According to a letter he wrote to Ron Franz, Chris
McCandless believed that true happiness comes from experiencing new things. He says
that
...there
is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new
and different sun. If you want to get more out of life, Ron, you must lose your
inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life that will
at first appear to you to be
crazy.
Chris believed that he
had to abandon the constraints of society and civilization in order to truly experience
the beauty of life.
Chris McCandless also romanticized
survival in the wilderness. He felt that shedding his reliance on money and material
possessions would in some way bring him closer to nature and a sense of purity and
freedom that were impossible while following the expectation of the world. This
sensibility (or lack of sense) was fed by McCandless's love of a Tolstoyan way of
thinking. He internalized the writings of Tolstoy, Thoreau, and
others.
McCandless simply could not accept the world he
lived in. He felt he had been mistreated by those he loved, whether justly or not, and
could not understand what he perceived to be cruelty. He also could not fathom human
desire for "things" when there was a lack of motivation to attain what he believed truly
mattered: purity, beauty, joy, etc.
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