The Getting of Wisdom--- Happiness: Only True When Shared

"Two years he walks the earth.
No phone, no pool, no pets, no cigarettes.

Ultimate Freedom.

An extremist. An aesthetic voyager whose home is the road.
Escaped from Atlanta.
Thou shalt not return, 'cause "the West is the best."
And now after two rambling years comes the final and greatest adventure.
The climactic battle to kill the false being within and victoriously conclude the spiritual pilgrimage.
Ten days and nights of freight trains and hitchhiking bring him to the Great White North.
No longer to be poisoned by civilization, he flees, and walks alone upon the land to become...

Lost In The Wild. "

-Christopher McCandless, a.k.a. 'Alexander Supertramp', May 1992


An Abridged Backstory:

After graduating from university in 1990, Chris decided to make an abrupt, absolute, clean break from society for some period of time, and live in solitude in the wild. He dreamed of Alaska. He looked upon the "empty materialism" of America with the most intense contempt, and could no longer be a part of it. He needed out so badly that he didn't take any time to learn how to survive in the middle of nowhere, all alone with hardly any supplies. He didn't want to take any kind of provisions that would make it too easy. Anything that would remove the purity of the adventure. The idea was that any indication of the type of civilized society that he was so desperate to leave behind would taint everything he wanted to stand for. He wanted to just be out there, away from all the people he believed were in denile of how shallow and meaningless the world was becoming. He just wanted to "live off the land, far away from civilization, and keep a journal describing his physical and spiritual progress as he faced the forces of nature".

He died of starvation in Alaska, in August 1992.

Just as his body was starved of food, his soul had been starved for the idealistic world that could never be real. If he hadn't become lost and trapt in the wilderness, I wonder what would have happened to him on his return to society. Theoretically, even having successfully lived modestly and humbly in the wild, and then returned... I don't know if he would have been able to last long. His soul was dying in society, his body dying in the wild. And a person needs both soul and body to truly live.

Here's the question I've been asking myself, struggling with, on what McCandless did: Was it inspirational or irrational? Was it brave or was it cowardly? Heroic or reckless? Arrogant and irresponsible? Or was it simply tragic?

The closest I've gotten to an answer: ...... All of the above?