Serenity

One of my younger friends had read the book Into the Wild and he seemed to like this book very much, so I went to the library and borrow it. There was a story about why this book was published. At first, there was small news about an anonymous young man who died in Alaska, and then his friends identified who he is. The young man, Christopher McCandless, is well-educated, smart and strong in sports. Nobody knows why he went to the wildness in Alaska and finally died there. Therefore, Jon Krakauer, the editor of Outside Magazine, wrote a report on this. Many readers wrote mails to Jon after they read this report. Some of them gave positive comments such as brave man to the young man, while some of them gave negative ones such as reckless and arrogant boy. On the other hand, some of the young man’s friends shared what they knew about Christopher and they wanted to know why Christopher died there because they thought that Christopher was strong enough to live everywhere and he definitely didn’t go to their suicide. This brought Jon an idea to dig out what happened to Christopher.

Jon desired to understand Christopher because Jon had a similar experience as Christopher. He went to climb a notorious mountain named Devil’s Thumb in Alaska when he was young. To find out what happened to Christopher, Jon traced where Christopher had visited and interviewed the family and friends of him. Combined Christopher’s notes, Jon’s personal experience and some related and famous people who have been wildness in history, Jon tried to write this book to explain what Christopher thought and why he did these things; however, the clues were too less to build a whole view of Christopher, so what we read was inferences of the author.

Christopher seemed to not like the civilization and didn’t want to live with folks. In contrast, he liked the nature and lived alone, and he did do many trials to close the nature and succeeded to live peacefully with it. It was a pity that he made some mistake in his final trip. What I learned is that there are many possibilities in life. Before reading this book, I only knew to be a scholar or an engineer in the future; however, we could live with more freedom as long as we drop some desires in physics. I knew that I can’t live as Christopher since I like convenient functions of cities and I don’t like trouble, so I may never try to go to the wildness. Also, I think I don’t need to go there to find out the deep feeling of mine. At least, I don’t need currently. By the way, a new movie based this story will show up on Sep. 21, 2007. When there is a DVD in Taiwan, I’ll take some time to watch it.