The Wild of College(1st assignment)

In Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild, there are a lot of similarities as an upcoming freshman going into college. It might not be as extreme, but there are similar challenges and adventures. McCandless started out hitchhiking, otherwise on his own, very similar to High School grads, no longer able to stay under the roof of their parents, eating their food, watching their satellite television on their high definition TV.

On his journey he meets Gaylord Stuckey, his companion and ride to Fairbanks, AK. McCandless and Stuckey become great friends through their journey. And much like college, everyone finds a friend, someone that they can rely upon. When they reach the University, McCandless and Stuckey split, but Stuckey makes the other promise to write a letter later on in life. Similarly some friends don’t last in college, because some of them will end up transferring to another college, but you can still keep in touch.

At the University McCandless buys a rifle known as the Nylon 66, which is no longer in production, which represents the buying of used books as apposed to new ones; college students are cheap. Along with his rifle, McCandless had a half full back pack, which included a scarce amount of food, and nine or ten hardbound books. And much like in college life, you spend a majority of time to study, and eating, besides the occasional night drinking.

While in the wild, McCandless starts off struggling, he finds it hard to kill game, he is battling weakness and massive amounts of snow, not to mention the occasional disaster. But then finally gets a little bit of success by acing down a spruce grouse. As time goes by in the wild, he starts shooting better and soon becomes a very astute hunter.

However McCandless didn’t survive the wild, and ended up dieing. This is an exacerbated outcome of college students, since the worst is usually failing out of college. But McCandless did find his soul-flight in the wild, an important part of any journey, where he discovered himself and his capabilities. And it is near impossible to not discover something about yourself when you take your journey in to college.

There is also a poem that has similar types of relativity. In “The Poem that Takes Place of a Mountain,” the writer writes about a poem that sets his amazing ness, something that makes him more than just an amateur poet, in a sense, it’s his “degree” in poetry. It’s like the aspiring singer who needs that one hit to make it to Hollywood. This poem that he writes is what sets him from amateur poet to just poet.

Of course now any story that tells a journey could be considered a college related story. College is and always will be a journey of every student. Take Jorge Borges’s The Circular Ruins, for example, a story about a journey similar to Krakauer’s Into the wild.

These both consist of a man treading into land to which he knows nothing of. Whether it be an uncivilized land for McCandless, or an ancient temple inhabited by natives for the foreigner, the main character in The Circular Ruins. While in this new territory, both characters are inevitably, in some sense, alone. There is no to hold their hand or tell him how to survive. The foreigner does however have some natives that give him food when he arrives, which could be considered his financial aid in a sense, and there is Fire that acts upon the Foreigner as professor at a time.

The foreigner also had close similarities to being in college. Just for starters he’s in a new area and has to figure what the buildings are for. He has two temples and has to travel between the two, trying to figure out what each temple is for.

The biggest connection to college life is when the foreigner creates his son out of his dreaming. He creates this human that is purely out of imagination. His creation takes years of concentration. Using his mind is what he relies on most, it takes lots of concentration to create his son. Day after day studying the anatomy, making sure everything is as it needs to be. Treating it like a huge senior project that could make or break his grade.

Using your mind is important in all journeys you take. Whether it using your mind to master the rough snowy terrain of Alaska tying to survive against the odds in Into the Wild, writing a poem that could turn you to a poet guru as in The Poem that took Place of a Mountain, a journey to a temple where you must use create the most complicated idea in your mind from Circular Ruins, or making through those four plus years of college to earn that important degree. Your mind is your most powerful tool.