Leaving it all behind

Several years ago, I came across the story of Chris McCandless, a young man who, after graduating from Emory University in 1990, gave away all his savings, most of his possessions, and set off to wander across the country. As chronicled in Jon Krakauer's book Into the Wild and the 2007 Sean Penn movie of the same name, McCandless came from a wealthy family, but clashed frequently with his father and felt generally out of step with American capitalist, consumer culture. As a result, he left it all behind, hitchhiking across the country, pursuing his own direction, eventually ending up in Alaska, living alone in an abandoned bus in a remote area. Unfortunately, the story has a sad ending as McCandless died at the age of 24, only about four months after arriving in Alaska. Though the exact cause of McCandless' death is still debated, it was most likely either starvation or something in his meager diet.

When I first heard the story, it was as if I had heard it before, though with different details and from different times and places. In fact, at the same time when I read Into the Wild and saw the movie, I was teaching a course on Medieval and Renaissance Europe. We had just read about Francis of Assisi, who similarly grew up in a wealthy family, but defied his father by renouncing worldly things for a spiritual life of poverty. (That renunciation scene is dramatized below by the artist Giotto di Bondone, with Francis as the figure looking heavenward.)

Further in the past and across the world in India, the mythic life story of Siddhartha Gautama, who would eventually become the Buddha, is also eerily similar. According to the myth, Siddhartha grew up in the lap of luxury, prince to a king who wanted him to become a world-ruling conqueror. Despite his father's best efforts, though, Siddhartha was too determined to find the solutions to sickness, pain, and death, and renounced his royal heritage to become a wandering ascetic. (Shown below is an artist's interpretation of Siddhartha sneaking out of the palace.)

There are obviously common themes here, though some may cry foul (as certain critics of comparative method often do) that those similarities are only there because I chose three similar examples. Point conceded. Still, the fact remains that these stories are eerily similar, and they come to us from India of ~500 BCE, Italy of 1200 CE, and the United States of the 1990s. Very different times and very different places still produced circumstances that led individuals to rail against the civilizations of their day, choosing to "drop out" rather than go along. All three rejected the conspicuous wealth around them, choosing to own no things as a way to avoid being owned by things. It's also interesting that all three had fraught, contentious relationships with their fathers. In the cases of the Buddha and Francis, where we are dealing with "hagiography" (a narrative form for relating the lives of saints) one wonders if the generational tension was a literary mechanism for communicating the revolutionary nature of their thought. For McCandless, though, according to both Krakauer's work and Chris' sister Carine's book, the tension with his father was all too real.

In the end, I find myself focusing on two issues. First, these three people's stories boil down to the question of radical self-determination. Who am I? What will I be? If the answers to those questions puts me at odds with family and society at large, do I have the strength to go against those forces and be who I am and what I want to be no matter the outside pressure?

Second, though I find each of these stories compelling and I have my own gripes with the cultural values around me, renouncing and living a wandering life is not so much in the cards for me. I love my family too much. Perhaps there's a way, paradoxically, to "renounce in place," to leave it all behind without going anywhere?

One thing's for sure: McCandless' story in particular seems to have struck a nerve: year after year hundreds of people take pilgrimages to the bus where he briefly lived, and died, having left it all behind. (McCandless's famous -- and haunting -- self portrait at the bus is shown below.)

Next time, in honor of the release of Wonder Woman, I rank my favorite superhero movies of all time. Until then, take care.