the cards we are dealt

We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand.
-- Randy Pausch

I read the rest of the book (Into the Wild) while I traveled back home, and it reminded me of the fact that many patients who came to visit the psychiatry department had divorced parents and other family issues.  McCandless doesn't seem to have suffered any mental illness, and what brought him to Alaska was his intense character and adventurous spirit combined with his love of nature, but what pushed him to the extreme -- cutting off all contacts with his family for two years, and ultimately all human contact for his "great Alaskan odyssey" -- was apparently his discovery of his father's past bigamy (which had ended a couple of years after his birth).

McCandless was never withdrawn, and he actually left some lasting memories in the hearts of many people he met in his last years, but obviously had some problems building intimate human relationships, and it seemed to stem from his parents' mistakes that made his "entire childhood seem like fiction".  Maybe he needed something to believe in, and nature -- its absolute existence and its merciless honesty -- was what he turned to.  He was apparently criticized of his arrogance for trying to live in the wild without enough preparation, but perhaps it was his naivete -- he'd put too much trust not only in himself but the wilderness as well.

The tragedy was not really the fact that such a young man had died alone in starvation, but that he had to die when he was finally ready to go back to civilization and human community -- his severe experience of developing a bond with the wilderness had somehow helped him move on and it seemed like he had just found a way to forgive his parents' imperfections and his own, but that was when one careless mistake took his life.

Then again, I found a not-so-tragic answer to what I'd been wondering when I wrote my last entry -- how he had felt when he realized he was going to die.  It reminded me of what Viktor Frankl had said in his book, about how we were always -- always -- free to choose how to react to a circumstance (and death too is one of those circumstances).  The author of the book, Krakauer observes that McCandless was unmistakingly at peace in his last picture, "serene as a monk gone to God", and I don't think it was the author's wishful thinking -- the below is what McCandless had written before deciding to walk out of the bush to possibly end his "great Alaskan odyssey".  It was shortly after he had shot a moose and regretted it due to his failure of preserving the meet and wasting it.  He'd always demanded a great deal of himself (and others) but this moose episode seems to have taught him the value of acceptance:

Consciousness of food.  Eat and cook with concentration... Holy food.

I am reborn.  This is my dawn.  Real life has just begun.
Deliberate Living: Conscious attention to the basics of life, and a constant attention to your immediate environment and its concerns, example→ A job, a task, a book; anything requiring efficient concentration (Circumstance has no value.  It is how one relates to a situation that has value.  All true meaning resides in the personal relationship to a phenomenon, what it means to you).
  The Great Holiness of FOOD, the Vital Heat.
  Positivism, the Insurpassable Joy of the Life Aesthetic.
  Reality.
  Independence.
  Finality -- Stability -- Consistency.

On a side note, the plane I took yesterday had a problem landing, and it flew past the airport into the city.  It took the staffs quite a long time to announce what the problem was, and until then, I seriously wondered if the plane had been hijacked or something, and if we were all going to die.  To be honest, I was quite upset by the thought of it, mostly because I thought my life hadn't even started yet, but after a while, I just started wondering what the last thing I had said to my mother had been.  Had I ignored her last call?  Had I been nice to her?  I was actually still holding the book in my hands but the whole McCandless story seemed to have dropped off from the surface of my brain.

After a lot of useless and unnecessary panicking and finally landing on the airport, I went straight to my grandmother's place only to find out she was sick, though it was mostly a mental thing; she is always too busy worrying about dying and feeling sick that it almost looks like she never has enough time to have fun.  When she started feeling better, I was going through a pile of books on her shelf, and she told me the novel I was holding was supposedly really good: "What was it about... yes, yes!  It teaches you how to survive!"  She hadn't read it, and I was pretty sure she never would, so I just told her maybe she could just forget about surviving for a moment, and relax.  Otherwise, I really wanted to ask her what she wanted to survive for so badly.  If she knew, I think she would stop worrying too much, but then again, I will never know how it feels to be 86 for another sixty years.