Domaine Étranger

I just finished re-reading one of my favorite books of all times. My roommate has a copy of Into the Wild by John Krakauer in French, so I borrowed it and read most of it while I was in Istanbul. This was probably the fifth or sixth time I've read it. I have definitely read it more times than any other book, and it was really interesting for me this time to see how the meaning of the story had changed for me. I haven't seen the movie yet, so I hadn't re-visited the story since about my Freshman year of high school.

When I first read it in fourth or fifth grade, it was all about the adventure. The idea of dropping out of modern society and living alone in the Alaskan wilderness on my own terms really appealed to me. I sort of selectively ignored the fact that Chris McCandless had cut all ties with a loving and caring family. His parents, however imperfect, clearly wanted nothing for him but success and happiness and worked hard to provide him with every opportunity to attain those goals. As a ten year-old boy, the fact that the protagonist died at the end probably hardly even registered with me. My own mortality was so distant and alien to me that I just fantasized about doing the same thing myself, there was no question in my mind about how difficult it would be or whether I could survive something like that.

Re-reading the book this time, thousands of miles from my family and my home, often surrounded by people I didn't know, whose language I didn't speak, all I could think about was how despicable it was for McCandless to put his family through something like that. My thirst for adventure was largely satiated by what I was doing every day so the fantasies and day-dreams that the book originally inspired were largely absent from my mind this time (though it did make me miss the North American wilderness at times). Instead I found myself thinking about how long it had been since I had seen so many of the people I love and that I would hate to die so far from home. I assumed it would be worth reading the book in French for the vocabulary and the grammar etc. but I hadn't guessed that my perspective had changed so much that I would draw such different meaning from a book I had read so many times before.