"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."
Chris McCandless aka Alexander Supertramp
With the coming September 2012 release of the film On the Road, based on Jack Kerouac's beat novel, I've been thinking about films and stories that focus on a journey, ending (more than often) in tragedy...
One of my favourite books in recent years is Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Very unconventional in style, but it becomes clear after a few pages that this is just a continuous flow of concious thought. The harrowing journey taken on by a man and his boy is deeply disturbing, touching and heartbreaking. The movie is a brilliant interpretation of the book with Viggo Mortenson taking the role of the father and Kodi Smit-McPhee playing the frightened boy. Both mediums show a very dark exploration of the human psyche and they delve into the very common theme of human extinction and our own mortality.
Continuing on the theme of journeys, a true story that has really affected me in the last few years, is the inspirational yet tragic life of Christopher McCandless. Having been recommended to watch Sean Penn's film Into the Wild by one of my friends, I was quite unprepared for how Chris' story was going to touch and haunt me for a very long time...
After graduating, Chris travelled all over the States and Mexico, having given away his life savings to Oxfam, he lived by working as he went along all in order to go to Alaska and live in the wild. Sadly for Chris, something went wrong because he roughly lasted 119 days before succombing to starvation. There are many interpretations as to why Chris felt he had to experience this extreme self-suffiency - he was an educated and intelligent young man who loved and was influenced by the writings of Henry David Thoreau, Leo Tolstoy, Jack London, William Steger, W.H. Davies and Jack Kerouac - and I believe it was to gain an understanding of true isolation and what can be achieved mentally and creatively by this kind of lone survival. Sometimes I think he was so young and niave... and if he had just let one person know where he was.... but, in the end his tragic story has influenced many people to gain a better understanding and respect for going back to our beginnings and not being a slave to money and society.
Further reading I would recommend:
And the Hippos were Boiled in their Tanks by Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs
Junky by William S. Burroughs
No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy
Call of the Wild by Jack London
Music I would recommend:
Into the Wild Soundtrack by Eddie Vedder
Internet Sites I would recommend:
http://www.christophermccandless.info/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=2480
http://www.backtothewildbook.org/
