Saturday, October 27, 2007

Identity Search

Last night, my husband and I and some friends went to see the film Into the Wild. It's the fictionalized account of a true story, a real person - a young man, Chris McCandless, who, after graduating with honors from college, gave all of his money ($24,000.00) away to charity, shredded his ID (social security card, driver's license), and took off, travelling the country without so much as a hint to his family or anyone who knew him that he was leaving. He travelled for over two years - first by car, but mostly by walking and hitching rides. As he travelled, he kept a diary in which he wrote about himself in the third person, calling himself "Alexander SuperTramp," and he introduced himself as such to everyone he met. His goal, in part, was to leave all social conventions and just be "out there," scrounging for survival, testing his limits, creating an identity for himself that had nothing to do with the family he grew up with or with the parameters Western society expected. He ended up in Alaska, alone, far from human contact, far from the gaze and expectations of others. The tragedy is that after a stay of about a month or two, he decided to leave his "Alaskan Adventure" as he styled it and to reconnect with the human race, but he found himself trapped, unable to cross the raging river, full of early summer's melting snow and ice. He ended up starving to death - dying alone in the wilderness. Before he died, he records in his diaries he loneliness; he wanted, in the end, to be back in human community, and his last note, written to whomever might find his body, was signed, not with the identity he had taken in in his two years of travelling, but signed, "Christopher McCandless," the name his parents had given him, the identity he thought he'd wanted to leave behind.

I'm not sure exactly how this fits in with our ideas about perception, our questions about how important others' perceptions are of us - but I think there's a connection somewhere here. It was important to Chris, in this re-creating of himself, not only to re-name himself, but to tell others his new name, to make sure their impression of him was of someone without ties, without family, without parents, siblings, even friends. He wanted to be a free agent - unconnected and unaffected by those closest to him, even to those he met in his travels. But in the end, he longed for that connection - but the realization that he even had that longing or need came too late. I think in many ways, we, too, want to feel we are free agents - only affected by others when and how we want to be affected. But as with Joan Didion, when her husband died, as with Chris, when he came to his own death, they both realized that their identities, who they were, were bound up in the lives of others. And that when that bond was ripped from them, they almost could not bear the loneliness of it. I suppose the fact that our lives, our identities are so bound to others is both a joy and a terror, a blessing and a burden. We cannot live without it, and in certain moments our fellowship with others - their gaze upon us - is one of the greatest of joys. But at other times, the gaze is a great weight, and Chris came to a time when he did not want to live with it. So what do we do with these two halves ourselves?

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