c. 2007 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) On this, the 50th anniversary of Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road,” we see the release of “Into the Wild,” a film based on Jon Krakauer’s book that tells the story of Chris McCandless.

Kerouac’s riotous “road trip” led to fame as he became the undisputed voice of the beat generation. McCandless’ 1992 adventure into the Alaskan wilderness yielded less auspicious results _ he starved to death only four months into his trip.

Despite the different outcomes, the similarities between the two are striking.

Both wanted to be set free from convention and to fully experience life.

At 19, Kerouac described himself as “independent _ nutty with independence, in fact.” He didn’t finish college because he “had his own mind” and wanted to be “an adventurer, a lonesome traveler.”

His alter ego Sal Paradise proclaimed in “On The Road” that “the only people who interest me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved … the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like the fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.”

Unlike Kerouac, McCandless graduated from college, but instead of using his $20,000 in college funds to enter graduate school, he followed in the footsteps of his hero, Leo Tolstoy, and rejected his wealth, donating the balance of his education fund to OXFAM to fight hunger.

McCandless highlighted these lines from Tolstoy’s Family Happiness: “I wanted movement and not a calm course of existence. I wanted excitement and danger and a chance to sacrifice myself for my love, I felt myself a superabundance of energy which found no outlet in our quiet life.”

In a letter to Ron Franz, an elderly man he met near the Salton Sea, he wrote that “nothing is more damaging to the adventurous sprit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of his life comes from our encounters with new experiences.”

Both Kerouac and McCandless are controversial figures characterized by immoderation in their pursuit of self-actualization. Kerouac pushed the extremes of excess in city life. McCandless was the extreme ascetic, jettisoning all so he could experience the basic, essential human life in nature, unencumbered by the superficial trappings of civilization.

Both were young men who as spiritual seekers were “trying to set their souls free.”

That people did not see his as a spiritual quest was one of Kerouac’s great frustrations. Ann Charters, a Kerouac biographer, said interviewers “thought he was kidding when he tried to explain that he wasn’t `beat’ but a strange solitary crazy Catholic mystic.”

To the usual redefinition of beat _ “one who is exhausted ecstatically” _ Kerouac added the religiously inspired idea of beatific, describing to reporters his search for a more direct, blissful knowledge of God. He compared “On The Road” to John Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress,” seeing both as a search for “an inheritance, incorruptible, undefiled, that fades not away.”

McCandless, who had serious issues with religion, saw his encounters with nature as direct encounters with God. He wrote to Franz, “You are wrong if you think Joy emanates only or principally from human relationships. God has placed it all around us. It is in everything and anything we might experience. We just have to have the courage to turn against our habitual lifestyle and engage in unconventional living.”

His final notation written on his deathbed was simply this: “I HAVE HAD A HAPPY LIFE AND THANK THE LORD. GOODBYE AND MAY GOD BLESS ALL.”

“On The Road” became an instant success, and Krakauer’s article about McCandless in Outside magazine generated more letters than the magazine has ever received.

Each tapped primal human instincts, the feeling that there must be more to this life than we experience, the belief that underneath the material is a spiritual reality.

I saw “Into the Wild” with my 19-year-old daughter and I could not help but see that regardless of our age, the restlessness of a Kerouac and McCandless taps into our own, calling young people to live an examined life and calling my generation back to a quest many of us left behind when we “grew up” and put away childish things.

(Dick Staub is the author of “The Culturally Savvy Christian” and the host of The Kindlings Muse (http://www.thekindlings.com). His blog can be read at http://www.dickstaub.com)

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