prison of your genes - all of it is temporarily forgotten, crowded from your thoughts by an overpowering clarity of purpose and the seriousness of the task at hand."

In amongst all of that eloquence, I realised with a huge sense of relief that I am, in fact, completely normal.  How liberating to know that all those things that clutter my mind are universal concerns.  They must be.

Anyway - back to the book.  If you haven't read it and you were once a nihilistic, impressionable, idealist who felt the world owed them a living, this book is like a return to forever. For that reason too, it can be quite a difficult read - as difficult as holding a mirror up to a scar.  The extent to which the read affects you will depend on how far you've travelled along the path of your internal expedition.